When subscription revenue fails to provide a good roi, this is the inevitable fate for most llm’s. They’ll pretend to help you find what “you would have chosen,” but your shopping activities will be treated as a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder.
I think the ability to search and filter will start to be restricted as well. At this juncture people are still under the illusion AI will be an annoying bolt-on to their experience; it won’t be. The “dead internet” will not just be searches that don’t show what is truly available on google; websites themselves, rather than offering robust tools to find and understand and review products will begin to force you to use their AI funnel, which as you said will just be a paid delivery funnel for 1 final product. Many won’t notice the change, but there will come a day.
To your point, a number of large companies have scrubbed any direct support contact info from their pages and force you to go through their chatbots to attempt to get connected to someone who can actually do something. The destruction of traditional communications to force people through customer disservice machines is already happening.
So 100% “Amazon Basics”?
I dumped amazon at the first of the year. I’ve save so much money not buying cheap plastic crap!
Do people really get tempted by online convenience to over consume? I think of online shopping as saving me a trip driving to one or more stores, and don’t believe I buy significantly more than I would have otherwise
Since pandemic where I really started relying on online orders, I almost never goto physical stores except the grocery. Saves a lot of driving time, saves a lot of my time
Also saves loads of CO2. Got beat up on here for saying buying on Amazon is more climate friendly than going to the store. But it’s rather obvious, isn’t it?
If 100 people in my hood need a thing from Walmart, that’s 100 cars and trucks making a 22-mile round trip. The same Amazon truck can serve those same 100 people on one trip. Same difference in using a bus vs. a car.
Say what you will about Amazon, but their efficiency is beyond question.
Remember the giant failure of those Amazon buttons? You’d like put it on your fridge or something and when you pushed it it would instantly place an order for a specific item? Yeah, people don’t want shit spending their money without being consulted…
Those Amazon Dash buttons were high-key a great deal, because you could easily hack them to be a generic customizable IoT/home network button, and Amazon was practically giving them out for free.
How I Hacked Amazon’s $5 WiFi Button to track Baby Data - https://edwardbenson.com/2015/08/how-i-hacked-amazons-dash-button-to-track-baby-data
Neat! They’re on eBay for between $1-$2 plus modest shipping. I’d try a 10-pack if I had a use case or three.
Well, Amazon was probably not excited for people to do that 😅
Probably just mad they didn’t think of that first.
Their search engine is to stupid to find what I am searching for when I enter a precise article number. I don’t think an A “I” will be any better.
I’m not buying much from Amazon, but when I do, I do it on desktop from two separate browsers. One where I am not logged in and cookies get deleted after each session, to browse, find what I want and get the link, stripped down to the basics. (That’s also where affiliate codes go to die on my machine.) If/when I actually decide to buy, I use the other browser where I am logged in but almost all scripting is disabled. To make the purchase I copy in the stripped url. If it’s more than one thing I use Notepad to store the urls in between.
It got a little harder when Amazon moved most reviews behind the sign in, but not impossible, and all this only takes an extra minute or two on desktop. Thus Amazon has no idea why I buy what I buy, only what I have actually bought. This way if I just look at something out of curiosity I don’t have to see it again in recommendations for the rest of my life, or ever, and they can’t fuck around with prices on items in Save for Later just because they know I want to buy it. It also makes spotting price variations between what they’re offering registered users and what they’re offering everyone else immediately obvious.
This habit started accidentally a few years back but once I saw it really cut back on all that Amazon fuckery I never went back to shopping logged in. I haven’t seen the AI tool yet, but I imagine I can probably remove it from my sight with either NoScript or uBlock Origin if I do.
You’re still buying the product under your account though… I’m struggling to understand the point of doing all of this
If I understand this might be to limit being influenced into buying something by the algorithm?
It’s that, and thank you for adding that clarification, but it’s also about breaking affiliate links unless I specifically want to use one, and about breaking linked tracking: big data titans like Amazon are all selling our data to each other. If Amazon has no idea why I bought something, that’s one less piece of my data they can sell off, one less piece of data that can be used to infer my political leanings or my health situation to better manipulate me, etc. Though to be clear, I’m pretty sure the Karl Marx and Che Guevara t-shirts and Preparation H I bought for jury duty took care of much of the latter.
The rest I already stated:
This way if I just look at something out of curiosity I don’t have to see it again in recommendations for the rest of my life, or ever, and they can’t fuck around with prices on items in Save for Later just because they know I want to buy it. It also makes spotting price variations between what they’re offering registered users and what they’re offering everyone else immediately obvious.
Everyday, I want to buy from them less.
and conversely, everyday they make themselves more ubiquitous
