Amazon Achieves Enshitification Inception

Amazon making it difficult to compare price per unit is why sites like https://diskprices.com and https://lifepo4prices.com and all the other clones are so useful.

Amazon’s search is so transparently corrupt and useless, I can search the exact product I want to buy in quotes and it will show me an entire page or more of other products it wants me to buy before the result I was looking for.

I love Cory Doctorow’s work, but man is it hard to get through sometimes. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s depressing.

The article spends a couple paragraphs complaining about Amazon not allowing sorting by unit price. This would be a very useful feature, I agree, but I don't think I've ever seen a online grocery or department store retailer which supports it. The brick and mortar retailers he praises don't let you _sort_ by unit price either, they just show it to you on the shelf (often because a regulation requires it), same as Amazon.

Test search term: pretzels. Couldn't find a way to sort or filter by unit price at Target.com, Ralphs.com, Walmart.com, Vons.com, not even beloved Costco.com.

If anyone does know a grocery or department store which lets you sort by unit price, I'd be interested to see it.

https://www.target.com/s?searchTerm=pretzel

https://www.ralphs.com/search?query=pretzels

https://www.walmart.com/search?q=pretzels

https://www.vons.com/shop/search-results.html?q=pretzels

https://www.costco.com/s?keyword=pretzels

So many e-commerce companies have made product search a dark pattern. It’s exactly why LLMs are coming for their lunch. Why would I use a marketplace in the future when I can get a terminal agent to scour the web and sort the products however I see fit? And prices will be cheaper since the LLM will find the sellers direct website where they don’t have to give the marketplace its cut.

The general argument against this is that “how can I trust the stores my terminal agent finds?” I much rather trust an objective LLM than these modern marketplaces that remove or simply don’t publish bad reviews, game reviews with programs like Vine, or start selling generic versions of the same popular products third party sellers sell.

Usually Doctorow is tedious in his presentation mainly because of how angry he is at what he's reporting on. It's not that it's unwarranted, it just hard to digest because of it. This article, which eventually arrives at Amazon's absolutely unforgivable corrupt implementation of a second-price auction for advertising placement, is worth the read.

Amazon on HN, recently:

Announcement of the FTC lawsuit; (2 days ago, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49529685

> An Amazon senior VP in charge of ads said internally that in Amazon’s auctions, “the second price isn’t set by an actual bidder, but rather by” Amazon itself with a “proxy 2nd price that we calculate,”

Listing practices found illegal in EU; (14 days ago, 0 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49393379

> The platform operator sorts search results by default according to the category “Recommended” or “Amazon presents”. While it refers to general influencing factors such as customer actions or product information on help pages, the Senate considers this to be too vague. It emphasizes that a mere exemplary listing of criteria is insufficient. Consumers must be able to easily understand which factors significantly determine the selection and how they are weighted against each other, especially with dynamic weightings.

And a blog post by Seth Godin describing their ad system preceding both: (17 days ago, 705 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49345263

> They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse.

Cory also wrote a blog post about this titled “Greedflation”: (3 years ago, 70 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35705872

> Where Amazon once guaranteed sellers that if they sold the best match for a customer's search, they would top the search results, Amazon now makes its sellers bid against each other to be at the top of your results, whether or not they're the best match for your search.

At some point it feels like blaming someone else for my cocaine problem. If Amazon sucks, stop using it.

It would be nice to drive thru my neighborhood without have to sit behind an Amazon delivery vehicle parked in the middle of the road.

Wow, amazing article. I hope it gets the attention it deserves.

Well, that’s one hell of a website

  > As Tim Wu points out, the money Amazon makes from payola exceeds the advertising revenue received by all the newspapers in the world by 300%. Alongside that number and its implication for the news media, Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post and turning its editorial page into a sewer of shitty Ayn Rand fanfic barely registers.

These people are so far removed from reality that you could easily call these social circles a (more or less spontaneously organized) cult, and they have to warp the world around them to serve them even more. Buying twitter, buying newspapers. They are telling us that the "others" are brainwashing us.

  > This is pure enshittification. Of all the ingenious, innovative ways that Amazon came up with to make money, the most successful is a scam that makes everything you buy more expensive even as it reduces the profits of the companies you're buying from. It's another example of corruption: a system of concentrated gains and diffuse losses – and once again, it's the most profitable thing Amazon does.

Bezos isn't an entrepreneur, because an honest business owner wants to be proud about their own work.

There should be a double t in ‘enshittification.’