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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3326 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 26, 2023

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Has anyone noticed that Amazon's "top review" feature doesn't usually work anymore? Years back, whenever you sort reviews by top reviews, the ones listed first always have the most "helpful votes." Now, most products do not. For example, see this iPad:

https://www.amazon.com/2021-Apple-10-2-inch-Wi-Fi-256GB/dp/B09G91TLNJ/

Notice how for a product with 40k ratings, the "top reviews" listed have "8 people found this helpful", "8...", "21...", "5..." etc. Historically, for such a popular product, the top reviews would have thousands of helpful votes, and certainly hundreds at a very minimum, and they would also be sorted in descending order instead of at random.

The same is true for all kinds of products, even those with tens if not hundreds of thousands of ratings, like airpods, airtags, etc.

What gives? I've noticed this being a frustrating problem for years by now. Surely Amazon is not stupid enough to not notice that its "top reviews" feature doesn't work. Is this a deliberate business decision to obfuscate reviews other shoppers have found helpful? Charitably, perhaps Amazon found such weighting incentivized chicanery with review manipulation, and so a new random ranking "fixes" the problem?

Strangely, when I tried to google this problem to see if any articles or blogs (or reddit threads) have complained about it, I couldn't find anything. Either no one actually cares about this feature being broken/gone, or my Googling was bad, or Google was bad. Why does tech no longer work anymore?!

Google is better at searching Amazon than Amazon though, if you are looking for something in particular rather than whoever is best at convincing Amazon's algorithm to favour their dropshipped crap. I'm pretty sure Amazon does this on purpose, so as with many things -- it's working for somebody, just not for you.

Who is it working for though? I actively avoid searching for products on Amazon nowadays. It is awful compared to other internet marketplaces or retailers. But then Amazon entered my market only a couple years ago and there were already established players by then. Did they simply become a powerful monopoly in some areas and are just exploiting this?

I think it's "Amazon Marketplace sellers" at this point mainly -- although Amazon search was horrible even when most things came directly from Amazon, so I think there's some less scrutable goals at work in terms of showing you things that Amazon wants you to buy, as distinct from things that you would like to buy.

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