[the-pigeon]

> I think it really is that it's a very difficult problem of cat-and-mouse, without any clear path to victory for Amazon, and the sellers have a huge monetary incentive to evade detection.

Honestly it's really hard to believe you. That may have been what you were told but there's hundreds of well documented cases of sellers manipulating reviews where Amazon does not penalize the seller.

The logical explanation is Amazon has decided not to punish sellers who manipulate reviews if Amazon thinks it's a net gain for Amazon.

[spenczar5]

> Honestly it's really hard to believe you.

Yeah, I get it. For what it's worth - I didn't just get told they care, I saw some of the systems that were built to work on detection.

Amazon is not a very short-term oriented company. They're usually pretty good at caring about long-term dominance to get dollars in ten years rather than pennies today. It's clear as day to anyone that fake reviews are hurting their image to customers, eroding trust. That's leading people to buy stuff elsewhere.

At the same time, Amazon Marketplace is one of the underappreciated masterstrokes from Amazon over the last 15 years and has driven a huge increase in their retail revenue, which you can see in annual reports. So, certainly they're unwilling to take really dramatic action like dropping 3rd-party sellers entirely. But I still think they realize fixing this is pretty crucial for the long-term health of the retail business.

It's hard for me to explain the cases where people find obvious fraud and the seller doesn't get penalized. These would get flagged internally in mailing lists too, and most of the time it was a process error somewhere - a ticket that got dropped when shuffled between the zillion different departments; Amazon's internal bureaucracy is truly insane and huge. I think it's usually incompetence rather than devious cleverness, honestly.

There are probably some other cases that are more complicated (sellers reopening new accounts, and then doing social engineering on unwitting poorly-paid support people to regain listings). I think those are kind of rare.

---

Anyway, all this to say: I get it, it's hard to believe because it's easy to think of Amazon as all-powerful. But... they're really not. It's a huge, slow, bureaucratic, sludgy company. They have some money (okay, a lot of money) and technical talent but it isn't super clear how you'd apply those to this problem. It's hard.

[Judgmentality]

> I get it, it's hard to believe because it's easy to think of Amazon as all-powerful.

This has nothing to do with thinking Amazon is all-powerful, and everything to do with thinking they don't care because it makes them money. Amazon's revenue is clearly skyrocketing and they make a ton of money because of the marketplace. It seems obvious to me they made the decision to put revenue/profits over long-term customer support.

You believe that Amazon wants to solve the problem. I believe Amazon doesn't want to solve the problem, because they make more money not solving it now. And talking about the long-term vision of a company whose founding CEO just stepped down is pretty meaningless.

I'll be more blunt. Amazon saying they care about fake reviews is like Facebook saying they care about privacy. They make money by lying about it, not fixing it. Facebook clearly hasn't suffered the long term damage of years of horrible PR using their stock price as a metric (you know, the only metric that really matters), and Amazon likely won't either (in fact they've had just as much bad PR and look at them now).

[Xeronate]

If you had ever worked at Amazon you would find it very difficult to believe what you do. Short term solutions aren’t part of the companies culture. Andy Jassy has been around since the beginning and has the same core values as Jeff. Not to mention your argument could equally be made with Jeff as the CEO. It just isn’t how the company works.

[Judgmentality]

I have never worked at Amazon, but I have heard enough horrible things from people that used to work there that make me believe not everybody shares your opinion. In fact, those other people went out of their way to convince me not to take a job there.

I am glad you seem to enjoy working at Amazon, or at least have a respect for the culture. I've never been there so I can't comment on it, but I've heard lots of horrible things about the culture there. And lately the complaints have been shifting towards Amazon thinking more and more about short-term profits instead of the big picture.

All I can say is not everybody agrees with you.

[Scramblejams]

I don't speak for my employer, which is Amazon.

FWIW, single data point, YMMV, etc., but where I work (under AWS) I have never seen behavior that is exploitive of the customer like you're talking about to be encouraged or allowed.

Yes, AWS may be different from how things are done in retail, and we're huge so I'm sure it does happen here and there -- but from my admittedly limited vantage point, Bezos' heavy emphases on long-term thinking and earning the customer's trust have taken deep root everywhere I've been able to see.

Doesn't mean peeps always get it right, some choices are difficult, compromises have to be made, there are outliers, etc., but still, it's there. I've just never seen cheap thinking around customers, so to speak, and I really like that aspect of working where I do.

If that ever changes in a broad way, that'll be the beginning of the end of Amazon's dominance.

[Judgmentality]

> If that ever changes in a broad way, that'll be the beginning of the end of Amazon's dominance.

And I'm saying I think this is already happening, and the most talented senior employees are already starting to leave. This is going to take years, maybe decades to unravel. But I've already shifted away from buying things on Amazon because the experience has become significantly worse for me and I'm better off buying elsewhere.

You're welcome to disagree, but I think Amazon is no longer about value creation but value extraction. And quite frankly it doesn't matter if you feel differently as an employee, because that's how I feel as a customer.

[marmot777]

Then please prove that commitment to the customer and to long term credibility by making it a high priority to mitigate this problem.

A lot of people love Amazon now but this kind of shit screws customers and that’s unacceptable.

[andreilys]

What about the short term solution of PIP culture?

Sure you get short term results because colleagues are competing against one another to not get into the PIP meat grinder, but inevitably it leads to burnout and people leaving.

Not to mention Amazon’s reputation in tech is pretty low b/c everyone knows about this management by PIP culture

[sosborn]

> they make a ton of money because of the marketplace

Would that go away once the shitty reviews go away? I'm not convinced it would. The economic impact would be on shitty sellers as they would lose revenue, but I suspect a lot of that revenue would just go to good products.

[Nasrudith]

Think about that initial paragraph for a moment. You assume it is because it makes them money but you also assume it is a choice on their part - that they could do something about it that works.

That is basically the same thing as all powerful in this context. It is the same pattern of sinisterization in the whole "Big Tech Bad" propaganda push.

[marmot777]

Well said.

[BeetleB]

> At the same time, Amazon Marketplace is one of the underappreciated masterstrokes from Amazon over the last 15 years and has driven a huge increase in their retail revenue, which you can see in annual reports. So, certainly they're unwilling to take really dramatic action like dropping 3rd-party sellers entirely. But I still think they realize fixing this is pretty crucial for the long-term health of the retail business.

This is a long winded way of saying "Yeah it sucks, but we're not losing as much money as we are making because of this, so we're not as invested in fixing this problem."

I'm not doubting whether they want it fixed. I'm doubting the priority they put on it.

[marmot777]

They’re been able to create a service or two for AWS so they clearly have the horsepower to resolve this unacceptable problem that’s eroding their credibility. They have a lot of cred now which I assume they don’t want sliding down a slippery slope.

[stickfigure]

> where Amazon does not penalize the seller

If fake reviews simply penalize the seller, you've opened up an attack channel where anyone can submit fake reviews and eliminate competitors from the marketplace. It's complicated.

[_hyn3]

But then you're buying your competitor's products.

[marmot777]

Yeah, I have to call Bullshit that Amazon couldn’t stop at least organized mass fraud.