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Comment by Judgmentality | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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It's funny, you and I arrive at the same conclusion from different paths.

You believe Amazon is so bad at removing fraud because they are greedy and evil and are happy to have it. I believe Amazon is so bad at removing fraud because it's beyond their capabilities, and that nobody knows how to ensure trustworthy information on the internet.

But we arrive at the same spot: I don't really buy from Amazon anymore either for anything where the quality matters, because I can't trust anything on there. I use Chewy for pet stuff, Newegg or Monoprice for electronic stuff, Lee Valley for gardening stuff - etc.

In a way, I'm more pessimistic than you: I think good intentions wouldn't even help.

You’re saying the company that’s revolutionized the supply chain and brought us AWS can’t mitigate at least mass, organized fraud if it was a priority?!

Bull shit.

There will be Amazon rockets and maybe one day a Mars landing but stopping mass fraud is too big a problem?

If Amazon wanted to solve this problem, they'd get rid of comingling and allow customer to flag bad returns as "fraudulent products." It would be trivial to train an ML model to catch fraud this way, all you have to do is allow it to have meaningful inputs. Of course once you get rid of comingling you don't even need to bother with that, as you've solved the problem the same way the rest of the industry has already solved it.

This isn't hard. Seriously, you have lost all goodwill from me - anyone that isn't a fucking idiot could immediately solve this problem. But Amazon doesn't want to lose money, is what you really mean.

Fuck Amazon and fuck you. I have more respect for Facebook at this point.

I've also completely stopped buying from Amazon. I will go so far as to exclude amazon.* from my search results when I'm searching online for an item.

Reasons:

- Receiving broken, clearly used/returned, or counterfeit items.

- Product reviews obviously gamed and useless.

- Sticking their nose into political issues. Just run your services please and don't try to tell me what to read or think.

I always wonder how much you can truly unlink from Amazon for retail purchases. Even where a store runs on Shopify there is a good chance they are using FBA for fulfilment

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