“Amazon’s Choice” is determined by an algorithm and not always reliable
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
It doesn't take that much effort to have a human in the loop to pick something for the top thousand or so product categories, and naively that's what I expected when I saw the "Amazon's Choice" seal of approval on these things.
Yes I have seen my fair share of cheap shoddily made things as part of 'Amazon's Choice'. I quickly scroll past them when browsing. There is this myth going around that because it is made in China that it is well made and not shoddy workmanship; yet I once bought several items all from China and one of the items literally exploded and nearly caused a fire (The product was a shoddily made Lithium Ion rechargeable battery). I quickly complained about this after that incident, but as expected - I got no reply and I assume the seller doesn't even speak English as it was some tacky online storefront where the seller liked to describe all their products in broken English.
The other product I bought was a bluetooth speaker (again from China) and the battery in it never held charge. Had to keep charging it every 30mins, even though it was claimed on the item page that it holds power for 6 hours. I would nearly swear the item was second-hand and somebody knackered/exhausted the battery before refurbishing it and selling it as new. People need to consistently debunk the myth that because an item is made in a certain area that it is made well and with decent workmanship. Take for example the current myth that items made in Germany[0] are of better quality than other countries.
It's not a widely held belief, but there certainly are people out there that believe the myth that China doesn't want a bad reputation for making products, so China will go the extra mile to prove people wrong about their 'shoddy' image and deliver excellent well-made products. Maybe in most cases they do have good craftmanship, but as I said; from my experience I have seen nothing but trouble from Chinese products, especially from Amazon.
It's perfectly acceptable to use the nation of manufacture as a heuristic in predicting the likely quality of a product.
Barely anything sold on Amazon is not made in China.
What I use to determine what to expect from a product is the quality of the documentation, which is almost always pretty bad (but sometimes better than on Ebay or Aliexpress).
Nowadays there's the whole spectrum, you get what you pay for, but if the counterfeit things are priced correctly and not double checked by someone else there's a risk of getting scammed.
It seems hard to believe that many customers take into account some label that looks like paid advertisement.
You should also consider that the average Amazon user is not the average HN user. Even if it was a paid ad, any sort of endorsement from Amazon would certainly "fool" all the middle aged parents out there who can't be arsed to do extensive research on third party reviews.
I've had that impression as well. It's not anything particular about the look for me, but that I expect any highlighting / positioning on Amazon to be paid for.
Why? Because it's a similar pattern that we see on other websites: the "sponsored" content gets the top spots. The real content comes directly after.
What is surprising that educated people are more aware of marketing/advertising/capitalism?
I only had to see some fake business accounts for large companies(Aldi) acting like real users to put my on high alert for anything on the Internet.
A rule of thumb for urban shopping is to always ignore "helpful" store recommendations, especially unsolicited ones. They have little interest in doing right by you, and every reason to trick you into a purchase that's better for them and worse for you.
1) Demonstrate trustworthiness
2) Make sure you think of them when making your decision, increasing the chance you'll buy something from them.
Specifically: Amazon aggressively sells everything else. Why would they not sell promotional placement?
It certainly pays to take reviews into account, it's just that a soft survey style approach yields more information than a hard rules based approach.
I think that given a certain set of products, the algorithm actually seems to do a pretty good job of making a recommendation for the best product out of the set based on the ratings or whatever it looks at, but the bigger problem is that if you aren't searching for exactly the right keywords the choice of the best product becomes completely meaningless, and blindly tacking on the "amazon's choice" recommendation obscures the fact that your search is too narrow to provide a meaningful recommendation in the first place. (I'm sure there is some filtering based on ratings but because of how common fake reviews are, if you're looking at niche products they'll almost all have fairly high ratings anyway.)
It's probably better to not provide a recommendation than to recommend a bad product, so maybe they should try to narrow it down to more common categories.
It seems to get things right most of the time, but I always look at others and compare to be sure. Sometimes I don't get the Amazon's Choice.
(It’d be nice if Amazon themselves gave you the ability to subscribe to a given reviewer-user’s opinions and have them show up as labels on your search results—but new features like this popping up on the Amazon store seem pretty unlikely, somehow. Has the Amazon store stagnated?)
Now that I know that it was an algorithm, I think that years ago it may have indicated quality products, but as the review system and other aspects are thoroughly hacked/gamed, it does the opposite. I've been purposely scrolling past Amazon Choice items for a while now
Actually, I think I am going to drop Amazon Prime. Only money is going to convince Amazon to right their ship.
Rather, I assumed it was being (rightly) critical that Buzzfeed news spent such a lot of words and effort on a topic that wasn't especially newsworthy. In particular, it was a frustrating read, being padded out by too many examples and testimonials, when the real meat of the article could have been summed up in a sentence: "Amazon Choice recommendations are algorithmic and not very reliable."
(It seems to be trying to tap into the zeitgeist of looking for a critical angle in everything that Amazon does. Which is weak and clickbait-y.)
Honestly, it's a bad (or good?) example of what the internet has made "journalism" into - and I put journalism in quotes here not because I'm knocking Buzzfeed news as being able to sometimes produce good journalism, but because this isn't one of those times.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
A good argument about this problem contains a careful analysis (probably involves some kind of reliable algorithm runs).
As for the lockpicking. The general locks available and in use are mostly security through obscurity these days. Knowledge about how to pick them (or by using a pickgun or '999' key + 'tomahawk') is abundantly available. These locks are meant to slow an attacker down, not stop them. They're a terrible security measure if they're the only layer of defense.