About Amazon's decline in recent months: I have an Amazon account I use ONLY for buying ebooks. Nothing else, ever, going back over a decade.
My recommendations page in that account now contains no ebooks, only products from categories I never purchase, like lawnmowers (I don't have a garden) and dresses (I'm a boring cis male).
I can't actually find any new ebooks I want to read via Amazon recommendations any more. And this seems to be an outcome of deliberate changes? Why would they DO that?
@cstross A few years ago I was briefly in contact with Amazon. My client at the time was trying to get them to commission a "gamified" training app. We talked to one of their European execs, who immediately cancelled the thing as soon as we mentioned books. Apparently they really disliked being thought of as a bookstore (we actually didn't do that; a book was just an obvious example for a feature we were discussing). "We don't sell just books, duh, get lost" is what they told us, basically.
@cstross since I got interested in decentralized systems and privacy preserving content browsing I've always felt that recommendation engines - including ads if that is necessary to fund content access directly or indirectly - should also be decentralized and definitely not tied to content publishers.
Of course no content publisher is going to like that, they prefer closed systems with lock in, and pushing you the content they want to sell.
@cstross Yeah, the suggestions are crap. I have bought a number of items over the years and the first suggestions are always the exact same item that I already bought, as if I want to buy the same book twice. And then it quickly goes random. I think it’s probably harvesting your web searches because I’ve noticed that looking up a sports score immediately causes jerseys for both teams to pop up.
@cstross
Around 1/3 of ebooks when I'm searching general categories in a browser are Sponsored, sometimes not relevant to the category, and often repeated as I page through. Also nothing to do with any search or purchase. They're either low effort 'personal development'/woo, soft porn/romance or, even stranger, engineering standards at a price that only someone needing and searching for a specific title would actually want.
@cstross Dumped them altogether about a year ago. Any company that pushes their staff to the point of inadequate toilet breaks deserves to be abandoned by as many people as possible.
@cstross Everyone was all about recommendations back in the teens. Remember when Netflix had those contests trying to improve recommendations? Now everyone just recommends the same old "trending" crap and things they want to monetize.
I've been very frustrated about books in particular. It used to be whenever I needed something to read I could easily find someplace to get 5-10 good recommendations. No longer.
@cstross I realized a decade or so ago that I was using Amazon’s nice recommendations system to find new books and music, and then buying them elsewhere because their discounts on those items were very low. Not long after, their rec system went to shit.
So I suspect one factor is that they noticed people doing this and have been trying to thread the needle to only provide recommendations to their high-profit or high-kickback items, which people are less likely to buy elsewhere.
Most of what I buy from Amazon now are household items which are difficult to easily get elsewhere. But I’ve been trying harder to cast a wider net.
@cstross interesting. I have heard a few people talking about this so I just checked my Amazon page.
It's all stuff I have bought, related items, and as far as books, there's a list of books that are interesting to me about art, AI. politics, and math.
The only weird thing is audio books which I never buy.
@cstross
The best explanation I can think of is Cory Doctorow's "enshittification."
I've gotten many more useful book recommendations from Mastodon, the Tor newsletter, and the Raven Bookstore than from Amazon. Oh, and literally surfing the library shelves looking for new author names. Terribly old school, that last one, but effective.
@cstross
They don't care about selling you e-books because they know from your history that you will seek out and buy e-books. They are casting around trying to find some other category that will attract your eye and broaden the range of things they can sell you.
I loathe recommendations. I purposely mess with their algorithm because I don’t want them monitoring my purchases. Every thing I buy I set to not use for recommendation and I turn off the browsing history tracker. It doesn’t stop recommended but it makes them useless. I keep a wish list at bookshop.org. If I want the ebook, I just type in the title directly to purchase it on kindle. Don’t feed the AI machine.
@Penguinflight Bezos stepped down as CEO a year ago, which is about when the rot accelerated out of control. (I think he took his eye off the ball a few years before that—he has side-hustles like his own space program to fidget with—but the decline before he stepped back was much slower.)
@cstross That's a bit evasive, or at least missing the point. I'm surprised at you Charlie, I'm genuinely surprised you have ANYTHING to do with them. #Amazon is a monster on SO many levels, but particularly workers' rights. And #Bezos still OWNS it; it doesn't matter which gangster he has running it for him.
@cstross it's because making money is not enough, you need to make MORE money, and according to the algorithm that means lawnmowers. It doesn't matter if you want a lawnmower, as long as someone wants a lawnmower then the algorithm succeeded. And because lawnmowers are more expensive than ebooks the algorithm needs to be right about that a lower percentage of the time.
@cstross our washing machine door handle broke yesterday. Our choices were to buy a spare part via Amazon, or fix it ourselves.
Superglue, a couple of screws and a drill did the trick. We did not use Amazon, and we got plenty of adulting points from fixing it. Very satisfying! 😁
@cstross I use Amazon for household goods, like cleaning products and hygiene products, and if I need some niche product that isn’t on the shelves around here. But then I realized a lot of those products are a lot cheaper at places like Temu, you just have to wait longer.
So, yeah, when I needed a pendant urn I didn’t pay $20 for the one on Amazon when I could get it for $3 somewhere else. It’s the same exact item & it’s not anything I need overnight.
They actually suck for finding other merchandise as well. Their search function brings up everything but what you specifically asked for. Even using the product filters they provide, they then ignore them.
@cstross they did the same to Comixology, rolled it into their main Kindle store, and now it's impossible to find anything. Result, haven’t bought anything in months.
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