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Comment by cloakandswagger | Hacker News Reader

The problem seems to exclusively affect HN commenters, who have the remarkable misfortune of having every single item they buy off Amazon turn out to be counterfeit. It's a total scourge on the community of HN but miraculously doesn't seem to affect anyone else.

Occasionally I'll see a broken-English listing from a third-party seller advertising a $800 camera for $200, but when that happens I just...don't purchase the obvious counterfeit product.

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> The problem seems to exclusively affect HN commenters, who have the remarkable misfortune of having every single item they buy off Amazon turn out to be counterfeit. It's a total scourge on the community of HN but miraculously doesn't seem to affect anyone else.

I'm sure that much of the anecdata on HN unfairly paints Amazon in an poor light in regards to counterfeit goods. At the same time, I suspect that many, many people have bought counterfeit goods on Amazon and don't realize it.

One side issue you'll run into when discussing things like this is a major response bias. People who have neutral or good experiences are far less to chime in saying as much. By contrast you'll have a very large percentage of anybody who ever had a negative experience say something.

Like I suspect the vast majority of people, I've ordered plenty of items from Amazon and also never run into a single counterfeit.

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As a tangent, you could also apply this same bias to driving the things like the division in social media. People surround themselves with people of the same affection and biases which, in turn, ends up being seen from their perspective as 'normal' which, in turn, drives radicalism since their distorted perspective creates a false reality.

So I've been using Amazon for years, and only had a bad experience once. I always used to use Anker products, especially their screen protectors that were cheap and worked well enough.

I ordered the exact same listing maybe 4 or 5 times (at the top it would say 'You ordered this item on XX.XX.XXXX) and the sixth time I ordered it, what turned up wasn't Anker at all, and wasnt' even pretending to be. The pack was completely different and this was from a store listed as 'Anker'.

Of course, Amazon refunded and sent the correct item but it does happen.

I suspect there’s something to what you say. People buying on price are more likely to hit counterfeits. It’s also statistics. With a large enough population, some people are going to get unlucky purely by chance.

But how else can I be a disruptive hacker if I don't buy $800 cameras for $200?

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