[cdbyr]

There was a line from Jeff Bezos, ""One of the early examples of this is customer reviews. Someone wrote to me and said, 'You don't understand your business. You make money when you sell things. Why do you allow these negative customer reviews?' "And when I read that letter, I thought, we don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions."

The incentives are different at different levels of the business. There could be someone with a shorter-term outlook making these decisions, or (more likely imo) it was a very quick misapplication of the policy based on skimming the review. Acting as a first reviewer actually seems like a great application of LLMs, where attention won't flag + they can hopefully be tuned to only focus on the policy-relevant pieces.

[brookst]

That Bezos quote is insightful. For companies that just help people pick which product to buy, steering customers away from bad products will increase satisfaction and repeat business.

[mgkimsal]

> We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions

If those reviews help you decide to buy from someplace other than Amazon... perhaps in short term or narrow circumstances it still helps Amazon (reduced refunds/etc).

[kzrdude]

Bezos apparently thinks Amazon makes money when they let consumers buy knockoff and fake products, too.