This (ironically). I often start enforcing a "no pronouns" rule for myself and others when conversations and concepts get more complicated. It (the rule) is awkward at first but makes a big difference in mutual understanding.
Counterpoint: a friend in Brooklyn was mugged for only around $10 but almost immediately after ran into street police on patrol. They jumped in the car with him and summoned other local cars to catch the robbers successfully.
The police want to catch the bad guys too, but after 8 hrs has passed, it becomes virtually impossible to succeed.
If we're sharing anecdotes: a former schoolmate, also in NYC, had their phone stolen and was quite literally able to track the phone to the thief's home, but all the police did was take a report.
Hmmm. Maybe the problem is that the police are Luddites.
Maybe the problem is that legally, you can't just bust open a door if someone says: "my phone was stolen and is now in this location". Because especially in buildings, the location isn't always accurate, for example. Also, who says the phone was stolen and wasn't planted by the person filing the report? Who says it wasn't found by this person after the person who stole it threw it in some bushes?
Before you can bust down a door, you often need to do a lot of work. People tend to underestimate this greatly. And any hours spent on this one iPhone isn't spent catching rapists (for example). If only the issues were as simple to solve as people commenting here make it seem.
Yes, obviously, the police would need a warrant to actually enter the building.
But there was no attempt to get one, or even just to knock on the door. There was no attempt to do anything apart from record the fact that a crime had (allegedly) occurred. Which, no matter how understandable, is not exactly the pursuit of justice.
> And any hours spent on this one iPhone isn't spent catching rapists (for example).
Okay, so I understand that you have recently taken a job with law enforcement and I can see why you feel the need to defend your workplace but the point remains that objectively speaking, whether one thinks the US police is benevolent or malicious, they don't really do much for the vast majority of property crimes. It's simply not a priority, as you've inadvertently said yourself.
Plus law enforcement...doesn't exactly catch a lot of rapists either.
Given how popular it is to call a SWAT team on someone as a 'prank' I can't say I see too much truth in "Before you can bust down a door, you often need to do a lot of work."
The perceived emergency in the bogus 911 call adds some weight of course, but in lots of cases the Police seem far too gung ho to roll out heavy and bust down some doors. Not to say that it is an appropriate response to go raid a house in search of a reportedly stolen phone, but goddamn.
As you alluded to, I think telling the cops someone has your phone and telling the cops someone is about to shoot up a bunch of people should get different responses.
Now, I'm not saying cops don't abuse their power nor what response they should give to an "obviously" bogus threat, but even for a trigger happy cop, why bother the risk for someone's phone when there are gonna be hundreds of "credible" threats? I doubt even a crooked cop would be willing to break the rules over someone's stole phone.
Old roommate's company in SF - Car, bikes and computers. Car was stashed in Bayview & cops waited till they had enough backup to lock down the blocks around the house, thieves weren't there unfortunately.
> The police want to catch the bad guys too, but after 8 hrs has passed, it becomes virtually impossible to succeed.
There are places around the world with extremely wide rollout of CCTV cameras across the city, where the crime is recorded and police literally could trace a criminal back to his home. Yet even there police are often uninterested in doing more than providing victims of "petty" crime a copy of the police report for insurance purposes.
One potentially negative unintended consequence: closed systems like Facebook become even more powerful than they already are. Their revenues will dwarf (even more than they do now) any other free digital platform that can't re-create a fully targeted ad product entirely in-house.
Without Google AdX and the mess of disturbing cross-site tracking, I can't see why advertisers wouldn't just spend 100% of their digital budgets in walled gardens. It would just be so much more effective.
Assuming tracking works (I have my doubts it boosts conversion), there has to be an equilibrium price, right?
That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works.
> That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works.
Precisely this. Go back to the advertising model where you place the advertisements in relevant locations. It's like going into the local pizza parlor and seeing an advertisement for a local plumber.
"Joe's Pizza" in Somewhere, NY can still say "I only want advertisers who want their ads shown in 30 mile radius of Somewhere, NY".
Flip the entire thing on its head and go back to camping sites showing camping ads, and auto parts stores showing ads for the latest amazing oil filter. They don't need to know who the user is at all. They are on a camping related site, they probably want to see camping related advertisements.
Tracking definitely works, at least in my experience. That's why Google and Facebook have completely taken over the entire digital ad ecosystem. They just have much better data, and your spend is an order of magnitude more effective than buying directly from publishers.
Take the camping example. If I sell camping equipment, I can try to reach out to blogs directly, but I will have to place hundreds of campaigns for $100 each, track and monitor them all separately, and count on each of the blogs to deliver them accurately in good positions with no fraud. Or I can just buy one massive campaign with Facebook that runs across Facebook and Instagram and targets people who are interested in camping and maybe even expressed purchase intent. That's the better option every time. The transactions costs of dealing with individual websites are prohibitive.
Google (and the other tracking companies) just distribute that same option across the open web. If you get rid of it, Facebook wins absolutely.
I like the idea, as one commenter expressed, that the open web would be better without advertising. But I think the reality of an infinitely powerful Facebook is that the open web would be a wasteland and afterthought.
There is nothing stopping Google or Facebook from offering content-based advertising to advertisers, publishers and users--sidestepping any issues with multiple small ad deals. A regulator could demand it if they wanted, and together publishers and advertisers could too. Individual users just don't have the same power, and resort to adblockers--which is pretty much their only option if they don't want to be tracked when a site doesn't have a subscription option.
Fair point. If you prohibit everyone, including walled gardens, from targeting based on user behavior or user data, that seems like a plausible solution.
It's a purely regulatory solution, though, not technical as the top level comment suggested :)
Opt-in user targeting could still be fine (like offline loyalty programs), and it would be healthier than the current norm of opt-out through ad-blockers.
Tracking is not necessarily about boosting conversion, though definitely an aspect of it, but it's also about trying to prove the value of the advertising spend to begin with.
If I wanted to be generous I could point to the fact that advertiser revenue allows companies to realise a revenue stream other than having to directly charge a customer, be that subscription or increased prices. And so it could be argued that as a consumer you get an indirect benefit from advertising dollars, it's not clear that it's actually exploitive in that sense.
Full disclosure, I run adblockers and used to work for an adtech company.
I have the same reservation about ever more tracking increasing conversion, but I would guess in reality the equilibrium price might come as more people use adblockers vs those who would turn them off if they could be assured they weren't being tracked and only being served some form of a content-based ad.
For a large site like Facebook, adblockers might have a small effect, but for smaller sites seeing 30-50% adblocked traffic, their choices might be direct ad sales, and likely little else. I saw a post about ethical-ad-server recently, and maybe such ad servers should be the ones default unblocked by adblockers.
I think the big thing is that opt-out tracking should be illegal. It's total bullshit that giant partnerships like ad choices and just collect and share tons of info about you with the flimsy veil of an opt out system[1] that NEVER. EVER. succeeds. Like this is big tech you think they don't know how to write an opt out program that actually works, they solve problems in all sorts of domains, I think if they _wanted_ it to work they could do so very easily. Not to mention that in opting-out, you have to agree to let them track you anyway with a different cookie that is supposed to keep you from being tracked.
Profiling has to be done with acording to a privacy assesment analysis and can only be done if the assesment shows no elevated risks and / or the risks that exists are taken into account and contingencys are planed for.
Yes it is quite some work and overhead, but you are extracting information and use it in a way the person could not foresee or conceptualize even exists within the data.
I like the Hemingway app, but it is very much designed to make you write like Hemingway (ie short, clear sentences _only_). Obviously most great writing is not in this style.
The Hemingway app is good for work emails and marketing copy, or if you happen to like that style. It is hardly the universal arbiter of "poor or confusing writing".
I was coming to say the same, and the descriptors being removed actually just points mote to its usefulness for writing 'in a Hemingway style'.
However, having said that I don't think the author of this article used it well, as for many reasons most any journalistic article is going to be very descriptive and use things like puns to get/maintain a reader's attention (something I personally usually hate, but not always).
I think it would be fun to create a version of this which pushes writing towards other recognizable styles like Raymond Chandler or David Foster Wallace. Maybe you pick a style from a dropdown and the analysis changes. You could possibly take it even further and automate some transformations of the input to stylize a piece of writing.
To satisfy a DFW style it'd need to understand 2 page long sentences with multiple footnotes per sentence. Haha. It would be a fun one to do though! (I say that loving DFW)
When it comes to newspapers isn't this the goal, though? Hemingway's writing is journalistic writing. "The [Kansas City] Star’s style guide formed the basis for his own style that ran against the elaborate tendencies of 19th century writers."[1] So if you're judging the style of a journalist's writing a preferable guide is how similar to Hemingway it is.
reminded - on some estate sale here in US i randomly picked up and opened a small end-of-19th century book of some American writer that i never heard (that just means that it is definitely not a Tier-1 writer as i'm not an American). The first large paragraph consisted of just 2, yet pretty large, multipart sentences with several great ideas and observations masterfully woven together. I was awestruck. In Russia we call it "Tolstoy" (War and Peace) style and that beat even the Tolstoy. I immediately closed the book, quietly put it back. It was a very uncomfortable reminder of what we lost. The times has changed.
I would say, no not really. The goal is to make writing readable to human, not same as Hemingway wrote. Those are two different goals, despite Hemingway being also readable.
Practically, I don't have problem to understand American major newspapers.
There are plenty of writers - I know several - that seem to think Hemingway's style is the "correct" one. And it may be, for business use-cases, where clarity is more important than beauty, insight, nuance, individuality, or consonance with the meaning of the text.
There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself.
But increasingly we seem a long way from achieving this. Amazon reviews have become such garbage, I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality.
There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising because they have thriving businesses that generate lots of cash. Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process.
These are signals that are harder to fake, and they're kind of the best we've got right now.
I know my comment will be lost in a sea of voices, but I need to share my experience _somewhere_ else other than amazon reviews. I got my fiancé two Christmas presents this year - both bought off Amazon. One was an electronic keyboard that was dead on arrival, the other was a snuggie type blanket that started falling apart yesterday. Both items had thousands of 5 star reviews.
I usually go somewhere (anywhere) else besides Amazon because I have had bad experiences in the past, but this was the only place I could find the niche keyboard because it's an older model. I now have a firm rule that I will never order from Amazon again.
I've completely stopped ordering from Amazon, for three reasons: they have too much market power, they have serious ethics problems, and their 3rd party seller program has made the buying experience garbage. Welcome to the club.
Even for non-counterfeit books, I’ve often got shit quality print-on-demand versions with plates that look like an inkjet printer running low on ink and with the letters having fuzzy boundaries.
I purchased a book this year which included encoding errors. Original greek text which amounted to a couple of quotes was replaced with garbage output. Tables were printed but unformatted. Furthermore, it only included the first 1/2 of the text. The entire second half of the book was missing. I could look past many of these except for the last. Selling half a book is fraud.
For books I've gone from buying on a Kindle to Kobo+OverDrive which I use to check out e-books from the library. But I'm one of those freaks who actually prefers e-ink devices over dead tree books.
B & H photos has done right by me so far. CDW seems okay. Newegg appears to have vendors reselling stuff from Amazon with markup. And while you can filter third party out, you quickly discover Newegg doesn’t have much inventory.
Last year I ordered a high-priced item from Newegg, received a different model from a reseller, and returned it – then ordered it from Walmart and got the same different model from the same reseller! Finally CDW sent me the correct product.
Has any retail company ever gotten better after being bought out (thinking NewEgg, Toys R Us, Guitar Center...)? Some incentive is fucked up if decent businesses are being run into the ground.
Toys R Us and Guitar Center are among the retailers bought by private equity firms explicitly so the investors could wring the value out of the company and throw the remains in the dumpster. G.I. Joes was another. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-...
By the way the remnants of Toys R Us are now owned by Tru Toys and they are looking to make a comeback.
Can you give an example? I don't disbelieve you, but it's not something I've come across. What do they do, take an accounting liability completely unrelated to the company, "sell" it to the company, thus putting it on the books there and off the books of the investors?
Buy the company with loans, strip the tangible assets for cash, burden the company with the loan repayments and bail out.
Basically use the company as leverage to buy it, and then make it pay for having been bought out. It will seldom be able to do so, and eventually will stagger into bankruptcy. Both the company and the creditors lose, but not the 'investors'.
This is the best 3x5 card/elevator pitch version of the private equity playbook that I've seen. The part about making the company pay the 'investors' for buying the company is especially poignant.
If anyone never quite "got" the rancor directed at Mitt Romney for his association with Bain Capital, this should clear it up.
Low expected long term business value due to predicted market shifts. Compress all dwindling future value into an immediately extractable source of income at the cost of the existence of the business itself. Basically, squeeze the brand name dry until the brand name itself means nothing.
tl;dr: I expect to get something with shoddy build quality from Newegg, but at least the reviews seem non-gamed.
After a few months of lackadaisically making sporadic attempts to order an RTX 3080, I finally threw in the towel and ordered a prebuilt machine which will come with whatever brand 3080 card is in stock at the time from Newegg. I could really use the CPU upgrade anyway, and the markup on the parts isn't at all bad compared to the markup from scalpers, who I refuse to do business with on principle.
The reviews on Newegg at least seem not-gamed. They're largely, "Quality parts slapped together and shipped unprotected, so I received the box with cards and RAM modules unseated and case parts bent due to being thrown around during shipping." I'm going to end up merging parts from two systems to produce a watercooled variant anyway, so all I really care about is just getting the parts, in particular the 3080, at this point.
>I'm going to end up merging parts from two systems to produce a watercooled variant anyway, so all I really care about is just getting the parts, in particular the 3080, at this point.
Fwiw you still run a risk that the CPU heatsink or something similar will come dislodged during shipping, and tumble around inside like a wrecking ball, smashing up the CPU, 3080 and the other parts you want to keep.
I learned this the hard way. There's a difference between how computers like Dells that are designed for mail order are made, vs modular DIY ones. The interior parts of the former are more strongly locked down inside. They're more likely to be non-standard and difficult or impossible to upgrade, but that's the cost of making them UPS-proof (United Package Smashers).
I know a couple of people who've done the same thing -- order a prebuilt machine just to get one of the new CPUs or GPUs. Hopefully it remains unviable for scalpers and thus viable for users who actually want to use what they buy.
Many Chinese sellers will list items on Amazon for a multiple of the price listed on AliExpress. You're essentially paying a multiple of the price for faster shipping.
And a middleman that will give you your money back more or less no questions asked if the product doesn’t match its description.
Getting something in two days instead of two months and being able to get a refund if it was completely misrepresented is easily worth, say (as an example from today), paying $50 for an IP cam instead of $40 from Aliexpress for something with firmware so butchered from upstream it doesn’t even fulfill basic requirements or provide listed functionality anymore. And being stuck with it.
At least the firmware is so full of security holes I can probably find some use for the device one day when I feel like spending another evening with it.
I would love to use Target or Walmart, but the killer feature that Amazon PrimeNow and Fresh still have for me over all the rivals is that they will not allow me to put something in my cart that they do not have.
That's it. Instacart, Shipt, Seamless (yes, I've bought groceries through Seamless in NYC...), this is all I want from you: let me know what I'm getting.
It is really good to diversify your purchasing. Walmart is often a great alternative to Amazon: Newegg or Bestbuy for consumer electronics; Jensen for bikes; Adafruit or Robotshop for hobby electronics; Apogee for rockets.
I can relate to this experience, but the thing is, similar things have happened to me with other retailers, that I think have especially high markups and used to be in my mind decent brands.
I got a shirt from Macy's with sewn in stripes that started to unravel before long, this was many years ago, but I never bought clothes from there again.
And more recently, I got pillow cases from bed bath & beyond, that were very expensive, but otherwise exactly what I wanted, and the seams started coming undone.
Amazon is not a reliable brand, but on the other hand, one can justify trying it again and again, because it is not a single (tainted) brand.
I've said before and will say it again, I read the reviews starting with the worst, as if all the five star reviews were always all fake. I don't know what they might have been for your products, but usually I see no connection between the best reviews and the useful information in the worst.
One extra problem with Amazon is that a lot of products are sold by third party merchants and their site UX seems to deliberately obscure the fact. Same goes for Walmart, though I have less experience using them.
If I order from Amazon, from Amazon, I tend to have good experiences. If I order third party from Amazon it’s a crap shoot.
Don’t you think it could be argued that proudly displaying something is sold by amazon but displaying nothing for 3rd parties would be an antitrust problem?
Also there is text on the page showing you who the item is sold by, and who it ships from.
walmart used to be better about this but now I notice they, and other major retailers are trying to adopt the amazon platform concept.
Sometimes it's easier to just make a list and physically go to a store so I don't need to question whether or not what I'm buying is legit and deal with that stuff.
I bought this exact drone for my nephew and was sorely disappointed by it. I agree with the earlier comments saying that we need to go back to buying from manufacturers in legitimate countries and relying on strong brand names like Sony and the like.
Both Amazon and Walmart are not reliable vendors. Costco does still vet all it's products, I will probably just use them from now on.
Best Buy is my secret weapon. For the last couple of years I’ve gotten gifts for people last minute with same day pickup - as small and simple as new earbuds and as large as a color laser printer.
This Christmas I even got an echo show from them when Amazon itself was back ordered past the holidays.
Best Buy has done a pretty admirable job digging out from what seemed like a surefire death sentence. Target and Walmart weren't dead, but Amazon was eating their lunch.
What they are doing much better at now is the hybrid e-commerce/brick and mortar that Amazon is struggling with. Whole Foods helped give them a platform, but Whole Foods are nowhere near as prolific as Target/Walmart/Best Buy.
For all the reasons mentioned throughout this post, Amazon has gone from my first stop to far down on the list when looking to buy something.
I have been doing the same, Best Buy/Target/Walmart any big box retailer I know does some quality control. I have purchase way too many products from Amazon that broke immediately, just shockingly terrible quality. And the worst part is Amazon isn't cheap anymore, I have found that they have a 20-30% markup over their competitors and the cheap things just third party fake goods.
IMO buying the cheapest products on Amazon is like using disposable plates and utensils, sure the one time purchase is cheaper than buying dishes and real utensils, but over time it's way more expensive.
Honestly, opening a package from Amazon for a 5 star recommended item that you had high hopes for only to find a cheap piece of garbage is infuriating.
> And the worst part is Amazon isn't cheap anymore, I have found that they have a 20-30% markup over their competitors and the cheap things just third party fake goods.
I’ve noticed this too, except it’s mostly with health and skin care brands that are trying to use Amazon for free advert / discovery and then push users to their site with lower prices and no Amazon take. I view this as a scumbag move by the vendor myself and find a new product from a vendor not doing this.
Any time I put a less than 5 star review, i get contacted by the seller, who many times offer to send me a free replacement, a newer model, or another product I may be interested in, if I change my review. I have refused, but I imagine many others did that.
Ha! I got a shitty appletv stick on holder that dropped off the TV the other day after a couple months, I put up a 1 star review hoping that would happen but it hasn't as yet!
I'm pretty convinced there are a lot of sellers on these third party marketplaces that arrive with a truckload of Widget A - once Widget A sells out, they're gone... on to the next thing or rebranded and selling Widget C. Especially when you're selling a low-margin plastic commodity item.
If you don't get support while they're still actively selling YOUR widget, good luck.
I use Fakespot, and I wonder about its accuracy. Seeing a 5-star product given a `D` rating is shocking. If Fakespot is reasonably accurate, then Amazon is inexcusably bad at removing fake reviews. Amazon has orders of magnitude more developer talent and user information than Fakespot to tackle accurate ratings. But I suppose that's the reality of differing incentives...
I also question them. It seems a lot easier to accuse Amazon ratings of being poor especially if it feeds into an already existing confirmation bias against Amazon. For all we know Fakespot could just be making all of it up right? How are Fakespots ratings verified? Do I need a Fakespot for Fakespot too? Maybe rating systemes like these are fundamentally flawed.
Costco and Targets selection is basically nothing compared to Amazon though. Can I buy an eGPU enclosure, a GPU, and some paper plates from Target or Costco? Then if I have a problem or decide I don’t want them after opening how hard will the return be with Target and Costco?
The minimum quality of the items Target and Costco tends to be better. Also, neither allows arbitrary third party items onto their platform. Their buyers choose the items they sell.
In essence, I don't care that much about the reviews. There are fewer of them, and they usually talk more about factual aspects of the item. There are very few "1 star, this is total garbage" type reviews because the retailer has filtered much more of the crap out.
I do think that Amazon is inexcusably bad at removing fake reviews.
However, I think there are some instances where Amazon probably rearranged large numbers of reviews because they found out the reviews were for a different item. It's likely that Fakespot can't tell the difference between mass censorship and legitimate removal. So you do have to take the results with a grain of salt and read recent reviews.
Amazon does have the disadvantage of being more worth circumventing. I.e. if amazon cracks down on some method of cheating the system, to a large extent the cheaters are going to find some other method of cheating.
Whereas since Fakespot etc are less popular, there's less reason to evade their detection algorithms.
That said, yeah, it sure seems like amazon's doing an awful job for consumers in this area.
It's likely Amazon. Of course, there are instances where (e.g. mason jars) where fakes may be acceptable as they're commodity products.
It's tiring using Fakespot just to find dozens of D and Fs. For the most part, I use other retailers or just don't buy the item (surprisingly it's a zen option to not buy stuff you don't pressingly need).
This experience is alien to me. I order from Amazon all the time and everything I get is generally fine. Occasionally something breaks after a while or is missing a part but that can happen anywhere and Amazon has extremely generous return policies. If anything I've come to trust AmazonBasics as a reliable brand if I'm deciding between products.
Same. I really feel like this is one of those things where 99+% of people have zero issues and don't comment on stuff like this. Myself and just about everyone I know order from amazon all the time and have very very few issues. And when we do, the return/replace/refund/whatever process is smooth as butter.
Confirmation bias combined with the fact that unhappy people are more likely to leave “reviews”[a] (like here). I’ve never had an issue with Amazon that they haven’t resolved, and it may seem like I’m a minority, but Amazon is the size they are today because, for ever 1 fsck-up, there’s 99 others who didn’t have problems.[b]
[a]: Complaints. Reviews. Etc.
[b]: Not excusing their bad behavior. Just stating the reality.
Maybe this is a longer game by Amazon. Let bogus reviews and bad experiences pile up for third party sellers, slowly driving people to only trust "Amazon Basics." They have nearly perfect knowledge of the profitability of any item, so they know what items they should have under the "Amazon Basics" umbrella. Over time they could expand this into other Amazon "Brands" at varying quality/price points.
I’m surprised there aren’t counterfeit AmazonBasics products by now. Or are those the only listings that disallow third-party / commingled-inventory sellers?
If you're still every looking for instruments, Sweetwater has excellent stuff, and really stellar customer service.
They answered questions by phone before we purchased. I received a keyboard for my daughter, then we had a change of heart and decided we had gotten the wrong one, they handled everything for shipping it back and sending a new one, and called a week later to see if we were happy.
And they will call you once every few months for the rest of your natural life (and then some). Sweetwater is notorious for being a company whose contact list you can never, ever escape from. Change your phone number, move across the country... Sweetwater will find you.
This hasn't been my experience. I have been called by them before, but it's been at least a year. And less than a half a dozen times in my life. And most of those were sometime after a large purchase where they were (claiming) to ask if the thing was working ok.
I personally prefer zZounds to Sweetwater, because they're honest about their financing plans instead of making it difficult to realize you're signing up for a credit card until you're halfway through typing in your social.
I cancelled my Prime last year because the "2 day" shipping was consistently taking 4+ days. The final straw was my Halloween mask not arriving by Halloween lol.
Between late deliveries, bait & switch 5-star reviews, and being able to find cheaper prices elsewhere, I now only use Amazon if I can't find a product anywhere else.
Agreed. Shipping quality on Amazon has declined massively (before corona), and since marketplace and comingling, products have often become unreliable and even dangerous. On top, there was a forced price raise to sell me videos I didn't want. I did the math and am now prime-free.
I was thinking about creating a site (allreviews.com or something) where you could write a review about anything, purchase, service, etc. Not sure about the legal background. Could I face legal challenges having such site in the US?
Review sites are legal, but you’d almost certainly be at risk of defamation lawsuits from unhappy businesses. You’d most likely be in the clear, but it won’t stop them from trying.
Amusingly enough if you trace the history of brand names ... this is why they started!
And this is the strength that the major retailers have against Amazon - if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead.
I was of a similar mind this year, but when I went to Walmart's website, they had 3rd party sellers on there too. It is really annoying, especially with the pandemic, trying to sift through all the trash online.
I ended up buying we webcam from BestBuy.com, because a webcam I got from Amazon was pay-for-review and was utter garbage.
Just more evidence, to me, that the era of internet business models being "get everything online" (Amazon, Spotify, Steam) is closing, and the era of online aggregation as a product is just beginning.
I've also found myself buying a lot of things from Best Buy, something I would have scoffed at 5-7 years ago. These days, I just want to know that I'm getting a genuine (vs replica) product and most of the time I can go pick-up my purchase same day, solving the "fast shipping" problem.
Since NewEgg started up their 3rd party seller program, I've also switched to Best Buy. Running out of places to buy from that aren't flooded with trash.
One 3rd party seller on NewEgg has been ripping off customers for years. (You order something from them -- say, a mouse -- and they find some shitty used product on Ebay or someplace and ship that to you. Getting a refund can be a challenge).
Multiple complaints (including contacting the CEO of NewEgg) haven't removed this bad actor. So I just assume that this practice of retaining terrible 3rd parties reflects NewEgg's true* extent of their caring for customers, and I don't buy stuff from them anymore.
This is the trend because the existence of the brand's website as a multi-seller marketplace is considered more valuable/higher ROI than the actual direct selling of items. And that's a reasonable view considering most of what is being sold is commodity and prices, thus margin, having downward pressure.
The e-commerce website gets a positive reputation and a brand is built for being a good place to buy things, so it expands into being a hosting platform other sellers, with the intent of drawing more customers based on the brand reputation.
Yes, but the brand, being non-tangible, has stronger staying power as the platform marketplace expands to encompass more sellers. The brand then becomes more powerful as it eats up the reputation of the individual sellers.
Additionally, no one gives a crap about long-term anymore. Scorched earth, grab what you can, screw everyone else and all that.
Seems to not be on the US site, for now, but that's very discouraging to see. I don't know where to turn for electronics if Best Buy goes to crap, too.
(I smell a market opportunity for a retailer that sells only quality products...)
Adding third party sellers is not a problem. Removing the ability to filter for items sold by the retailer, and commingling inventory with random resellers is the problem.
> Since NewEgg started up their 3rd party seller program, I've also switched to Best Buy. Running out of places to buy from that aren't flooded with trash.
I still buy from NewEgg, but the first thing I do when I hit the search results is to click the Sold by Newegg button. Might be a few bucks more, but at least I'm getting the real deal ... at least so far.
NewEgg screwed me out of a monitor. I wouldn't trust them as as retailer anymore. That's from someone who used to buy all their computer stuff through them.
I've shifted a lot of purchases to Best Buy as well. I also ordered far more products directly from the manufacturer's web site this year. Many offer the same free shipping if you are buying anything of value.
I figure if Netgear sends me a fake switch when ordering directly from them it's time to give up on capitalism.
Searching out the manufacturer (assuming there is a brand behind the product and not just an Amazon shop) has made my recent efforts, too. A surprising number of times, the item is cheaper from the manufacturer, and they offer free shipping or a coupon for further discount. I imagine that works out for the buyer and seller - I get a genuine product at their chosen price, and they get to keep fees that would have otherwise gone to Amazon.
> if Amazon won't police (and they have problems with commingling counterfeit brands, too) then Walmart and Target will jump ahead.
I think they are solving this differently. Amazon introduced their own brands for almost all daily necessities. Amazon basic, amazon pharmacy, amazon fashion, amazon elements, amazon pantry, amazon echo and few more. They generally have average or above average products at an affordable price and good support.
You can buy AC, fridge, vacuum cleaner, clothes, baby food, dog food, dog bed, multi-vitamin, ramen, TWS, carpet, blanket, swiss army knife, solder machine, and a lot more from amazon itself now.
Yeah, tried that. Amazon Basics are as hit-or-miss as the rest of the garbage.
I'm frankly surprised they want to put their name on what appears to be dollar store crap that might be fine, might not, who knows. You can almost see the flickering neon and smell the cleaning fluid.
The last time I bought a "new" phone "Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC" it arrived several weeks late, with a burned in screen, scuff marks, and randomly rebooting.
My impression is they did not have the item they were selling, and were relying on some presumably "trusted" reseller to provide it.
I ended up purchasing a used one in much better condition on eBay for several hundred dollars less where the condition at least matched the sale entry.
Be careful using eBay, a rather scary number of listings on there are people just relisting items from Amazon at a higher price and reshipping (or just ordering with your shipping address, I had one eBay purchase come directly from Amazon).
There are plenty of terrible sellers on ebay, too, but it is much easier to sort out the garbage sellers. Seller feedback is right there in the search results, and though you can't filter by feedback any more, it is easy enough to just skip over any listings with a low number or less than 99.9% positive.
Actually, I think it's D2C that will jump ahead. The problem with Walmart and Target is they either (a) have limited brand selection (target) or (b) they dilute themselves so much to compete with Amazon that they eventually become Amazon (Walmart).
Limited brand selection is actually a benefit. I don't want to spend an hour flipping through shitty USB-C cables to find the one that won't nuke my device. I want to pay the buyer at the retailer a few cents to do that for me.
Well, yes. The difference is that once you find a trusted retailer, you don't need to put in the same effort every time you need to buy something. You just trust them to have vetted their products for you.
That's okay. I use retailers way more often than I buy cables. Find a good retailer and you can buy several products from them over time, not just one.
I dunno. I don't think anyone actually wants D2C, for rare-purchase (ie the mass majority of goods).
It's one thing if the brand has an ongoing relationship with its customers, but nobody wants the burden of dealing with 1,000 slightly different processes for ordering toilet paper.
That's the inherent value of Paypal et al. -- abstracting diversity on one side into a standard interface on the customer side.
> It's one thing if the brand has an ongoing relationship with its customers, but nobody wants the burden of dealing with 1,000 slightly different processes for ordering toilet paper. That's the inherent value of Paypal et al. -- abstracting diversity on one side into a standard interface on the customer side.
I guess you've never ordered something from a Shopify based store then?
What on earth does their payment processor and tech choice have to do with a direct to consumer model? I'm talking about the features for the consumer when they shop on a shopify based store.
Trust doesn't scale naturally. That's the point that the GP comment was making. What we saw with Amazon is that bundling[0] works and can scale, but once it reaches that point and trust erodes, then unbundling becomes more appealing to the consumer.
Shopify has struck an interesting middle ground. Lots of the features that make the bundle attractive (one login, saved CC/details, etc.) are baked into Shopify stores. It'll be interesting to see if Shopify rolls out some sort of "Fulfilled by Shopify" and then a "Prime" because then the consumer can ensure quick/free delivery without dealing with the bazaar that is Amazon.
The Shopify features you outlined are the "how", but not the "why". As in, why would I buy from a Shopify store, if an equivalent product were offered by a bundler?
1,000,000 stores using Shopify are effectively the same as 1,000,000 products on Amazon, only less convenient.
I think the overall takeaway is that trust doesn't scale to Amazon-now-size: i.e. one of the biggest retail companies on the planet.
What it did scale to (and very well) was Amazon-1995-2010-size (eg Etsy or eBay), and there's a lot of size between D2C and those variants of Amazon.
I'm open for convincing, but I don't see a path to "D2C eats the world," when for relatively modest amounts of capital one could create a smaller, right-size Amazon that could bundle and dominate.
I was under the impression Shopify didn't promise anything about genuine goods to their customers, and were having to deal (haphazardly) with the same fake problems as their larger competitors. [0]
From reading back through their statements over the years it seemed to have shifted from (initial) 'we're a store platform, and take no responsibility for the content of the store' to (now) 'we have [unspecified] teams dedicated to IP infringement and fraudulent stores.'
Unfortunately Walmart seems to be doing their best to be just as bad as Amazon. I had good luck ordering from them for the past few years but more recently it's gotten almost as bad. They now have a lot of fake/junk products being sold by random parties, plus I had a really awful experience with their customer service recently.
The product page for one item that my partner was looking to buy for her Mom's birthday said something like "Free 2-day shipping, receive it by the 4th". Well when she went to check out the only option to get it by that date cost $30+ dollars. I ended up getting on the phone with a support person who fully acknowledged that the shipping info was wrong but to my shock completely dismissed it as not being a problem.
I said that people were putting items into their cart based on false information and the response was basically a dismissive shrug. We went back and forth a few times to make sure I really understood his response and there's no doubt that he did not care that they were displaying false shipping info.
Since then I've been wary of buying anything else from Walmart.
> I ended up getting on the phone with a support person who fully acknowledged that the shipping info was wrong but to my shock completely dismissed it as not being a problem ...We went back and forth a few times to make sure I really understood his response and there's no doubt that he did not care that they were displaying false shipping info.
You have as much agency and incentive to fix the problem as the support person. Most arguments for why the support person should spend their time and energy trying to fix a problem outside their authority, and their reasons for not doing so, could equally be applied to you.
I agree. I've had about 400 Amazon orders over the past 20 years, and as far as I can remember, with every single one the item was as described and with good quality. I think I've had 3 problems over the years (item didn't arrive; missing part; container of spices opened during shipping) that were accidental in nature, and they were easy to resolve (refund or replacement)
It does help to be a bit sceptical about some listings. For example, a webcam by "GREETBUAY" for $25 is probably not going to be of high quality. So I don't buy those kinds of things. But in cases where the nature of the item is that it's a single piece of plastic that just needs to be the right shape, I've bought them from sellers with bizarre machine-generated names and received exactly what I wanted.
Completely agree. Unless I'm familiar with the seller on Amazon (a known brand like Anker) I try to stick to Walmart, Target, Staples. Bonus, often times the identical item can be found at a lower price. Downside is the shipping may take a few days more.
For something like an SD card or a battery your chance of getting a counterfeit or unreliable product is pretty high. I prefer not to think too much about how that maps to food.
There was an article (I think here on HN) a few years ago where a bookseller who was forced to buy Amazon ads for his own book just so the counterfeits wouldn't outrank him on Amazon.
I myself am convinced that brand recognition is on borrowed time - that is, recognition of old brands may still work as useful filter, but new quality brands will be near-impossible to establish.
The reason for that: we're being DDoSed with brands on e-commerce sites. For an increasing amount of product categories, you're going to find 10+ "brands" on Amazon that are selling the same white-label garbage class product, just with a different sticker and box/ad art. I've seen that in electronics, clothing, consumables. And while multiple brands under one company was a thing for a long time now (see e.g. how many stuff you eat is made by Nestlé or Unilever), there seems to be a qualitative difference here: white label goods meet e-commerce. "Brands" proliferate at the speed of computing.
What you’re describing is exactly how brands work. The garbage brands will continue to cycle because there’s no reason to keep the brand name (in fact it’s better to change it so that people who got burned don’t know it’s the same). But the good brands are investing in the brand name and so they will stick around and you’ll start to recognize them.
Look at a company like Anker. They operate in spaces filled with garbage but they have managed to become trustworthy.
I love Anker. I remember when I discovered them around 2013 and started making purchasing decisions on Amazon by just looking for their brand name, it almost felt like cheating, since I knew I wouldn't need to do an hour of research to make sure, "ok is this charger going to be the kind that explodes." So I just buy Anker and it works like a dream.
The million dollar question is, how do we know which brands are the good ones?
Is there a community which tackles this sort of problem alone? The best I have found so far is to find the community surrounding a type of product, especially on Reddit - there is a community around almost every interest imaginable - and figure out which brands they recommend, via search or just asking.
Often they even have advice in a stickied thread or wiki article.
There was a website here the other day that planned to build a community of people that review products as they age. A review after the first 2 weeks, 2 years then 10 years etc. "Buy for Life" or something like that.
They operate in the most trashed-up market on earth: cheap internet-connected widgets. But I will buy from them every single time because all their products run a modified OpenWRT and all of them let you replace it with vanilla upstream OpenWRT. And all of their recent products have a physical "unbrick this device" button you hold down to boot to a slick reflash-the-firmware-over-the-network ROM.
I will not hesitate to pay twice as much for a gl.inet widget because of this.
An example for not producing anything themselves (afaik) but only putting their name on actually decent products is Blitzwolf. A brand like that can be built on the most basic due diligence (and thus not significantly higher prices). A bonus would be actually delivering some technical detail on a product, but even "manufacturers" like TaoTronics seem to be having a really hard time doing that.
I'd say Aliexpress is probably a better way to find somewhat established (or trying, which is what matters) brands than Amazon.
This is on point. When I first ordered something from Anker (a USB-C dongle IIRC), I was worried it'd be knock-off trash. Their brand hadn't been established long enough for me to evaluate their reputation. But the quality was high and now I trust it. I was happy to pick up one of their MacBook Pro USB-C hubs on Prime Day, and would happily buy more Anker supplies in the future.
There’s a cycle with these brands. Monster started out not insane and then quickly just became bad stuff with a brand. I also remember when Belkin used to be consistently good and now it varies by product.
I’m afraid for when monoprice stops being an awesome brand and starts coasting.
> recognition of old brands may still work as useful filter
Not for long. How many dependable long-lived brands have been mopped up by hedge funds and private equity and subsequently slapped on the cheapest crap you can make? Remember when Craftsman tools used to be top notch?
Right. Also the regular "optimization" (i.e. of costs, not value). For example, Miele was a decent brand of white-label goods, but I've read numerous commenters here claiming that they're succumbing to plasticpartisis and their products aren't as reliable as before. I also vaguely recall hearing that Anker isn't what it used to be.
(Then there are brands spanning great many product categories - like Phillips. I'm having trouble keeping track which product categories they do well, and which they don't.)
I mean, once you get brand recognition and a market foothold, that's when you start optimizing on the cost quality tradeoffs. That seems to be the normal course of business in the US. Smart brands recognize there's a limit to gaming the margins before they lose trustworthiness and cut quality slowly and only to a certain point so as not to eliminate brand loyalty and recognition.
If that margin gaming process gets too greedy, the cycle kicks back and people start looking for other brands. The real strategy is to ride just above the stable point of adoption and keep an eye out for competitors that are offering better value, then gobble them up before they unseat your nice comfortable market position.
The end result is you get a bunch of medicore products and services in the marketplace as well as terrible products/services. The high quality stuff tends to die quickly, undercut by those dominant in the market through anticompetitive forces while the poor quality stuff survives because their brand will be short-lived anyways. Few seem to be able to hold onto the ideals of putting and maintaining high quality first over increasing profit margins, that just isn't the goal.
I disagree on Miele. They still produce their products in Germany. That's not something you do if you want to sell plastic knockoffs. Sure, quality may vary, but this is literally their brand identity. So I seriously doubt there is a calculated attempt to be less reliable.
It gets more difficult. Tefal produces great pans in France, and really terrible pans in China and they are almost the same product and have the same price.
What I try to do is to buy D2C if possible, from brands where I know what is produced where. That's only a small subset of needed things, and its expensive, but it usually works out for me.
I now know household, electronics and clothing brands that genuinely produce here in this country, for example, and the quality is simply better. I also know that no child labour was involved. So, I feel good about supporting such efforts.
Any brand I see on Amazon I assume to be one more variation of the same rebranded product. If I buy it, I buy it under the assumption that it could break the next day.
I also check whether the established brand name has been bought up, which happens a lot. Most of the eminent electronic brands are merely licensed labels nowadays.
Miele still produces in Germany, but quality has gone way down nonetheless. Repairability is also getting poorer, you no longer get parts you one used to get for 20 years after the sale.
For washing appliances there is Miele Professional. But entry was about 5000 to 6000EUR when I last looked. It may depend. From time to time I use them in washing saloons when I have larger batches of dirty (sports) clothing or blankets, bed linen(other "sports", don't ask).
Anyways, very easy to use, fast, and looking indestructible, while the washing drums look space age from the inside(materials wise, and the shape/structuring of it).
GE used to be a marker for reasonable quality but over the past couple of decades they've licensed their name for all kinds of crappy consumer products.
The GE consumer product business was sold to a Chinese company quite a while ago, and I believe the brand was put on a lot of poor quality and poorly designed products, but I have the impression they have substantially turned around the quality, based on consumer reports and other hearsay. I got a GE washer and dryer based on this belief (and they were the only ones that would fit) and so far, so good, after about a year.
The popularity of drop shopping has probably played some part in the spread of low quality no-name products on Amazon.
YouTube is stuffed with videos on drop shipping. Many drop-shippers have no interest in the product they are selling or it's quality. They're only interested in whether they have picked a profitable niche. When that niche gets too crowded, they move to another product space before the wider drop shopping crowd swarm to the same product. And so the cycle continues. Rinse and repeat.
That may be true. Between brand DDoS and dropshipper spam, I no longer buy anything of consequence on any e-commerce platform - I only order from the sites of local chain stores (electroncis, pharmacies, comestics) or directly from manufacturer. I probably pay slightly more because of it, but I avoid dealing with fraudlent sellers and fraudlent products.
> For an increasing amount of product categories, you're going to find 10+ "brands" on Amazon that are selling the same white-label garbage class product, just with a different sticker and box/ad art.
But you could still build up a brand the old-fashioned way, by buying advertising (including forms that can't be targeted, like billboards) to create broad name recognition. It's hard to do and it takes lots of capital, but that's the same as it has always been.
And then any white-label product you sell is a reflection of the brand you've built up, so it's in your interest to only sell high-quality stuff.
Brands still arise out of that. I buy Spigen cases. Anker cables. If I want a low-cost but workable set of headphones for the kids, "MPOW" devices fit the bill. I know that Amazon Basics keyboards and mice will be satisfactory given the price.
Yeah, that. My son has an MPow fightstick and it's a solid product. MPow is doing a good job establishing themselves as a reputable new brand for electronics.
Similarly, Anker, Choetech, and a few others to a certain extent.
Some of them come from the ashes of Alibaba rebrands, but a few start making decent products and are at least at what I'd consider "Belkin-level" but at a better price point.
What you describe is a digital version of white van speaker scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_van_speaker_scam while person you are replying to means old established brands, like Sony or Philips. You can pick up cheapest Philips hair trimmer and be sure of decent quality, but picking even something looking upmarket, but coming from one of the made up Amazon brands is almost a guarantee in chinesium shock. $300 Panasonic/$400 Moulinex bread maker might look identical to Silvercrest(lidl)/Medion/Sencor/Hamilton Beach $50 branded one, but difference in manufacturing quality and used materials are quite dramatic.
What makes you think the old, established brands are what they once were? Many of them are just a label put onto something entirely different, meanwhile being bought by another entity, produced in less quality/durability.
Maybe not as extreme as the "Chinesium Shockers" which I learned about in this thread, but the tendency is there.
It used to be borosilicate glass, and now it's soda-lime glass. Apparently the latter has higher thermal expansion and therefore more likely to shatter when subjected to very rapid temperature changes.
There are some conspiracy theories that the material was changed to make it less suitable for meth labs. It seems more likely that it was changed because it's slightly cheaper.
EDIT: I just found out that one of the ways to distinguish the earlier, borosilicate Pyrex is that the earlier versions are labeled in all-caps: PYREX.
Unfortunately Amazon's UI is actually pretty hostile to this, too.
I was trying to buy simple USB cables... After a pair of tablets were destroyed by a bad USB cable, I'm picky about usb micro cables. So I tried to search on Amazon for usb a to micro cables...
And the brand filter didn't list many of the brands I was seeing in the resultset. Like, I know you have Monoprice and Belkin cables, I'm looking right at them! Why can I only filter to Chinese no-name brands and Amazonbasics?
This comment caught my attention are bad cables really destroying your tablets? I ask because I literally power all my phones and tablets with cords I bought at the dollar store. Never had any problems. Have I just been lucky?
Not sure about Micro, but a few years back a Google employee posted a bunch of info about bad USB C cables. Sadly I think it was on Google+ and gone now, but his reviews are still on Amazon [1]. There were certainly some really bad ones, missing resistors and things, so its quite possible on C at least.
Well I guess I will consider myself lucky. I learned my lesson with an amazon power cord for my Lenovo laptop. It charges fine but the casing around the electronics melted due to it getting so hot. It is my kids laptop and could have literally started a fire on him. I bought a new one from Staples and now won’t buy any electronics like that from amazon.
They physically mangled the connector itself, so the tablets could no longer charge. They were 4-year-old Galaxy Tab 7" so not worth repairing.
Basically I had a usb cable where the metal of the connector bent in just the right way that it scraped off the contacts inside the tablets' female port.
That mechanical connection is definitely prone to failure. I've had phones where the charging port was physically worn enough that I could plug them in and charge them OK but bump it just a bit and it would disconnect. Wireless charging isn't quite there yet but I'd be happy to get rid of all cables.
I used an off-brand USB cable for my Garmin watch once, and it wouldn't power on for a week afterwords. I have no idea what strange software/hardware fault could explain that, but it spontaneously recovered after a week of being dead. I'm not willing to risk using off-brand cables since then.
If anything, the last few years of politics have convinced me that objective information is more likely to die out, replaced by advertising, brand recognition, and coercive tools.
An older friend of mine made the observation that really before the few large news networks and papers in the last 40-50 years objective information that everyone roughly agreed upon was not the norm. Yellow journalism, hearsay and rumors dominated common conversation.
He observed that with the internet we're returning to what was this "normal" state with anybody being able to post something and gain widespread recognition, the difference of course being the rate at which this non-objective information travels and the better ability to weaponize it.
I think, after looking into it a bit more, I agree with him and that our period of fairly objective news and political information and the general consensus that brought was the anomaly. This raises the question then how do we as society re-learn to cope with that and filter out non objective information because clearly we're not doing so well with it now.
So, I don't think so much as it will die out as much as I think we need to develop abilities to separate wheat from chaff, stronger societal bullshit filters because truth will have a weaker signal.
> I think, after looking into it a bit more, I agree with him and that our period of fairly objective news and political information and the general consensus that brought was the anomaly. This raises the question then how do we as society re-learn to cope with that and filter out non objective information because clearly we're not doing so well with it now.
I don't know the answer, but my opinion is that we need to stop optimizing for views. I.e. kill the online advertising market. You can do your part by installing an ad blocker and paying for services you like with real money.
How much of that was the American propaganda machine doing its job to keep the western world united against communism? The change we are seeing could just be the end of the cold war leading to slow return to normal and not due to technology at all.
I mean united news cycles predated the cold war and wasn't an isolated American phenomenon and I'm not talking about America but the world so I don't see how your opinion is relevant to the topic other than to stir the pot.
It's remarkable how people have taken the NYT and others reporting what they were told over the Iraq war, where finding contradictory evidence was extremely hard, as a reason to go to far less reliable news sources.
The manufactured consensus of the mass media had some terrible failure modes. Perhaps it wasn't worth it.
But it had a nice positive externality in creating a shared reality for people who otherwise didn't have much in common.
We can all watch the landscape shatter into pocket, subcultural realities, and the fear of the other and general distrust is palpable.
People are falling back on the old stalwarts: common ancestry and/or religious conviction. That, too, has advantages, but it comes with severe downsides.
I just made a pretty big purchase decision in a field (cameras) where there is a lot of competition and reviews carry a lot of weight.
In the end, the information that helped me make up my mind was from video reviews by mostly well-known photography vloggers on YouTube.
This is also something that could be messed with by unscrupulous marketers, but there is a strong counterbalance to those anti-patterns: the vloggers themselves are trying to build reputations, because "top photography vlogger" presumably pays better than 99% of all other work that involves photography.
I'm not sure how much this counts as "better objective information" -- other than seeing an object move around in someone's hands you're mostly getting an opinion -- but I found it super helpful and could easily imagine this being the "future of purchase-decision influence" or something like it.
For example here are three channels I used, with radically different styles:
> because "top photography vlogger" presumably pays better than 99% of all other work that involves photography.
Just to be clear though (I work in a field that relies heavily on niche-specifc YouTubers for marketing) - the reason that being a "top niche blogger" pays so well is because companies pay them a lot to encourage favorable opinions of their product lines.
I've seen amounts that are several multiples of my annual salary for fairly small market segment channels - and it's not explicit like "We are hiring you to post positive reviews of our products" because that would need to be disclosed. It's more along the lines of "We are nominally hiring you as a brand ambassador, you will visit our HQ and make a collaboration video". But of course, YouTubers aren't stupid, they're not going to post negative content about brands that are paying them even if it's theoretically for something else.
This is the same problem that PC hardware review magazines had back in the day - companies that purchased a lot of advertising from the parent company just happened to never get negative coverage in review articles. You can't bite the hand that feeds you.
Yeah but aren't these contradictory goals for the "influencer?" At least for the ones who start to catch on?
Canon says "make us look better than Sony" and Sony says "make us look better than Canon" but at least in the stuff I watched, for photography, the really successful people were quite obviously prickly opinionated photo nerds who were not likely to risk their ever-increasing reputation and influence for a bit of payola.
I guess it probably varies a lot based on subject. Travel vloggers are pretty openly corrupt in that sense. And I have long dreamed of being a corrupt restaurant critic...
Brand outreach in photography is so endemic that I just can't trust any reviews for the first three months or so after a release.
It's only when working photographers get their hands on the product and use it that the real story emerges, but it requires someone to take that risk for the benefit of others.
People believe (speaking of photography / video YouTubers) that Apple generally doesn't give pre-release or demo units to users (except the "inner circle", shall we say - Daring Fireball, etc.).
Odd, then, how a whole bunch of photography vloggers, the vast majority of whom made absolutely no mention of loaner / demo units, promotional consideration, etc, all got launch day Mac Pros.
"Much anticipated", people might argue, so of course they pre-ordered.
Odd. They must have all got together and talked. Because on my YT subscriptions list I counted no less than eight photography vloggers who somehow, coincidentally, managed to get the EXACT same configuration:
The 24 core, 384GB, 4TB, Vega Pro II Duo, with a Pro Display XDR, nano coated.
Now, not only is this an overkill for ANY photography editing, even 100mp medium format, it's also a $25,000 (33 when you count the display).
I'm willing to guarantee that these were all Apple loaner units and that at some point they bought their own with the specs they really wanted, and "subbed it in" to their setup, later.
As long as they were actually loaners and not just given to the vloggers I honestly don’t see much of a problem. The vast majority of magazines, for example, would do reviews based on products loaned from the manufacturer (with Consumer Reports being a notable exception). While all else equal a review from someone who shelled out their own money seems more trustworthy, I wouldn’t write off a review just because the product was loaned.
Brands aren't perfect either. For example Volvo had a reputation for making great safe cars. The brand is now owned by a company with a reputation for making cars that disintegrate and obliterate the occupants in crash tests.
The same is true of Arc'teryx, Jaguar, and many other well known brands that have been sold off to companies with terrible reputations for quality.
Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus.
Can you expound on this? The same parent company (Amer Sports) also owns Salomon/Atomic and several other well regarded brands. I wasn't aware that something had changed recently. Are you talking about the Anta Sports buyout? People use these brands for life-critical applications in the backcountry, so this is certainly concerning to hear.
I bought two Delta Lt Zip microfleeces from them in 2018. They were expensive (over $100 each) but incredibly high quality, fit me like a glove, still wearable today after umpteen washes.
In early 2020 I ordered another one -- exact same product name, exact same brand, same size, shipped-from-and-sold-by "Arc'Teryx". It was like wearing a garbage bag; the proportions were all wrong, like it was tailored for an obese person my height. Lower quality material and all sorts of silly zippers and patches tacked onto it in weird unnecessary places.
Something went seriously down the drain in terms of quality with them in the interim. I'd probably bought over $1,000 worth of clothes from them up through 2018, all of it was first rate. Since 2020 I haven't bought anything else from them.
> The brand is now owned by a company with a reputation for making cars that disintegrate and obliterate the occupants in crash tests.
In China. From what I've heard the products are also still completely on the same level because it's not like Geely just started selling their cars with the Volvo brand, but they keep the company doing what it's good at.
A counter-example is the German car brand Opel that was recently sold from GM to french PSA. Because the car manufacturer attached to the brand was already largely dismantled all Opel cars are now PSA models - which is rather well known by people who care and also affects the brand.
I am not sure but volvo's cars are still pretty well rated and relied upon - https://www.caranddriver.com/volvo/xc90 . Jaguar is now owned by a Indian company and Volvo is owned by a chinese company but I haven't heard anyone claim drop in their quality.
Can you point out specific examples of how changing ownership has affected quality of their cars?
> Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus.
Speaking as a socialist-leaning libertarian, I'mma have to take a hard disagree on this. Let the companies have a mix of terrible quality and great quality as they wish, and let the market itself decide which products and companies succeed or fail
Let a private company, say, Consumer Reports or Vegan International, give their imprimatures to quality.
A government, in this specific case of toy drones, is a bit heavy-handed, in my opinion. Would "quality specs" work? Would they be subject to political whims? Would a connected company be able to overwhelm the governmental department dedicated to the quality control of toy drones?
Edit: I promise, despite the proximity of "socialist" to "libertarian" in my preamble, this is not an ideological stance. If you have a better idea, I will change my mind! I'm fine with a downvote, but don't just smash it because you disagree. Tell us why :)
There is a reason you aren't afraid of getting poisoned when you eat at restaurants, and it isn't because every restaurant owner cares about poisoning you but because the government have made the common practices which led to food poisoning illegal.
> Kind of a non-sequitur, no? I was talking about toy drones.
Batteries are regulated, as is the type of paint used in kids toys.
Even with regulation companies still try to sneak in lead paint(!) and batteries occasionally burst into flame.
No regulation would mean parents would have to carry around lead paint test kits...
Review sites cannot keep up with the deluge of brands, and some aspects of product quality, such as longevity, are impossible for reviewers to adequately test in a reasonable amount of time. (A review that certifies a dish washer model last sold 10 years ago will indeed last 10 years isn't of much use!)
And in regards to a comment below, those toy drones likely charge with USB!
The original assertion was "Ultimately the only way to guarantee quality would be to vote for politicians who support strong regulations and a strong regulatory apparatus". I disagreed this is the only way to ensure quality. Now people are talking about batteries and restaurants. The original assertion was about quality, not safety
Now append some eco to your leanings and see that this sort of free market experimentation isn't sustainable, if you don't want to end under the great garbage avalanche like in the movie "Idiocracy". Or be filled with microplastics, which contain endocrine disruptors, which are not good for anyone/thing.
The assertion I responded to was that the only way to ensure "quality" was to support government regulation. I disagreed. Using the heavy hand of government to be sure that these toys don't break within a day is overkill. I suggested an alternative
Rather than argue against that specific point, people began arguing against another easier point: that government regulation protects us from dangerous things
While true, it's a distracting non-sequitur. Argue against what I said, not against a stupider argument that I did not say
Given the counterfeit problem on Amazon, I have been using the retailer as a proxy instead. I feel much more comfortable buying things from a known retailer like Target or Walmart, since I can rely on them to at least do some kind of due diligence on the products they carry. I think this will be the way forward for these companies to stay in business as Amazon becomes overrun with junk.
Even though Walmart also has a marketplace full of mystery sellers, at least they still offer a simple filter at the outset to limit your results to only things they sell directly. At Amazon, you have to have already put another filter on your search results to see that option.
> There's still a lot to be said for established brands.
Thus the loop comes full circle.
Originally the idea of a brand ("burned" -- burned into the hide of an animal or a piece of wood) was a way to label the provider in the hope that people would learn which providers were trustworthy and had high quality. This extended into manufactured products once printed packaging become popular (logos and labels, starting with low-input goods like tea).
Then sometime in the 20th century people figured out that they could use mass advertising to build the brand (by then just a label) itself, sometimes even rendering the product itself almost irrelevant. I remember articles in the paper (80s I think) expressing shock and/or bemusement that someone would wear a shirt with "Tommy Hilfinger" printed boldly across the front. At that point such brands become an expression of stance rather than product quality, or perhaps the product was merely a way to broadcast the brand. For example Diesel jeans which can only be worn a small number of times, compared to levis which last much longer.
And now it's come back to the starting point: seeking the brand, but for some level of quality assurance rather than lifestyle adherence.
>I've fallen back to pretty much relying on name brands as my placeholder for product quality
I've fallen back on a combination of brand, country of manufacture, price, and to some extent if the company has its own retail presence outside of Amazon and other online or meatspace big box stores. For example...
If the brand is good, the item is expensive, but it's made in China and sold on Amazon, I try to avoid. There's some risk it will be money wasted on something that will last just 3-6 months.
Conversely if all of the above are true but the item is cheap, I'll buy it from Amazon, enjoy their fast delivery, and simply build into my expectations and budget that it will need to be replaced in 3-6months. This is what I've come to with headphones, for example.
On the other hand, if the item is made in (not just designed in, but made in) the US, Japan, Korea, Germany, or some other Western European countries, then it matters less what the brand or retail venue is. For example, buying a room fan, power tool, or similar, I'll look for one with a motor made in US/Japan/Germany/etc.
These are the best signals I've found to be available atm.
> There's a somewhat pervasive idea that advertising and brand recognition are coercive tools that will ultimately die out, replaced by better objective information about products. I'm kind of partial to this idea myself.
Based on what? Are people investing less in marketing than before?
My personal experience is that many brands had a high markup on brand recognition and I used to be able to find better quality and value through no name brands that made good products. The internet is supposed to spread information well and with perfect information I should be able to differentiate true quality vs just a known brand signaling quality.
I think the problem is that places like Amazon distort information (eg, tolerate crappy reviews) because it makes them more money. The bazaar model is supposed to have some positive feedback loops to incentivize positive events, but that’s drifting away.
So I used to think that effective marketplaces would replace brands with disintermediation and perfect info. But not so much now.
This is sort of a tl;dr for why I buy Apple. They have a huge markup for brand name, but it’s exhausting to me to try to evaluate what’s the best laptop this year and I can trust Apple to probably be pretty good.
Yes, and even if the product seems like its legit - the manufacturers often won't honor warranties on products bought from Amazon if they don't have a formal relationship with them.
100% agree. I’d also add that people love to trash brands that produce substandard producers. Negative word of mouth spreads easier for more recognizable brands, and the company’s need to protect their reputation provides a level of assurance that doesn’t exist for anonymous producers.
I disagree partially. Depending on the size of the corporation holding the brand, and thus available capital, it may be chump change for white/greenwashing via advertisement campaigns, cross media product placement, lawsuits, and employing whole armies of "reputation management* trolls...err professionals flooding any site with positive comments, burying anything else.
> There's still a lot to be said for established brands. Brands can afford widespread advertising...
Established brands can do one other thing -- enforce on-ground quality assurance in China / manufacturing outsourcer
Chinese factories are amazing. But they produce what you let them produce. 1000-units-of-X, only QA'd when they hit receiving port, are going to trend to crap.
On the other hand, established brands have the financial and relationship muscle to actually inspect and cut things out earlier, and therefore can maintain a higher quality level on shelves
> Brands can get stocked in major retailers because you need decent products to make it through Walmart's buying process.
Not only this - brands that get stocked at Walmart need to have considerable production capacity. I was involved in a manufacturing business that did great as long as we stayed b2c - but when we started doing b2b sales, even in small local shops, we got swamped rather quickly because we didn't have enough capacity.
It's not much use finding a quality product if you can't buy it.
Branding is an emergent phenomenon in nature as well, e.g. flowers of particular shapes to attract bees. The book "Alchemy" by Rory Sutherland goes into this.
This is effectively being debated by proxy is most apple threads - i.e. It's easy to forget that we're debating this on HN, where even the least informed still have some idea what's going on whereas most consumers only information about a product is from very few sources and mostly advertising.
The problem is consumers are unorganized and people wanting to sell things can easily induce distortions in whatever recommender system by buying labor, companies, or products. You can only temporarily solve the problem before wealth demolishes objective feedback systems.
We in the US spent something like $7000/citizen on stimulus so far though, so $30/test gets you a lot of tests if it mitigates the economic effects of the virus.
I doubt it. These lawsuits would be few and far between and Google still derives a ton of value from its free accounts in the aggregate. They might just get better at terminating the right accounts...
