Search for anything and you are likely to find the same item with 50 different brand names but all essentially the same garbage from aliexpress/wish.
For example, here's a search for "bike trainer" [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bike+trainer&crid=KCCRWTVZHHQ7&sp...
Right now, Amazon combines the honesty of flea markets with the reliability of a stoned teenager.
I'm back to shopping at physical stores, and am enjoying it, at least at the moment. And when ordering things, I try to go direct or find retailers who care about their reputations.
I really wish online shopping wasn't so messed up.
Of course, they're all working class stiffs compared to Bezos and the rest of the senior leadership.
I am looking at barrier hose crimpers for air conditioning lines. Okay, there's about a dozen identicalish looking ones on amazon with a price from 100-300 dollars, and a reputable united states manufacturer starting at 2500+. How do I know what's the best option?
I really don't care about the price, I want to know if the price is worth it. If these different products are different or just rebranded, I want to know.
[0] https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/1563060250269589505
That's the call where Alexei Navalny tricked an FSB agent into admitting they had poisoned him.
I think often people try to come up with too clever explanations for stupid behavior. Sometimes it's just stupid behavior. Often times this is the catalyst for conspiracy theories - it's a nice explanation for random or stupid events.
To be fair, not all direct-from-China goods are cheap crap. I've received excellent USB cables, noise cancelling earbuds, and much more from various sellers. And the middlemen selling on Amazon are offering the convenience of easy returns, fast shipping, and excellent customer service from Amazon. Depending on the seller, [their profit margins can actually be quite thin because Amazon charges a lot for their customer service, warehouses, and return handling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yhc6mmdJC4).
* I know TikTok is quite controversial, for good reasons like data security, lack of ethics, and algorithmic infobubbling/censorship. But I am still a fan and use it because its algorithm was the only thing that was able to string together my liked posts and begin showing content/advice about what mental health disorders I might have. That significantly sped up my diagnoses with my psychiatrist, who confirmed 2 of the 3 disorders.
TikTok is controversial because of the trove of personal data it has and it's a large Chinese company, and large Chinese companies are required to do what the Chinese govt wants, and the Chinese govt does not have the purest intentions with respect to the persons of the USA.
> its algorithm was the only thing that was able to string together my liked posts and begin showing content/advice about what mental health disorders I might have.
this is a feature of TikTok, psychiatric diagnoses? or you were able to use the linked together posts and diagnose yourself?
Twitter tries to algorithmically sort your feed, but some users (including myself) find it buries too many interesting posts, and use the old chronological feed. Twitter is sparing about showing users and posts you don't follow (except for retweets from your followed accounts, of course). This leads to accounts becoming "curators", who you follow because they retweet interesting content. This adds a nice human touch, but also limits discovery to other users' interests. Interactions are generally limited to retweets/quote-retweets, and comment treads, both of which rarely have a deep discussion because the UI isn't designed to promote it. Twitter has small sidebars to recommend other users to follow, but this is a very slow method to discover new content, and these sidebars are smaller or nonexistent on mobile clients. Tumblr is quite similar, so I group its community and discovery dynamics with Twitter.
Reddit is community-based. Subreddits are formed, users follow them, and posts are voted up and down. A subreddit can dominate its hobby, and there is no way to fine-tune the content you see. For example, I like seeing the deals in /r/frugalmalefashion but have no interest in the higher-priced designer shoes that can frontpage. This reduces the signal to noise ratio for my interests, and there isn't another active subreddit that would more closely match my tastes. The comment sections are the highlight of reddit, since discussions can go quite deep and low quality comments are downvoted out of view. Discovery is generally limited to commenters organically suggesting other subreddits, especially in mobile clients where there "isn't room" for algorithmic recommendations.
Facebook is quite different. Your friends feed is very broad-purpose, and groups are very specific. Groups are often smaller than comparable subreddits, and there will be less experts present in a discussion. This can hamper discussions on things like deal-hunting, where more frequent users can summarize community opinion or relay their deeper experiences. In other words, you have to do a lot more reading to find the information you want, giving Facebook a much worse signal-to-noise ratio. Comment sections can be more informative than Twitter but more shallow than Reddit, and communities are less interested in liking informative comments to bring them to the top to discussion threads. There is minimal algorithmic discovery, with only small recommendation sidebars.
Instagram is a mix of all these sites. You follow specific users like Twitter, but reposts are limited to the Stories feed, and are therefore deprioritized. So you generally follow each of these users for their original content (or occasionally curation, if they like to manually repost others' work on their feeds like a "meme page"). Comment sections can be lively but shallow, and I find discussions are generally superficial. There is an algorithmic discovery page that can find some good recommendations, but you browse it by thumbnail, limiting discovery.
YouTube is also interesting. You generally follow creators' channels like Instagram, and there is no easy way for "curators" to promote others' content without making a "meme compilation" video (and getting copyright strikes). Comment sections are second best to reddit, but not quite as good. Discussion is limited by the fact there has to be a relevant video for everyone to comment under - there's no way to make a quick post about a hobby without making an entire video, or making an oft-ignored text post. Discoverability is also very good, with the algorithmic feeds and recommendations being very accurate. But they lack variety and don't seem to try and dredge up old interests. When I watch a lot of automotive content for a week, I find recommendations about my other interests (like architecture) quickly disappear and only resurface for viral videos that don't align with my interests.
Finally, we have TikTok. You can follow creators and access a dedicated feed of their videos, but the primary method of consumption is the "for you page". There's some semi-scientific tests by users A/B testing videos (and comparing feeds to friends with similar interests) that lead to a general description of the FYP algorithm. The algorithm seems to form groups of users that like a particular cluster of videos/creators. Your new videos are shown to a few users in each of your clusters, and if some engage with your video, it is shown to more of that cluster and is tested against adjacent clusters. This significantly improves discoverability by letting obscure users' videos go viral, including one of my own quickly achieving 50k views (while all my other videos remain below 2k views). This is unique because it allows every hobby to have subcultures and nuance. I like car technology and engineering but not street racing or showy designs, and so I am clustered accordingly. It's obvious that there are racing and show-car clusters (some videos appeal to many clusters and the comment sections reflect that), but I am rarely shown that content.
This FYP algorithm can also help discovery about adjacent clusters. If you like videos about hikes, it will test videos about other activities like camping, and adjacent hobbies like environmentalism. This isn't hard coded - those are all just naturally occurring, adjacent clusters that each have overlap with hiking enthusiasts. So when I kept liking content about mental health condition "A", it because steady component of my FYP. Also interestingly, having a different condition "B" puts you at a 30% chance of having condition "A", despite the two having very separate communities on sites like reddit. So content from people with both condition "B" and "A" also appeared on my FYP, and I watched/liked the videos most relatable to me. As I began to see more content exclusively about condition "B" (and found some of it to be relatable), I began to consider if I also had that disorder. This wouldn't have been possible on other sites, since the subreddit for disorder "B" is quite heady and difficult to be easily introduced to. And I have a subtype of disorder "A" that is less common, so its community was less useful too. The communities on sites like YouTube or Twitter is so scattered to be practically useless.
Once I had a strong list of symptoms for each disorder, and some new vocabulary to help describe certain symptoms, I found a very qualified psychiatrist to evaluate me. The TikTok algorithm isn't perfect - I though I also had disorder "C", but after evaluation, it was determined that my symptoms don't match and may actually be from an unrelated issue.
No other social media app/site has the ability to navigate a large and varied community to find the parts that best fit each user. And no other social media app is as good at finding overlaps between communities and allows users to navigate them simply by interacting with content. For those reasons, TikTok is the best site for my browsing style, since I like to hop between communities and discover new ones that best suit me. It accelerated my exploration of existing thoughts and feelings so I could explore them to their fullest and see if each disorder's community matched my experiences, without requiring the effort of reading hundreds of posts and comment sections.
This is a case of the middlemen removing value instead of adding it.
It's still the best for pricing, and is pretty close to the sources (unless you're hardcore enough to translate Taobao listings and get your own mail forwarding). For example, I got a new smartwatch and wanted some bands in specific colors, and a screen protector. Listings with the exact same images on Amazon were $9-12 instead of $3-4. (And when you compared reviews and pictures, they were probably from the same factory.)
Some small notes about AliExpress:
- Although most of AliExpress's lower prices come from lower cost warehouses and less middlemen, some of it comes from exploiting discounted postage. [That has been improved since 2019](https://www.parcelandpostaltechnologyinternational.com/opini...) but I still get a ton of Kyrgyzstani-labeled parcels that originated from Guangdong or Shanghai/Hangzhou. I don't know if that's above-board or not.
- Sellers can sometimes be deceptive. When I was shopping for LED interior lights for an old car, some lumen ratings seemed accurate and even had videos of it being tested. Others had obviously inflated brightnesses despite having a similar number of LEDs are power consumption. In addition, some sellers will sneak an unrelated cheap item into variants of another item, so the listing has a lower price in search results.
- Packages now take a few days to be consolidated. This is great for efficiency and often means you get slightly faster delivery in your home country. But these packages can still get lost, so you may have to dispute up to a dozen items at a time. I might have to do this soon with all my smartwatch accessories, and in the meantime, pray my screen doesn't get scratched (or eat the inflated Amazon/eBay price).
- Compared to Amazon, they have fewer customer reviews, and don't stack listings for the same item. In disputes, customer service won't always favor you or offer a complete refund for bad items.
- Compared to eBay, they have much worse search filtering. You may wish to consider eBay for a balance of cheap prices and faster shipping, especially when you filter for sellers within 100 miles. Sometimes Chinese eBay sellers are cheaper than AliExpress sellers.
Things that are drop shipped haven't passed any third party scrutiny and nobody involved in the sales process is held to your local legal requirements. They can ship you an unsafe product that may burn your house down or poison your children, and your local legal processes have no power to make you whole again, nor any affect to discourage sellers from cutting those corners for profit.
The _other_ Amazon CDN