I used to notice that criticizing Amazon on Reddit was a way to quickly get a ton of downvotes, as if an active party was trying to stamp out negativity. I heard about an active social media team that stamps out negativity. Not sure if it’s true, but I can’t rule it out either.

Reddit is pretty much controlled by PR company bots. It's not surprising that they sometimes overdo it.

You have by any chance any resources on how they operate and research into this?

Thanks for the article, so I actually searched “reputation management” and there is actually a subreddit for this, active till two years ago. Crazy really that this can happen.

Wow! How is this legal. It feels like manipulation and fraud.

> I used to notice that criticizing Amazon on Reddit was a way to quickly get a ton of downvotes.

What subreddit? Because neither on HN nor Reddit, I ever see anything positive about Amazon.

Can’t really remember to be honest, this was a while ago 5/6 years, so maybe things changed. Probably some news subreddits I followed then.

Yep, same for me. Unreal how every product somehow now has a 4.5+ rating.

Amazon is just filled with scams and fakes now.

To be fair if Amazon is showing products with low ratings then it means they are continuing to sell shitty products. You don’t see low ratings because they just get removed.

Also known as survivor bias. That's a good point, tho I suspect the system is still flawed and scammed.

You can buy it cheaper on Aliexpress, but it will take several weeks, and everyone wants instant gratification. That's the entire business model of majority of Amazon sellers - buy on Aliexpress/baba - sell at Amazon at a markup.

Sometimes producers (RIP MPOW) also directly lists on Amazon, so you pay a small premium for fast shipping from local warehouses, and get pretty decent unofficial warranty - they know Q&A on low margin items lacking, high defect rate likely - will often replaced items no question asks on 1star review with offer to change back to 5 stars to (justifiably) gush about how painless RMA process is. Sometimes they even give you the shady gift card. Much better experience than aliexpress.

That's improving too. Now, very often you can get 15 day delivery on orders over €10 (or the equivalent in your local currency).

Not instant, but often quite manageable.

Isn't that the entire model of most retail stores? Namely that they are retail and have items available for reasonably fast shipping.

The business model of retail stores is that they will deal with individual products, individual users, and small geographic areas in exchange for a share of the profits.

Yes they have a job title called “buyer” whose job it is to find goods that the store should sell, including quality and safety (varies by store!).

If you shop Amazon for electronic components (LEDs, resistors, etc.) you can find listing that have 3+ weeks delivery times. Not all, but they are in there. Literal drop ship from China, absolutely no reason to buy on Amazon instead of aliexpress/banggood

Most a-li-express products are getting delivered within two to three weeks these days. They have become very efficient in logistics.

Also if you continue supporting Chinese sellers on Amazon, this would still encourage these behaviors.

Anker might be great in your eyes, but they are deceptive scoundrels in mines. Simply youtube “Eufy leaks”.

But yeah, back to the point… Amazon don’t appear to want to fix this broken system or they’d have done it years ago. It still makes them money.

I'll never understand how people go "just YouTube it". Sure, I'll sift through a bunch of search results to find a 54 minute video that makes the point you meant to reference 23 minutes in after four ads.

Just give someone an actual link, to an actual article. Like this: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/30/23486753/anker-eufy-secu...

> Despite claims of only using local storage with its security cameras, Eufy has been caught uploading identifiable footage to the cloud. And it’s even possible to view the camera streams using VLC.

(Personally, this means I won't buy an Eufy camera, and it doesn't change the fact that Anker's chargers have been far better made and reliable than their competitors in my experience.)

Re: Anker chargers, a few perform pretty well but many are kind of middling. A friend has been doing a lot of reviews of these on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/c/AllThingsOnePlace) and we started compiling test data- focusing on power conversion metrics such as efficiency and power factor, summarized into a single "power quality score" on a 0-200 scale- in a database at https://pqs.app.

For example, for the Anker power adapters we've tested: https://pqs.app/devices?categoryId=1&search=anker. We're also trying to turn it into a business.

Middling is fine for me if it doesn’t fall apart or burn down my house. Quality encompasses more than just efficiency.

Do you test for protocol negotiation for USB C Power Delivery and proper Lightning or Thunderbolt support? I think for many uses that's more important than small electrical losses

We haven't done lightning/thunderbolt, but the Youtube reviews include the different USB-C power modes. We also look at some aspects of safety, such as when overcurrent protection in kicks in relative to the device rating, and if it automatically resets after tripping or requires power cycling.

> your comment is generalised at some other experience

No, it's aimed specifically at this one.

YouTube's search results vary from person to person. I don't know which video you want me to watch - Paul Moore's five minute one? Den of Tools' eight minute one? Byte of Geek's nine minute one? Something else?

At the very least, since you've got a video in mind, link to it, but text remains a way better medium for this sort of thing.

First one, Paul Moore.

Don’t get me wrong, I know your youtube probably looks different to mine as we probably have differing interests. But I didn’t know Youtube search results varied from person to person - this is news to me.

Results vary from person to person and probably depend on locale and language.

Even if they didn't saying "it's the top result for ____" STILL isn't helpful. Loads of people make videos designed to rank high for "in" topics. So if it's the top result today it's probably outranked tomorrow by a larger channel.

This has been happening fairly actively since at least 2020, its not just youtube, search results have many of the same issues, and its not a single device, its by person(profile).

They've linked many of your devices together so you will see the same consistent videos/results unless you compare with other people, at places that are not your home location.

> And it’s even possible to view the camera streams using VLC.

That sounds like RTSP to me, which makes the rest questionable.

Anker’s EUFY product, which markets itself as a home security service not requiring cloud connectivity, uploads facial recognition and other data to their cloud

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/eufys-no-clouds-came...

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/29/eufy-camera-cloud-uploa...

Mind explaining the “Eufy leaks” issue?

Ummm I’m pretty sure it’s related to the fact you can access unencrypted video streams from cameras that supposedly only have local recording. Or are you just trying to distract from that?

Do you mean accessing anyone's camera remotely? Or are those recording on the same CDN, with expiring links?

The excusing of Eufy's behavior is incredible... if you have to push something to the cloud, why not encrypt it instead of promising to encrypt "later". Since the device promises local capabilities it would be easy to setup an encryption key on it/on the phone and transfer it to the device over local wifi...

With the new information we've been getting it definitely seems as though Eufy is in the wrong, especially given that URLs can be brute-forced.

Thanks for the information