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#1 "Fixed Gear Frame" on Amazon is... a light

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#1 "Fixed Gear Frame" on Amazon is... a light

Old 11-07-19, 01:13 AM
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Stormy Archer
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#1 "Fixed Gear Frame" on Amazon is... a light

I thought this was kinda funny, goes to show how useless Amazon is at anything but making us THINK we made the best purchase.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestseller...sporting-goods
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Old 11-07-19, 09:52 AM
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Lol well played Bezos
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Old 11-07-19, 08:14 PM
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That's because of manipulations of their algorithms.
Same concept as when robot battle videos get flagged as animal cruelty, and also analogous to people getting flagged randomly for violating terms of service without any explanation as to why.
It's not that that company is special in any way, it's that the algorithms themselves are limited. They're all basically doing the same thing.
Humans are not making these decisions. There are more results and items on these sites that you can possibly go through in your lifetime (even if you clicked on one each second), so instead of hiring massive teams of people that literally just click through the different results and flag them in some particular way (basically impossible), they make algorithms.

Some places do use humans to "train" these algorithms, but once they have a small sample size they basically teach themselves and humans are no longer necessary.

Many sellers somehow figured out (probably through a TON of trial and error, like 6 months or more of daily work) what they're looking for exactly and how to manipulate it.
What they're manipulating is essentially the parameters to those algorithms.
All of these tech companies have to base their content delivery on the inputs that users give.
So for something like that company, they would probably use ratings, amount of items sold, frequency of people clicking on it, price in relation to other items, etc.

If you know what they are looking for, and you have access to a lot of people who are willing to create a bunch of different accounts just for the sake of checking all the right boxes, then you have that above result.

One of the worst cases is SD cards. I'm sure you've all heard of those fake SD cards that are being sold for ridiculously cheap prices. Like $20 for a 1TB sd card or something.
SD cards have indeed become very cheap, but it's really a crapshoot as to whether or not you're going to be getting a fake or a real one.
Most of them have been found to just be like 512mb sd cards that are manipulated to read as 1TB cards when you put them into a computer.
But they don't store data because of the above reasons.
Those people have learned how to manipulate the algorithms and put them in the top spot as "best choice" or something.

It's not a problem with just shopping, it's a problem with social media, search results, video streaming services, etc.
Stuff that is starting to determine how we live our lives and the kinds of information that we receive.
Getting screwed as a consumer is one thing, you definitely have a negative impact if you take value without giving it, but the impact that it's having on our social and political lives is just totally wild.
OH, and good luck getting a qualified human to look at it.
Many people just send their complaint into an e-mail black hole and never get a reply for months.

All of this stuff is still in it's nascency, and I don't think that any of us expected technology to play such a large role in our lives, but I think that we need to fundamentally change the way we do a lot of these things.
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