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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

I'm sick of it being impossible to identify cheaply made products from high quality, durable products on Amazon. The rating system is flat out broken and there's an entire industry built around gaming those ratings.

I'm at the point that I rarely ever buy products on Amazon anymore. It's a total disgrace. On an ethical level, I wish I had the ability to say "I only want to be presented with results that weren't made in China or other slave societies".

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I understand how you feel. It can be frustrating.

Contrary to popular belief Amazon actually does put energy into making sure products are responsibly sourced. Products are de-listed if they’re found to come from unethical sources.

To take that even further take a look at Climate Pledge Friendly. Those are products with (at least one) third party certification. These certifications don’t just further climate goals. Social responsibility is also considered. Including worker conditions and product durability. You can filter search results by this attribute. Admittedly it can be hard to filter for specific certifications.

https://www.amazon.com/b?node=21221607011

Amazon can simultaneously do due diligence on a subset of products while completely ignoring the rampant fraud and knockoffs of many other products.

Buying from ethical sources is great, but that doesn't mean those products aren't crap either

Take a look at the certifications. It’s a signal.

A giant portion of Amazon's products are made in China by a populace that's enslaved by their totalitarian dictator. Please allow me to identify which products are made in China, and other communist/totalitarian states, so that I can exclude them from my searches.

The trick is to find your products somewhere else and then look them up on Amazon for a price comparison.

Is that Amazon’s fault? So many once reputable brands have been MBAed to death and are now indistinguishable from the bottom tier garbage. It is near impossible to do real product research on anything, anywhere.

Surely a company with the resources of Amazon can determine fake reviews from real ones. Especially those bait-and-switch where the product is changed and half the reviews aren't even for the current listing.

These days it should be assumed that the quality of anything bought on Amazon is dogshit. Which, even though I canceled Prime years ago for ethical reasons, is honestly the biggest reason I won't even click an Amazon link.

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