Amazon Achieves Enshitification Inception
pluralistic.netAmazon 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.
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.
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.
Yes, I agree with you. He is both real and it is depressing as the state of world is. I sometimes have take solace in utopian fiction like Kim Stanley Robinson's have my spirits high and have a positive look out. It is just me.
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.
Wow, amazing article. I hope it gets the attention it deserves.
> 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.
> 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.
Well, that’s one hell of a website
There should be a double t in ‘enshittification.’
Came here to say this. Otherwise it's pronounced "en-SHITE-if-fication."
i kinda like that better than the typical pronunciation tbh, but also unfortunately for us CD coined the term so we cant even be on a high horse about how he decided to spell and say the word he made up and now we all use.
i still might start saying it shite for fun though.