Hacker News Reader

Comment by HenryBemis | Hacker News Reader

With a combo of AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin and kill all the carousels (for many years now). Since then my shopping in Amazon is a breeze. They do make changes every now and then and I have to block 'this new carousel' that just appeared, but overall my eyes get polluted less.

View on HN

ABP is completely unnecessary and still shows ads for companies that pay them. Use uBlock Origin alone.

Sadly uBlock cannot block the counterfeit products.

Check out FakeSpot[0]. They do meta analysis on reviews to try and remove/filter inorganic reviews. They have a browser extension which really helps, imo.

Doesn't exactly remove counterfeit products, but goes a decent way towards correcting the fake review problem. Once you've crossed that bridge, you can focus more on the top results without paid bias skewing them.

[0]: https://www.fakespot.com/

I actually refuse to use Amazon but I'll be sure to tell about this to friends :)

I hate that I have to even ask this question of what seems like a super helpful extension but how does this company make money? They are a business that's hiring right now with an office on Wall St in NYC but doesn't appear to have any products for sale. I'm hoping its just cynicism and paranoia speaking on my part here.

Presumably they use affiliate links.

ooof... well, thanks for asking, cause I hadn't stopped to think about it before.

Searched around online and found it mentioned a few places, but ultimately it looks like they collect sales and order info and resell it... Damn. I'd be happier to pay a small fee instead.

Details on the info they collect and how they use it is in their privacy policy: https://www.fakespot.com/privacy-policy

FYI. On a related note - I was downvoted a couple of days back for an almost similar comment on the ABP uBO combo. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26058260 It seems ABP is shady that they let some businesses bypass their blocker.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com