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Comment by dcchambers | Hacker News Reader

I feel like you're several years late to the party here. I think it's pretty common knowledge at this point that certain types of goods sold on Amazon have a huge chance of being counterfeit and everyone knows reviews are faked/not to be trusted blindly.

At this point people seem to not care since Amazon will give a refund/exchange pretty much no questions asked. It's still extremely annoying and it's definitely not a good look for their business, but I assume the number crunchers have determined actually dealing with the fraud isn't yet worth it financially.

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I actually suspect something different is happening.

Local optimization beats global optimization. It's why Google went to the crapper too after it reached some number of employees. With 100+k people, no one cares about Google, but about their success within Google.

Someone at Amazon is meeting their short-term objectives and getting their bonus. "The brand" suffering is much more amorphous and harder to translate to a KPI.

Interesting thougth about organisation growth.

A practice I've seen in asset management firms:

(1) To assume high level roles, you must invest $LARGE_SUM_OF_MONEY in funds managed by the company.

(2) After leaving, you get back your money after $FAIR_AMOUNT_OF_YEARS. That's done as an incentive for folks to think long term.

Not sure how you could do that in a company as large as G or A though.

That’s what getting paid in equity is for. If you burn the company down, your salary declines. Of course at 100k people, your impact is small unless you’re a VP+.

Google is doing fine.

Google Search seems to be in decline but that has more to do with the slow death of the open internet than with any sort of internal issues at Google.

Google is in the same stage as Microsoft in the year 2000. It has a lot of cash cows, and is making piles of dollars from them. However, it's lost:

- the ability to engineer good products

- reputation

In the early '00s, most of the really competent people went to Google. Right now, most of the really competent people I know avoid Google, and it's sort of a second choice employer.

It has a lot of market power, but it's increasingly vulnerable.

The cost structure there doesn't help. High salaries+benefits / fewer employees was a good call. High salaries / 100+k employees is less competitive.

I can't predict the future, but I've been bearish on Google for a while.

I think it’s less about organisation size but it is everything about following the money.

Google search is worse because their revenue model requires optimising returns for their advertising arm, not for making a better end-user product. Shareholders demand it (in fact, this problem has a lot more to do with a public listing than team size).

The same is true of Amazon. Amazon’s shopping experience is worse because it is more profitable to be a logistics front-end for a million dropshippers selling specialised goods from tiny Chinese factories. The brakes are off and everyone with any influence over the company is incentivised to make the company more “efficient” (profitable).

Yep, pretty well covered at this point.

Ryan George - What Shopping on Amazon Feels Like https://youtu.be/nQpxAvjD_30

I bought this comment for my husband and he loves it!

I can weed out products with massive fake reviews by the stars distribution.

It's a subjective heuristic I developed informally. Never formalized anything statistical.

Just looking at the ration between 5 through 1 stars, I have a high confidence judging whether they bought fake reviews or not.

I also like to look at the two and four star reviews. 5 are obviously bought, 1 could just as easily be an irrational customer, and 3 may just be people who feel lukewarm. Well written 2 and 4 star reviews seem to have the greatest number of people attempting to approach the review objectively.

I can weed out products with massive fake reviews by the stars distribution.

It's a subjective heuristic I developed informally. Never formalized anything statistical.

Just looking at the ratio between 5 through 1 stars, I have a high confidence judging whether they bought fake reviews or not.

> It's still extremely annoying and it's definitely not a good look for their business, but I assume the number crunchers have determined actually dealing with the fraud isn't yet worth it financially.

They’ve dealt with it in limited ways. For example, they’ve inked exclusivity agreements with certain brands (ex. Apple) so that only Amazon can sell them. So at least that inventory should be legit as they don’t allow third party sellers.

Of course this is somewhat to Amazon’s favor. If a brand is concerned about their reputation due to customers unknowingly getting counterfeits, they need to strike a deal with Amazon, and likely one that is favorable to Amazon.

As a consumer, I didn't know that, and would just assume Apple products on Amazon are also likely to be counterfeit and just buy from Apple or a retailer I trust to have genuine Apple products, like Best Buy.

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