[NeedMoreTea]

Amazon's Choice is a purely algorithmic tag decided by the computer. It's utterly meaningless. I guess they change periodically on some reason known only to the code.

Amazon Basics must have had at least a couple of humans involved to agree getting it branded Amazon.

[partialrecall]

Presumably it was humans who signed off on the premise of Amazon's Choice in the first place. If Amazon is so careless with their brand in that case, as a consumer I'd feel like a sucker if I trusted there brand to mean much when their employees are evaluating products rather than algorithms.

Maybe the algorithm seemed like a good idea at the time but later turned sour. If that's the case, why hasn't Amazon yanked the program? If they don't terminate this program when it performs poorly, I don't trust them to keep other programs in line either.

[gumby]

> Presumably it was humans who signed off on the premise of Amazon's Choice in the first place.

On the premise, sure. But on the individual items, I've always assumed "Amazon's Choice" meant "Best for Amazon", i.e. high margin, low number of returns (which would reduce margin).

Not necessarily what I would choose.

[dpau]

excellent point, it's Amazon's choice, not yours

[NeedMoreTea]

Well I might have had trust in Amazon as a brand maybe a decade ago, as it got to the brand and product I wanted to buy pretty effectively. They've intentionally diluted it by filling their site with endless marketplace shite, and dodgy searches that hide brand leaders to show no-name garbage, and littering it with adverts for other no-name garbage. It's quite often I struggle to find the listing for the market leader directly, but end up there via a few "customers also bought/looked at" links. I go to Amazon less and less as a result.

So assuming Bezos isn't a complete numpty, that's intentional. Maybe Amazon's brand is completely disposable to fund Blue Streak.

Today I got more trust in Poundshop and eBay that I will get the right product easily than I do in Amazon. The old department stores, many now failed, sank or swam on the strength of their brand being a real indicator of quality.

[partialrecall]

Amazon employees have complained to Bezos about the state of Amazon's search. Bezos' response every time I've heard it is along the lines of "meh, I think our search is pretty good, quit your complaining."

Maybe it's intentional, or maybe he's deluded. I don't know. But either way, I doubt it's going to get fixed any time soon.

[ryandrake]

Maybe an urban legend, but I thought I read somewhere that the version of Amazon that Bezos personally sees is quite different than the one you and I see, due to all his various little one-off complaints and product micromanagement. Legend has it that engineering gave up trying to make sense of the requests and just gave him his own environment that does everything he thinks it should do. If true, then the search he sees might actually be pretty good for him.

[aedron]

Like all urban legends, there is likely a core of truth in the story. Certainly Bezos is known for micromanaging and arbitrarily overruling employees' decisions on everything from strategy to product design. Now, if a leader really does have great instinct, this can work out for the better (like Jobs). And I think in some areas, Bezos does (he has done surprisingly well with their IT strategy). But I know that in others he doesn't, and he just botches stuff (like many horrible Kindle design decisions).

[rurp]

Something seems off about that story. What's the point of requesting changes to a version of the site only he uses? I can't imagine he spends a lot of time surfing amazon.com as a regular user. Plus, not seeing the regular site means he might miss issues with the public website that he would want to change. Unless the point of the story is that Bezos doesn't realize the devs made a site just for him, but that's almost impossible to believe.

[ryandrake]

> Unless the point of the story is that Bezos doesn't realize the devs made a site just for him, but that's almost impossible to believe.

Yea that was the gist of it—when you log in as Jeff you (unbeknownst) get a different frontend, with all his various special cases and bad ideas that the PMs wanted to keep out of the real Amazon. It does sound incredible so probably false, but amusing to think about. I admit to having wanted to do something like that a nonzero number of times.

[taneq]

It’s suggesting that Amazon literally shadowbanned him.

[kevadk]

This sounds like a fable invented by someone familiar with the story of the phony villages that Grigory Potemkin built along the Volga to impress Empress Catherine II.

[MaupitiBlue]

Why do you need to trust Amazon? Just look at the reviews. Most AmazonBasics stuff has thousands of 4+ star reviews. It’s clearly distinguishable from the products with 15 questionable reviews.

[okmokmz]

Amazon reviews have become almost entirely useless once they began bundling like items. I've had cases of ordering an item only to receive a similar item from an entirely different manufacturer or seller. Looking at the reviews you'll find a number of different products being reviewed all under one product page which makes it impossible to actually gauge the quality of what you're going to receive