For those who don't watch the video: This is about his affiliate account.
It is surprising, that there is so little competition for affiliates these days. Amazon seems to be almost the only game in town.
Sure, there are thousands of other affiliate programs. But they pay surprisingly little. Often affiliates earn only like $0.05 per click (on average). While the same company pays $1 per click on other channels like Google Ads.
I am not sure why, but I suspect that it is because companies are so afraid of getting scammed. They trust Google, but not individuals.
They pay $1 per click on Google Ads, need 20 clicks to acquire a new customer and are happy with a $20 price per customer because they know the lifetime value of a customer is higher.
But to affiliates, they pay 5% of the customers $20 order, so $1. Divided by 20 clicks, that is $0.05 per click.
So the affiliate channel is underpaid by a factor of 20.
Why is no company tackling this inefficiency in the market?
They're not "afraid" of getting scammed. They get scammed often.
Affiliate marketers often use shady techniques to get the click. It's a tale as old as time.
Wasn't there some browser extension years ago that was inserting it's Amazon affiliate link into webpages?[1]
A large amount of the spam we receive in our email is ulimately just some affiliate trying to earn a commission. Affiliates don't have ethical rules they need to follow.
It's very, very hard to find the "old days" true affiliate that drives any significant traffic. It's way more profitable for affiliate marketers to force users to open a new browser window which drops a cookie without the user having any true intention to buy, with the aim to scoop up the commission any future purchases.
I mean if you can trick a million people into clicking a link, you can make money as an affiliate. Or you used to be able to do that.
> It's very, very hard to find the "old days" true affiliate that drives any significant traffic.
The shame here is that Louis Rossmann is that type of "old school" affiliate. I buy equipment because he talks about it in detail. Otherwise I might just pick up whatever is at Microcenter, etc.
> How would a scammer bring in a steady stream of new customers?
Spam email campaigns. Or google ad campaigns. Twitter bot spam.
There’s lots of ways to get people to click on Amazon links and make money. Especially because I think Amazon gives you the 4% of anything they buy in the next 24 hours or some period. Since a large percent of humans have Amazon accounts and buy stuff pretty recently if you can just get your affiliate cookie on their browser, you could make quite a bit.
Why not show a box to users on the website saying, "It looks like you came from xyz, we'll pay them 4% of this sale. Is it wrong? Click here to report it."
Because that has a non-zero chance of customers exiting out of the sale. I’m guessing they measured the lost sales against fraudulent affiliates and chose fraud affiliates.
People are funny and the slightest distraction might skunk the sale. Not for most, but for a few percent.
I watched my grandmother purchase something online and it was revealing how much time it took and how much she struggled. Something that took 10 seconds for me took her 15 minutes. Amazon wants those sales too.
It would be better to pose the question after the sale is complete, imo. Ask the costumer which partner, from a list, contributed to get him/her to decide for the product.
Because affiliate marketing is cesspool of scammers doing scams at scale. I say this as someone who's measured marketing performance of these channels over the years.
I've been away from this area for a few years now...but I'd say "No, Google is not doing 20x better". However - Google is in a "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" position, and trusted far more than it deserves. And whether you're dealing with small business owners, or C-suites full of suits - there are a whole lot of "we gotta do X!" (even if the ROI looks for-sure negative) human emotions around Marketing. And when you're emotional, and feel that you gotta do something...then "buy IBM" usually feels like the least-bad option.
Google itself isn't scamming the advertisers (much) - and individual scammers have no real way to use Google to make money for themselves.
Whereas anyone who signs up for an affiliate account can scam Amazon pretty easily, even just by routing all purchases they'd normally make through it for a discount.
Which is why I'm a bit annoyed they got rid of Amazon Smile, as it was a pretty decent way to "scam" Amazon with them fully knowing - you'd route through Smile and your charity would get the affiliate percentage.
Display marketing. The advertiser chooses which content gets their ads, and how much of a premium that content demands.
This has the side effect of allowing reputable / high quality sites to charge more per impression, and is also privacy preserving (since it does not require user profiling).
Individually negotiated deals. If marketers can negotiate deals for individual youtube videos, they can certainly negotiate deals for individual affiliate websites.
If I were to summarize this video to those who didn't watch it, it definitely wouldn't be "this is about his affiliate account." Reading further, one would get the impression that this video is about affiliate scams, driving people further and further away from the actual topic of the video.
That's not the main topic of the video at all. Rossmann stresses that he isn't reliant on the affiliate program, and doesn't care that it got terminated. What he does care, is the stated reason for the termination.
What happened is pretty clear. Rossmann made a video critical of Amazon after they randomly terminated a person's account, made unfounded accusations in a phone call, only to silently reinstate the account weeks after without so much as an apology. Days after the video goes viral, Amazon terminates his affiliate account that he used in his YouTube videos.
Amazon, without evidence, states that the reason for terminating the affiliate account is because Rossmann scammed Amazaon by encouraging his friends and family to buy things through his affiliate links. But it's obvious Amazon is doing this in retaliation and the reason is made up to discredit him.
The 20 clicks it takes for an affiliate is out of the control of the advertiser, and is determined by the publisher and the source of traffic and the intent level of the traffic they are driving.
Google, through their predictive models more or less is promising a certain CPA whereas a publisher may not have such guarantees. So obviously publishers need to be paid on performance instead. Affiliate advertisers still have to compete since publishers have a choice of who to actually publish.
I don't think that the 20 times lower PPC on affiliate links vs Google Ads is due to market forces.
From the numbers I see, Google Ads are paid roughly "correctly". The ad spent per new customer is somewhere around the lifetime value of the customer. At least in competitive verticals.
But for affiliate links, it is about 20 times lower.
Your argument that market forces should drive the affiliate market towards the same equilibrium is exactly my question. Why doesn't it do that? Visit some random website about some random product. You don't see a variety of affiliate advertisers. You almost always only see Amazon. The cases where there are more than just Amazon links, it is often just to justify the site as a "price comparison" site. But reality is that even on those sites, the vast majority of revenue comes from Amazon.
LTV is usually calculated as the margin on the future orders of the customer.
A customer has many other benefits. Just a few examples: They tell other potential customers about your product. More customers means better and faster a/b tests. More customers means higher stock price of your company.
I don't know about the international market but at least in my country, all companies abandoned PPC around 15 years ago. One reason was that you could pay Google AdSense $0.01 per click while being paid $0.1 per click yourself. It was a money printing machine while the company got worthless traffic that wouldn't generate any sales.
Think OP may be talking about arbitrage and making a "made for adsense" site. Attract clicks via cheap ads, get ads with a higher CPC for a more generic term. Just presuming.
To use Amazon's terminology here, it really feels like they're becoming a Day Two company. It took decades to cultivate the perception that Amazon cares about customers more than any other company. It takes so much less to destroy that image.
Google has already started paying the price for their customer-hostile behavior. It's a meme at this point how unreliable Google is for anything. Amazon and AWS have consistently been touted as the opposite. Contrast Google IoT Core with SimpleDB. The Googlification of Amazon will be to its detriment.
It was Day Two at Amazon by the time Jassy took over, roughly the same time they began paying lip service to being the "most customer centric" company on their "leadership principles" rather than actually just doing it. It became more and more apparent every month and precipitated my exit.
Nothing shows this like the switch from showing recommended books/products to showing ads.
Ads generate more revenue today, but I can't find good books to buy an Amazon, so I go elsewhere.
It's clear which is better for the customer (and for Amazon long term), but they can't give up on the revenue stream, even if it will eventually kill them (since it drives their customers to other platforms, and provides a place for competitors to grow).
Our personal Amazon account was closed, per their claim, because we used our prime account for business purposes or something like that. We often bought gifts and shipped it directly to our friends. We also did it for our friends from Belarus, sending gifts to their friends in the USA. I bet it triggered some kind of anti-dropship rule.
I am very particular at trying to not tie myself into their ecosystem, but we had two kids fire tablets with some purchased games that we lost access to as well.
After a month or so of back and forth eventually they enabled ability to log in to access digital purchases only. But it was my impression they do not have an easy way to separate different branches of their offerings, and often it is all our nothing, since even after partial account reactivation, many parts of the Amazon website are broken.
In the end, I created new account, and since I was attending University of People at that time, I got student's discount for all their services in the new account, which is enough for me to counter the hasle I had to endure while trying to get kids tablets work again :)
Funny, we have ordered some stuff from Amazon and had it arrive from Sam's Club. I guess they don't have as strict of rules around drop shipping. I've also sent Costco mugs all over the country to backers of my Kickstarter, with no trouble!
So Amazon wrongly accuses some random dude of racism after he says "Excuse me how can i help you" from their robotic doorbell, then bricks all of his amazon smarthome products remotely, then bans this man from their associates program for even making a video about it on youtube after 10 years.
Are we living inside of the movie demolition man now?
I absolutely hate large corporations. Racism off course is never ok, but the megacorp should never even be able to brick someones bought products in the first place, or surveil them for that sake.
We need some new heavy laws to whip these corporate psychos into place before we end up mirroring the chinese point system.
I think racism is bad, but I don’t think that racists should have their devices bricked.
Should cameras brick themselves if they film a crime? I think it’s a bad situation where consumer devices are making ethical, moral, or legal decisions.
Especially by some kafkaesque corporate no due process system of adjudication where a single accusation with no evidence results in permanent action. And I suspect there’s some stupid KPI about how many racists banned that encourages more dumb actions rather than careful determinations.
The Chinese point system is exactly what this reminds me of. It is ironic that unrestrained capitalism actually ends in a variant of communism where it are the corporations, rather than the party, that rule society.
There’s nothing ironic about it, much of cyberpunk is an exploration of the totalitarian nature of hypercorporatism.
It’s also not a variant of communism: first, in the Marxist-Leninist interpretation the purpose of the single party is expression of and progress towards the dictature of the proletariat, the single-party state is not communist (they claim socialism instead) and the ultimate goal is self-abolition (turns out all other issues aside it’s difficult to make such a system abolish itself).
Second, Libertarian Marxist as well as Trotskyists oppose the use of a transitional one-party state and “democratic centralism”.
> The Chinese point system is exactly what this reminds me of. It is ironic that unrestrained capitalism actually ends in a variant of communism where it are the corporations, rather than the party, that rule society.
That's not what happened in China.
The revolution in China was a _Communist_ one. Maoism is "Communism with Chinese characteristics". That's when 10s of millions of Chinese men, women and children were murdered to further the Communist utopia.
After Mao's death, Deng instituted many reforms and it would be arguable that it was no longer Communist -- but it would be rubbish to call it Capitalism. The government runs _everything_. Where they don't own corporations outright, they install party members to oversee them or own them "individually".
Look at what happened to Jack Ma to see exactly how NOT capitalist the country is.
There is no unrestrained capitalism.
This is the doing of the managerial class, and they managed to get so much power because of central banks. Especially after 2008 the major central banks have bought assets on the stock market and financed all kinds of projects without a second thought.
They print money and make companies like amazon huge.
This is 100% government 's doing. Total fake economy.
In a free market there is no limited liability, but even if there was companies are subject to profit and loss. The profit and loss mechanism has bren destroyed by goverment, companies now operate based on incentives derived from what's fashionable among the managerial class, not what serves customers and make money.
Also I would not exclude that these companies can be put in their place by using already existing laws. No need for new laws, it's a matter of political will.
>There is no unrestrained capitalism. This is the doing of the managerial class
Who precisely do you think has 90% of the power in 90% of businesses? And before you say 'the shareholders, duh', the venn diagram of the PMC and shareholders of these massive corporations is a circle. The ruling class is the PMC. They run the corporations. How could it be any other way?
The managers have power. They are helped by corporation status (a State creation) and by the fact that when they screw up the central banks print some money and write them a check (of course some schemes are used to hide this process a little bit).
This last bit is the most important. Even if you don't want to blame the managers, profit and loss mechanism is gone, so we are not under capitalism but in a command economy
> It is ironic that unrestrained capitalism actually ends in a variant of communism where it are the corporations, rather than the party, that rule society
Communism is when all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.
So pure communism precludes corporations that are owned by private individuals.
They meant actually-existing communism, not communism-in-theory. (Not that I favor one definition or another, but different people use words in different ways.)
Yes. Adam Smith himself stated that capitalism requires sufficient regulation in order to even be able to persist, as insufficiently regulated capitalism will inevitably devolve into monopoly.
That sounds like satire, but many of the under-30 crowd might support it:
¨However, Americans under the age of 30 stand out when it comes to 1984‐ style in‐ home government surveillance cameras. 3 in 10 (29 percent) Americans under 30 favor “the government installing surveillance cameras in every household” in order to “reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity.” Support declines with age, dropping to 20 percent among 30–44 year olds and dropping considerably to 6 percent among those over the age of 45.¨
As someone else put it, the younger folks live so much of their lives online where they can contact a corporate nanny to remove speech they dislike and ban users, it makes sense they'd carry those ideas into meatspace and want the same done.
For blacks (of all ages) it's even higher: 33%. For whites it's 9%. So the difference is presumably the greatest between young blacks and old whites, though these numbers aren't given.
Of course, it's not cool that Amazon can terminate anyone's account as they please. But I suppose it's their right.
The real problem is Amazon having monopoly. If there were some true competition, I couldn't care less about Amazon closing my account as I could go to a competitor.
My impression from the video is that Rossman is actually completely fine with Amazon cancelling his account—he just doesn't like the (in his view disingenuous) email they sent him claiming to to have cancelled it because of TOS violations, rather than saying that they've cancelled because they don't like his video about them.
I don't know if Amazon should have the right to terminate anyone's account to be honest. I feel like people are afraid to regulate anything these days but I mean some people's entire lives are dependent on these corporate accounts. You can't just have me build up a livelihood on Amazon or have my whole house running on Amazon smart products and then just terminate the account.
If there was more competition or these things were based on open standards you could easily switch over I might be more inclined to agree, but I think right now these companies have way way too much power.
The threat of a company deleting an account for many people would be detrimental to their lives. We are way way too dependent on corporations and in kind of tired of people being scared to regulate.
If Amazon and Google and other Big Companies were prevented from deleting accounts, what else would happen? How would the Big Companies game the system? Would that harm smaller companies (as regulation usually does)? Would we even see the benefits that were promised?
Regulation often makes things worse, so we can't just look at the potential benefits without considering the potential (and likely) negative consequences.
That doesn't mean folks are scared of regulation. It means they're _smart_ about it.
I used to agree with you but it's getting out of hand these companies have more control than most states and governments over our communication, privacy, money, and general lives but we don't get to vote in who is running them. I'd rather start shooting and ask questions later before we get consumed by these behemoths. We need another Teddy Roosevelt and another antitrust sweep up in my opinion.
This only works if there is _zero_ vendor lock in.
If you're dependent on Amazon for e.g. your e-reader files, AWS account, or even your wishlist and taking your data elsewhere is a pain, then your argument doesn't hold.
>Dear Louis Rossmann,
our affiliate program is designed to direct positive attention to Amazon. The way you have represented the company in your opinions in how we do business are antithetical to the way we believe we represent ourselves in the world. As a result of this disagreement we will no longer have you as our affiliate.
Signed Amazon.
Well, it took some underpaid service worker (doing this repetitive work probably 1000x/day) just 1 sec to click a button to choose from a bunch of generic texts reviewed by a legal team to cancel your affiliate relationship with them and you even "got" it. Very effective. Win/Win.
Maybe in the future Amazon will refine this with their own customized LLMs: legally watertight, some "honesty" fine-tuning and who knows from time to time sprinkled with some limericks just for the creepy giggles ...
And owning to the previous experience with Amazon the way more important point: >Don't try to compete with Amazon [...] they will literally destroy you.
The corollary to that: if you decide to do even some penny business with them, you are wholly at their whim.
The machine at work seems to be very trigger happy atm.
To be fair: I don't know enough about the case to judge but it plays well into OP's cards that Amazon closes his long-standing affiliate account because he allegedly had used relatives and friends to squeeze more money.
The anger in these videos is palpable. He’s doing us a great service by championing right to repair and consumer tech rights. But he needs a three-week holiday to Thailand before he snaps
Whenever something like this happens it's worth looking at the entire scope, this is not as simple as Amazon banning the guy. You need to look at the steps that took place, someone had to actually make the call and have him banned. There was probably an email chain and this was the decision that they arrived to. Linking shitty things that happen to a person rather than some abstract corp gives the right perspective. Evil.
That the decision was made without proof is the best, not the worst part of the whole affair.
If there was one iota of proof, half the people on the internet would be arguing how it's Amazon's right and duty to brick people's homes if they say the bad word.
None of them realizing that once such precedent is established, the Amazon corporation will be using and abusing it to it's own advantage.
Such non-immediate concerns are beyond half the people in the internet, who lack the ability to project the future more a year ahead.
No. Even if you work for a Fortune 500 company (which 80% of the workforce doesn't), your CEO likely isn't a billionaire unless they also founded the company. The vast majority of these companies aren't lead by the only 770 billionaires in the US. Even making 15 million a year (typical Fortune 500 CEO total compensation), it would take a long time to hit a billion.
It still not even close to the majority of Americans no matter your definition. The vast majority of the stock market isn't held by billionaires either. The total net worth of all US billionaires is ~5 trillion and the stock market is worth ~40 trillion.
You COULD say that, if you define "working for" in a particular way.
But if define it that way, then "working for" becomes a phrase that has no real use. "X is working for Y" just means "Y has a lot of influence in the world" and says nothing about the relationship between X and Y. So I don't recommend using that definition.
I was assuming the commenter was referring to how billionaires basically control everything through influence, government and regulatory capture, etc. So we're basically their little pawns and compute resources.
And that's why I don't leave reviews on Amazon, or pretty much any site these days. I have purchased (okay, indefinitely rented) too much media on Amazon, eBooks, videos, etc., and I don't want to lose them because of a non-five-star review.
I stopped with reviews a long time ago, but not for fear of cancellation, but rather - they seem to have a habit of removing honest reviews, and it just wasn't worth the time to leave them just to have them removed.
"racist trees", "racist doorbell", "racist photos"... my god, when will all this nonsense stop? When will the mass media stop feeding people with that crap? As a lesson, every single news company that writes about racism more than twice a year must be canceled from all the platforms out there. This shit is out of control and has damaged many people's brains. Or is that coming from politicians who love the "Divide & Conquer" principle?
> When will the mass media stop feeding people with that crap?
They won't, and that's why I think we, as a society, need to move past journalism.
That sounds like sarcasm, but it isn't. And I know what you're thinking- "oh but a free press is one of the legs of the tripod of society!" Well it was, decades ago. Now it's literally all tabloids and propaganda. It's time let it go.
We have various tools that allow individuals to securely communicate with each other. Let people communicate the news, word-of-mouth. We don't need bloggers and corporations anymore to put a spin on the facts.
"Democracy dies in darkness" is a threat, not a plea. Do you listen to cancer when it admonishes you, "don't excise me, or you'll be sorry!"
By definition, the "free press" isn't limited to government credentialed organizations.
A free press is essential to a liberal society (real liberal, not leftist authoritarianism). Ben Franklin didn't publish for free, so we should recognize a free press includes for-profit press. And long before there were bloggers, there were pamphleteers. We need all of it.
A few years back I bought a new Motorolla phone(for the replaceable battery) from the official Motorolla US Amazon store. I received a broken device with the packaging seal broken and the antenna not working at all. It was clearly a previously returned device that I also sent back.
n=1 is a bad statistic to base decisions on. I've had a couple of duds from Amazon out of hundreds of things ordered. No problem returning broken things at all.
Seems like an excellent opportunity for another retailer to pen a partnership deal with him. "Amazon sucks that's why we have a deal with NewEgg where you can get 10% off using my link in the description."
I feel like this is becoming more and more common with not only Amazon, but other big companies like anything rideshare (Lyft & Uber), food/shopping delivery, and others. Whenever you try to bring up a problem that might cause bad publicity, they "proactively" start deactivating accounts.
Another reason we need a better alternative to AWS: they will go as far as to shutdown your AWS infrastructure if you are somehow labeled as a racist or a racist sympathizer by their system.
There's so much support for Louis out there for being right about a bunch of things. And it is true that he is right about a whole bunch of things.
That said, I can't stand his shtick anymore. Louis getting wronged by corporations is content fuel.
It's also high blood pressure content. It makes you mad at stuff. I've got enough of that in my life, I don't know about you.
(Another example: Not Just Bikes can be like this as well, despite me agreeing with the dude. The tone and script of the videos makes the problem of car dependency, which, again, is a legitimate problem, seem more devastating than it really is)
The YouTuber had his Amazon affiliate account canceled after 7 years
without warning or evidence of wrongdoing. The reason given was that
purchases made through his links were for personal use or made by
friends and family, which he denies. He finds the timing suspicious as
it came a week after he made a video criticizing Amazon for canceling a
customer's account for a racist doorbell claim. He argues that the small
amount of revenue from his affiliate links is inconsequential to him.
He believes Amazon is becoming less accountable as it grows in power and
treats customers worse. While not excusing Amazon's actions, he
questions whether enough vetting was done before canceling his account.
The snap decision shows how trigger happy Amazon is to remove people's
accounts.
> He believes Amazon is becoming less accountable as it grows in power and treats customers worse.
He's right. I have recent first-hand experience of them deleting reviews of counterfeit products. The emails say:
"We investigated your concerns about product authenticity, and the information we have indicates that the product you received was authentic."
I've tried posting a review a further 4 times, each time only mentioning the quality issues and nothing about product authenticity. Every time, it's deleted within 24 hours, and I get the same email.
Amazon CS said: "As I further checked it here on my end, actually to tell you honestly, our partner seller is the one who manipulates the reviews on their product."
Who is the "partner seller" in this case? Amazon.com Services LLC.
Yep. I got a counterfeit product, reviewed it with photos showing it alongside the authentic version and the very obvious differences (like lack of branding). Rejected as "the information we have indicates that the product you received was authentic." This along with receiving so many low quality products that have glowing 4-5 star reviews has destroyed a lot of my trust in Amazon. I now order direct from manufacturers when possible and am deliberate about the items I trust to order from Amazon.
Someone who works in the supply chain made a revealing comment on Reddit that has tainted my trust in Amazon.
When you go to a listing (SKU) on Amazon, it shows you a bunch of "sellers" with various prices. These sellers usually fulfill with Amazon (hence, Prime shipping). Each seller sends its merchandise to Amazon's warehouse for fulfillment (shipping to you). Amazon commingles the inventory; all of that SKU goes into one bin, no matter who provided it.
Suppose the sellers are Creator, Honest Retailer #1, Honest Retailer #2, and Sketchy Knockoff. You care about quality, so you pay extra to order from one of the three trustworthy sellers. You still have a 1/4 chance of getting one of the Sketchy Knockoff's counterfeits, because they're all picked from the same bucket.
This also explains why you might see a review stating that someone received a counterfeit, even though they ordered from the creator.
This is going to be a huge problem in the medical/health vertical. It's one thing to get a BommyTahama pair of sunglasses, it's quite another to get counterfeit supplements that could cause injury.
Well, I wasn't going to say so here, but I will because it's important context and might lead Google searchers to this thread: the product I was talking about is Preparation H, a medicated wipe made by GSK Consumer Healthcare for people with hemorrhoids.
(Yes, I have filed detailed reports with the FDA and FTC)
I've got counterfeit electrical goods on Amazon (solid state relay that was rated at something like 40A, but on opening it up after realizing it was counterfeit, found the electronics were only rated to something like 10A).
I complained in a review, that review never got published, despite the only SKU having only one seller - the purveyor of the counterfeit items. I did notice they blurred the logo of the real brand in some pictures later, though.
This already IS a huge problem in the medical/health vertical. You should NEVER order supplements, makeup, or medicines/chemicals from Amazon for this reason.
I think there have been a few different noteworthy events where issues have popped up. I'll link to a couple of articles I've found on the topics.
The US government has long had zero interest in verifying supplements (and vitamins) are what they claim they are. The best you can do is look for a USP logo.
It’s a disturbing trend on any site we rely on or use for services. There is no recourse, once a decision has been made. Last week, I was banned from Facebook Marketplace because… I don’t actually know.
I’m cleaning out an old shed and want to sell a bunch of stuff. So, I logged into Facebook for the first time in 2 years, posted a Shop Vac for sale for $50 USD, and an hour later was locked out of Marketplace.
There is an option to “request a review”, which I did. An automated reply a few days later said they would not restore my account at this time. And that’s it.
Well a lot of times, they do, but it's often insufficient or falsely veiled in corporate speak that doesn't represent the situation, and indicates a misunderstanding or outright bias against the account holder.
I'd like to see regulation around warnings issues before bans, so that account holders may respond and change behavior or clarify the situation with support teams in good faith before the megacorp takes a harsh sweeping action.
Folks violate TOS all the time. Sometimes, users have to do it just to use the service. An explanation in these cases is essentially worthless.
You think Amazon is going to let government pass a law that hurts them? Half the time, it's big businesses _writing_ the laws. And when it's not, the big businesses can afford to break the law (i.e. pay lawyers to hold off for a cost-effective settlement) while small businesses get f-d.
Stop buying products and services that can be deactivated at a whim -- or do, if you think it's cost-effective. But government will not save you.
I have a 15 year Prime account. I purchased fake Colgate toothpaste on Amazon and left a review to alert others. Amazon then deleted all reviews I’ve ever left and permanently banned me from leaving any new ones. I appealed twice with no reply. Buyer beware.
My mom had been throwing out dozens of electronic candles because "they would break after only a few hours use" (normally they last weeks).
Turns out what was actually happening was the energizer batteries she was getting from amazon were counterfeits. Of course amazon takes no responsibility...
Lately I've been feeling lucky if I so much as obtain a new/functioning product when I resort to buying anything on Amazon, such as the protein powder I attempted to buy from (apparently) the only place online that would ship to my location. I mean, typically you don't really want "used" protein powder anyway, but when it shows up on your doorstep "new" with the bag partly open and powder exploded all over the box plus some hastily applied Amazon-branded tape somewhat covering the hole in the bag, I'm left with an ominous feeling about the entire operation's quality control. The clerk who assisted with my return told me she's seen people send used sex toys back... Are they now up someone else's ass?? I can only imagine.
>if you had a site where 3rd parties uploaded copyright materials for download you would be held responsible
Only if you had knowledge of the infringing material, or if your site overtly encouraged its upload. Otherwise, as long as you comply with the DMCA you would be eligible for safe harbor. (I think.)
I think one of the biggest tragedies of the development of the web is that third-party comment systems/annotation never took off (e.g. https://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/Overview.html). I'd love to have Hacker News quality discussion as a side-panel to many articles/topics.
>The reason given was that purchases made through his links were for personal use or made by friends and family, which he denies
He has 1.8 million subscribers and talks about gear. There's no way his affiliate purchases were done by "friends and family" in any significant number above 0.1% to even matter.
Sure but the T&Cs are written such that even the .1% makes him subject to termination and that's kind of the point.
If you write the rules (or laws) such that everyone is breaking them but then chose when and how to enforce those laws you can selectively enforce them against specific people or specific kinds of people. You're terminating him for a totally legitimate not-at-all-dystopian reason when obviously the real motivation is something else entirely. You just weren't looking to see if anyone else committed the crime.
>If you write the rules (or laws) such that everyone is breaking them but then chose when and how to enforce those laws you can selectively enforce them against specific people or specific kinds of people.
This! I've been saying this for so long and I'm glad to see more people saying it.
I don't doubt Amazon did this for retaliatory reasons but the wording of the email he received is no doubt a result of the employee tasked with shutting down his account only having a handful of "reason templates" to choose from.
If an American company (sorry if being US-centric), check the manufacturer's website. For example, I needed a replacement lid for a KitchenAid food processor. On Amazon it was being sold for around $14-15. At KitchenAid it was $5 and free shipping. Amazon deleted my review for mentioning this.
For the USA I've found that Walmart, Target, Home Depot, and Best Buy together satisfy much of my "need that free shipping on cheaply made shit" desire.
You do still have to watch out for marketplace items on some of them. And if it really IS direct-from-China why not go to eBay or Alibaba?
Quite often when ordering cheap Chinese junk that I can wait a month for, I do use eBay and AliExpress. I'm generally pretty happy. I save quite a bit of money, and the experience is no worse than Amazon 99% of the time.
AliExpress does manage to have a search feature that is massively worse than Amazon's, if you can believe that possible.
I have more trust for eBay then Amazon at this point.
However, I think the last purchase I made through Amazon was super specific (particular model of washing machine agitator motor) and unlikely to be glump-binned. So perhaps that's the approach.
Sorry, they are pretty specific to Turkey so they probably won’t be much help to you. I use this price aggregator/comparor website called Akakce (tl. White coin) that links to tens of different independent/corporate ecommerce websites.
Isn't it just retaliation for sake of retaliation? The company won't be financially affected either way. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some fragile ego called this in.
Exactly, Louis Rossmann has gotten heavily into lobbying for right to repair recently, and this could tilt him towards other targets on that level as well.
For example, if companies want to have anything more than a simple (unmoderated) review system there might be certain safe harbours they lose.
Even if it was clearly against the law, the most they'd probably get is a letter in the mail from the government that says "Pretty please, with sugar on top, could you write us a letter telling us at least that you will try to break the law less?" The US treats lawbreaking megacorps with kid gloves.
He says in the video an approximate amount, I don't remember exactly the number, but he said that his energy bill is 4x the amount he gets from the affiliate program.
> All big tech companies have this "trigger happy" approach to closing down accounts.
After years, I made my first Instagram post last week. I got instantly banned (it was a picture of a new bag I bought). Apparently the way to get it back is to jump through some hoops and post a selfie with an OTP. I decided that’s a bit much work and I might as well let them delete my account that only follows a bunch of people I know without ever looking at their pictures.
If you attempt to use a credit card that you haven't used in years, the bank will similarly ask you to verify your identity. I don't think it's weird that unused valuable accounts need re-identification when you start to use them again.
I don't mind anti-spam measures in cases which are common spam techniques. Hijacking unused accounts is common enough to warrant an approach like this.
But instagram is not a bank. I understand not wanting yet another company to have my photo (which nowadays is pretty much knowing who you are) + phone number. Plus it shouldn't require personal identification to post a photo online, especially given how easy it has became to filter out illegal content automatically.
Posting to Instagram really isn't the same as posting a photo to the internet in general though. That for-profit business is running the software, hosting the servers, and writing their own terms of service, they can block what they want at that point.
The real fundamental change after the dot om bubble was that the open web effectively died and was replaced with a handful of walled gardens. If you have your own site and post pictures to it there are very few that can stop you, posting to Instagram and you're effectively politely requesting a company to take rights to your photo and host or online if they would be so kind.
Both sides are reasonable, a common form of spam uses hacked accounts that have grown organically, the normal way, and have then been abandoned. Because they have been used the normal way they are ranked higher than accounts created by bots. So it isn’t that strange that the account is flagged if it suddenly starts posting and the first post is some product.
It’s also reasonable not to want to provide Instagram not to have too much information because after all it is Meta, however it’s debatable whether sharing a photo with a photo sharing service is too much information.
> > I might as well let them delete my account that only follows a bunch of people I know without ever looking at their pictures.
> Both sides are reasonable, a common form of spam uses hacked accounts that have grown organically, the normal way, and have then been abandoned.
That does not seem to be the case here.
When it comes to money, sure, take caution. When it comes to a dozen-or-so followers+followees, abandoned a decade ago with hardly any posts... congratulations, your marketing efforts or network effects were successful and they're back. Now stop trying to steal their personal data under the guise of "security".
If you must, feel free to make a password recovery via their emergency mail or something, but don't try to steal personal data.
If you want to complain, complain about Meta abusing recovery mechanisms for spam.
The rest just doesn’t work; the accounts get hacked using the recovery mechanism because the email accounts get hacked or expire and they get used for spam.
Then please explain my wrongness levels. Apart from data grab, what is the issue? Could company be accountable if somebody logged in with correct username and password and posted legal pictures? Because if it doesn't matter if it's bank or not, my bank clearly states that it is not accountable in such scenario.
Wait so if you have a "backup" card in case of emergency, the chances are it'll fail anyway? I kinda hate this stuff where we have to guess at how some company's internal mystery processes work to actually use their service :-/
I have this problem all the time with the HSA card (or did until i changed providers)
I would rarely use it, but then I would try to pay for something with it and it would be declined, when I called they always said it was "suspended due to inactivity"
So Yogi Berra works in the security department, not letting you use your card because you never use your card. I love the self-reinforcing nature of it.
That's particularly egregious—what percentage of people with an HSA or similar is likely to be spending money from it more than once every few months??
Yes but it is not hard to get it back - you have to contact the bank
In emergency you need to contact your bank.
I have had my card declined several times
Once on travel to USA - I probably should have told them before - in this case I had to phone them an international call and it was immediately reinstated.
They also denied a payment when it was in a place accross the country from my normal use, which wa good as it was not me trying to use it.
Basically if your spending is abnormal - e.g. in a different place or for a large amount then you might have to confirm the payment. The benefit is the bank is able to stop more fraud.
> the bank will similarly ask you to verify your identity
I doubt that. The bank will either cancel my account long before that, or it will work.
> Hijacking unused accounts is common enough
Ah, yes, for all my 20 or 30 followers, can’t have them see a single image, and of course, the hijackers also hijack the computer those accounts are from, so the IP belongs to the same entity it always did.
Credit card companies run sophisticated anti-fraud operations in real time. Visa "analyzes more than 500 unique risk attributes" the moment you attempt to make a purchase with a card.
They make decisions in milliseconds on each purchase to determine whether it might be fraud. This includes looking at past purchase history to see if this transaction is unusual.[1]
This looks like you copy and pasted an ad from somewhere. Anyone who has used a credit card for a while knows their 'anti fraud' is not very sophisticated and anyone who has used a computer should know that whatever they do happens 'in milliseconds'.
I think the dormant accounts problem is legit though - I've lost count how many "dead" accounts I've seen on both my FB and IG feed, that have suddenly become hi-jacked, and start spamming stuff.
Yeah, but in that case it would not be a single picture. And apparently their detection system on the FB side is incapable of blocking new accounts that instantly start friending hundreds of completely unrelated people and posting porn, something that should be pretty easy to detect.
Several years ago I created an account there and it was banned before I even logged in. I appealed but never heard anything. I never figured out why was it was banned. I couldn’t find anything offensive in the name. At least, not in English (the only language I know).
Did you use any tags in your post? And which tags if you did? Keep in mind that other users can report. If your bag appears in my timeline by misusing a tag I'm subscribed to it's an insta-report because man you can't imagine how many spammers there are pushing dropshipped goods from China.
And even if no one reported you if you don't have 2fa etc I'd say it's reasonable for FB to assume your (IG) account was sold, hacked or swapped.
I see, if IG is linked to FB login then I guess that's bad and/or broken on their part. Because it implies you log in via FB login I suppose? (I don't connect my account)
"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can."
The Melian Dialogue. That, by the way, was democratic Athens laying down the law to the Melos islanders who wanted to be neutral in the Peloponnesian war.
The Athenians then proceeded to kill the adult males and sell the remaining population into slavery. The island was repeopled by Athens, and later produced the Venus of Milo.
I disagree. Law (not in a vacuum but as practiced) can distribute power and thus unseat the power of strength alone. In many places throughout history, a strong person could hit whomever they wanted excepting the rich and aristocratic. A man could in this way dominate his family and neighbors. The only recourse was honor killing and revenge.
Today, in many places, even minor assault will result in consequences. In this way, the law redistributes power from the physically strong to those who may be weak but who have legal standing.
Of course, in an absolute sense, everything redounds to power. All law is in the end, enforced at the point of a gun. But this is an observation with very little practical utility IMO. It's like the saying which people employ when things are not going well, "it could be worse".
To be clear, I'm am here making a case for law as an insurance against indivual domination and warlordism which I think it can be. I am not making a case for the state in general though.
This is a good point. I should have said, in the absence of law, there is only power through individual domination and vassalage. Law does not guarantee a more equitable distribution of power but it can allow for it.
Those bribes are depressingly low amounts. Just fly a SCOTUS out for a fun quarter-million vacation and their next completely original interpretation of the Constitution will be in your favor.
The Navajo lost their water rights this week to a 5:4 supreme court decision over turning a lower court. I wonder who paid for that. How much does it cost to over turn a century old treaty?
The worst are banks and payment processors who sttaight out censor legal businesses.
If porn/weed/crypto or other stuff is legal, then the bank should not be moral police and close their account. Banks are not police, or judicary system and one cannot run a company without a bank account.
If they explain this with risk, then there should be some special state run bank that handles higher risk customers - and for example freezes money for some time to check everything. But at least does not close the account
OTOH, I doubt the banks themselves are doing it for personal moral reasons, rather because of outside pressure. They're doing it out of fear of the power that picketers have over their actual livelihood.
The risk here is that someone against porn etc will 9and have) sued them for helping bad activities. TYhe cost is too high for the credit card companies.
In this case the pressure on a government payment system would be even higher as no politician could afford to support something helping porn.
Don't let the foreign part cloud the picture. You cheese off someone bad enough, we have the mechanism to put an entry in place that echoes out to every lawfully operating money transferer, and suddenly, you don't have money anymore.
Every money transmitter's legal department has a full time department that just day in and day out handles law enforcement or government requests.
Other governments I assume enforce their own versions. Using "The Royal No One", here; but no one wants a world of unrestrictable interaction at a distance. In any form.
Outside of Healthcare, the Financial industry is the most regulated industry in the US. Regulatory compliance is often why payment companies and other financial companies are often trigger happy. It's risk management.
I unironically have no issue with racists being locked out of their homes. Perhaps with the doorbell robot giving them sarcastic responses to their pleas.
Say the rest, which is that it has to be a white person doing it. Because obviously a black person "making certain expressions in the presence of black people" is no problem at all.
So you want white people to lose their house if they hurt a black person's feelings. Totally legitimate position, not insane at all.
Of course you have to clarify that you mean white racists, because you'd be the most racist person in this thread if you meant the 33% of blacks who want miscegenation to be banned again: https://i.redd.it/fwgz4oyty85b1.png
I guess we should burn your house down just in case.
Interesting. Is there equivalent data on the question "should two people of different races be allowed to marry?". Seems more relevant than the question asked, which is arguably about states rights.
Participating in society requires you to use the tools that 90% of people use. In the past you could live by being paid in cash, buying things locally, etc.
You still had issues, if the local butcher decided to ban you then you were going to be vegetarian. If the church said you were awful (perhaps in retaliation to you seeing the priest doing something) then you'd basically have to move, you could no longer participate in society.
Society has reconfigured itself away from that. The problem now is you can't even move. If a couple of big corporations ban you, you're screwed. You will struggle to sell your services when 95% of people want to buy your products on amazon and pay by credit card.
The solution here is to have due process and appeals. The impact of amazon or whatsapp blocking you is far more on you than on them, just like the butcher banning you in the past. There's just less comeback, you can't even talk to a person on the phone, let alone face to face. You can't appeal to the rest of the village (well you can, people post on HN or Twitter and get bans overturned, but that's a minority workflow and is far less successful than in the past)
For most of those thousands of years, money was a precious metal (although not always the same one).
We moved away from it because of all the things that go wrong with that, and then the internet happened and we want digital money.
"Digital money" in the broadest sense is how it all works today, even with the coins and notes that are common here in Berlin. "Trust-less" money — without anyone who can undo transactions — is an illusion, as it necessitates the users trust their counterparty as court-ordered refunds can't be guaranteed. But too many entities who can undo transactions has a similar effect, and there's a benefit to scale, so you naturally end up with a small number of Visa/MasterCard/PayPal types who have motive, means, and opportunity to bribe/regulatory-capture governments.
One of the reasons I was originally curious about BTC, before it gave me "scam!" vibes, was the possible it might be a new path that might avoid some of this; but I no longer have that impression.
It's not even all that legal in a lot of places. For example, it's not legal to make a cash transaction over 1,000 euros in Spain - they locked it down to try and catch folks who tax evade by running all-cash businesses.
I sense that some of this trigger happy approach is coming from other consumer protection laws triggered by the society (through popularity hungry polititians) demanding action from someone and anyone when one or some adverse parties use technology and services with harmful intent.
Not all of course, companies with too much power act hostile just for the sake of it (means random management bullshit from power obsessed or just ambitious member of it).
So I am not too sure if even more and more consumer protection laws for for particular situations will solve this instead of making it worse.
Ah yes, the old 'companies are screwing us but it is regulation that is the real problem' argument that seems to disregard everything that reality and history presents.
Hint: if you have no evidence of something but believe it because of an underlying philosophy, you should figure out how true it is before arguing its case.
Apart from just hoping the companies come around, what do you suggest then? Or are we perhaps just screwed and have to walk on eggshells when we are on the internet?
We should not expect that some mistical fater figure or "they" will solve everything for us. Yes, we need to use the internet as there were hostile elements out there and without blind trust and blind fury that someone is not acting on our behalf all the time.
Some regulation is necessary for most serious or common matters but regulations are not a magic wand that will solve all of our problems without effort from the individual!
I always think of "they" as "us" — the society we make create to serve our collective interests. And that is exactly what it exists for, why we create it‚ because it is required to change the things we as individuals are incapable of addressing.
similarly, a few days ago I was working on a project with a couple of people and I had our meeting notes in a Google Doc. I went to share the doc with the people and was told that it wouldn't be possible due to "inappropriate content". after a quick scan of the text I realised that it was because the notes contained the word "imagery" - in relation to a logo. once removed, the problem went away, but it's disgusting to me that not only has Google given themselves the right to scan your documents for information, not only have they appointed themselves as moral arbiters of your work, they haven't even done it very fucking well. I'm guessing their filters have some kind of reference to "pornographic imagery" or something similar, and this has somehow meant that just the word "imagery" flags up as inappropriate
luckily I found the issue quite quickly, and the meeting wasn't held up, but how likely is it now that there's a flag against my account? what if it happens again? this just makes me want to use any alternative possible to Google's ecosystem
One time a few years back I searched google for the title of a thread on /r/boardgames about a board game called Ethnos.
I was instantly unable to use any google services on either of my google accounts that were both signed in.
I signed out of my accounts to try again and I got 1 google search to go through before I started receiving the same cryptic message, using anonymous mode didn't help either. I switched over to my phone and I was blocked there as well.
I then logged into my work SSO that goes through a work domain google account and that worked for a few minutes before also getting blocked.
I couldn't find a way to contest or ask about the issue so I reached out to a contact at google who sent me a link where I found out that the issue wasn't made in error and will not be rescinded. My work account and all google services blocked forever!
Un/Fortunately it was a Friday before a week off of vacation for me and my access was restored a week later right before I returned to work.
I know it's a very much first world problem but that week of vacation was the most anxious I've ever felt in my life.
My contact told me that it was likely set off by their automatic "human trafficking" detection.
Every few months since then I'll wake up and get one of the same messages and I'll freak out for a little before it fixes itself an hour or so later. I don't like having my account tagged in this way.
I have no idea what ethnos has to do with human trafficking, but could see searching for it to learn what it is. Having a single keyword disable all related accounts for a week could be devastating. I have so much account recovery that goes through Gmail that it would take months to unwind.
I've been moving away from Google services since the Snowden leaks. I've seldom used Google search in the past 10 years, and switched my primary email provider away from Gmail. I'm experimenting with LineageOS instead of Android with Google Play.
it was just my first guess, based on my hypothesis about a "pornographic imagery" filter. it's entirely possible that that wasn't at all what triggered the flag. perhaps removing any word would have reset the scan
> not only has Google given themselves the right to scan your documents
You agreed to it:
"We may review content to determine whether it is illegal or violates our Program Policies, and we may remove or refuse to display content that we reasonably believe violates our policies or the law."
https://www.google.com/drive/terms-of-service/?hl=en
>> not only has Google given themselves the right to scan your documents
> You agreed to it:
I highly doubt that: "clicking agree" and "agreeing" are two entirely separate things.
Literally no one has the time or ability to read, let alone agree, with the things they're forced to click through* in order to live in the modern world.
Therefore, Google gave themselves the right as the GP claimed.
* either literally by clicking through, or by opening up a box an using a product, or by having something like that silently and unilaterally amended, etc.
I’m surprised that in 2023 click through agreements are still valid.
It’s amusing to start a new console game and have to agree to a 30 page wall of text. Wait, let me have my lawyer review this before I sit down to play single-player CoD (choose your own game from a mega-studio).
Can you disagree with that and still use the product? So tell me how they didn't give themselves the power? If there was a true choice, then yes, the customer decided to give them that power.
You could argue that you could have not used the product in the first place, but for me (not the person you're replying to), the TOS was very different in 2006. I cannot simply just move to a different service. There was no true choice.
Further, if it is a corporate account, the user needs to make a living thus must choose to use the product or tell their employer they need to quit. There is no true choice.
That’s what all the section 230 hubbub was about a few years ago.
230.c.1: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
As long as they are “dumb pipes” they have no liability. When companies started to “moderate” content that was unaligned with a particular political persuasion, the other side claimed they were no longer dumb, but now editors.
AFAICT, any content filtering that is done is to avoid civil suits and provide the appearance of being helpful to society (or at least not fostering the criminal underworld).
The power of any of these large platforms (and how they apply their "policies") is bewildering.
I once listed some GPUs for sale on Amazon. Out of nowhere, without warning, they closed every account I had across Amazon platforms (including AWS). That was fun. Many people have reported the same thing with Google.
Just this week a woman tweeted about a Lyft ride that went sideways. Of course some skepticism is warranted on versions of events because it is a bizarre story but Lyft summarily cancelled her account for "jumping out of" a Lyft ride[0]. Even after multiple attempts to give her side of the story they refused to re-open her account. It was only after the social media response that they reversed their position - which is incredible because they seemed to do this without any new facts. If she was really that dangerous to the platform they would/should have stood their ground.
I have a similar story - I once had someone join me for an Uber ride and they yelled at the driver. The next day Uber sent me a notice that they "don't tolerate violence on the platform" and banned me from Uber worldwide for life (their description). It was embarrassing, I don't condone it, but I have to think the driver likely reported it as some kind of physical contact because I have no idea how yelling constitutes "violence". I didn't bother to pursue it in any way because if they don't want my money I won't give it to them.
Your friend probably made the driver feel unsafe; drivers are quite vulnerable to physical violence. Hard to defend yourself from attacks from behind you, driving or not.
I understand. Another reason I haven't pursued this (not like it would matter - I don't have millions of social media followers).
The additional context here is she was yelling at me more than the driver and this was in a small Midwestern town where crime (and especially violent crime) is nearly non-existent. Unlike some of the incidents you hear about where there is physical violence there is a near-zero chance the driver had ever experienced any. To this day I am convinced a little yelling is more-or-less (unfortunately) par for the course of a day in the life of a ride share driver or really anyone in the service industry that interacts with the public.
My perspective is that (again, unfortunately) people in these roles get yelled at on a daily basis (talk to anyone in service). If everyone who ever got yelled at (service industry or otherwise) described it as "violence" these industries would grind to a halt.
My general sense (from my perspective, of course) is the drastic exaggeration and characterization on the part of the driver was more vindictive than a genuine concern for their safety.
My version of events at least. Like the situation I linked to (Twitter thread) absent video (which should be mandatory and provided by the ride sharing platform) these situations are yet another they said/they said and wildly subjective.
The ban for selling GPUs I can't defend, but for the Lyft and Uber cases, I'm torn. Yes, companies are getting trigger-happy, but have you seen humanity lately? People are also trigger-happy and when triggered are becoming more and more belligerent and violent. As a company, for safety reasons you must be able to kick-out/ban them. People are freaking out in stores, public transport, airlines, everywhere. You don't want to be sitting next to someone at 30K feet in an airplane who's one comment away from having a total violent freakout.
I'm with you on that. I shudder when I think how much law (for example) is based on "a reasonable person"... That definition (as vague as it has always been) is moving more and more in the wrong direction daily.
This is why I mentioned mandatory platform provided dash and interior recording. It's very clear that in many of these scenarios (linked Twitter feed, my story) there isn't anything resembling an actual review. However the driver's issue was reported all they could have possibly considered to make their decision is whatever they reported. For all I know they said she hit them, for example.
This of course goes the other direction. I was once in a Lyft where the driver had an associate (of some sort) clearly experiencing an overdose in the front passenger seat. She was slumped over, making gasping sounds. I calmly ended my ride early and my first call was to 911 to describe the car and the driver. Going in the app to report the driver was a remote second consideration.
Yelling isn't criminal, what a "reasonable person" would characterize as violence is. As I noted it wasn't even really directed to the driver and at no point did I consider it threatening to either of us. If violence had actually taken place I would have expected the police to show up (as they did in my OD story). If she had hit them (or gotten anywhere close to threatening) I would be the first person to back the driver's story to the police.
Like I said I woke up the next morning to an e-mail from Uber that was essentially "We got this report, the decision is final". Had I even had the opportunity to attempt to provide my version of events I'd feel a lot differently about this.
The purpose of the affiliate program is to bring in new purchases from customers who wouldn't have otherwise purchased. Not to be a rebate for purchases one would have done anyway.
Right, and it's the part that (on the Web) nobody wants to admit is pretty much based on magical thinking, because you only have a partial view into the actions the user took, meanwhile you're trying to infer their thoughts.
They do have a policy that they deduct purchases for friends/family, but the tone of the wording is that they seem to recognize it happens:
"Why is there a deduction for personal use of the program?
We do not pay referral commissions for products you purchase through your own links. This includes orders for customers, orders on behalf of customers, and orders for products to be used by you, your friends, your relatives, or your associates in any manner. Due to the proprietary nature of the way we determine if the order was personal, we can't share the full list of criteria by which we detect these ineligible orders."
I don't read anything there, or in further text that sounds like you'll get banned. Just that they might exclude those purchases from paying out affiliate fees.
That's a really curious policy. In my family I know of at one person who after an 18th birthday discovered they were adopted. People they thought as on unrelated were actually sisters and brothers etc. How would you square that up with Amazon's policy?
"friends" and "associates" is easy to square up and try and define. My business partner is obviously an associate, my neighbor I cook BBQ with is a friend. How would I know who is my relative? What defines relations?
I once had a fraudster inexplicably start hitting a debit card I never used using an "Amazon Seller" source. They kept trying even after I closed the card. Because I am not actually a seller myself, Amazon support outright told me "No, we're not going to help you." Left it to my bank, who only compensated me after a police report.
The only thing that comes to mind is to stop straw purchases. If you have a friend buy a thing for you, then you're effectively getting a discounted price on that thing.
It's a separate video on his channel which is probably a better listen than this one. This one is a bit of conjecture, perhaps true. The other has been validated by multiple sources, AFAICT.
Short summary - Someone had tied in most of their home automation to Alexa and found their account cancelled suddenly one day. They went through the automated recovery systems and were told to contact support, which they did. Support ended up transferring them to an Amazon exec (let's assume "manager") who told them their account was disabled because an Amazon delivery driver reported that someone said something racist to them over their video doorbell (which wasn't a Ring, ironically).
Upon investigating, checking cameras, logs, etc,, the owner determined that (a) no one was home at the time of the delivery, (b) the driver was wearing headphones, (c) the doorbell had done an automated, "Hello, how can I help you?" response to the driver as they were walking away (presumably ring-and-dash or drop-and-dash delivery, as usual).
The driver had apparently, with the headphones on, completely misunderstood.
It took over a week to get Amazon to review all the evidence and reactivate the account. No apology at that point (although I believe I saw they subsequently have).
That's a bad look for Amazon, and the Youtuber makes a valid point that it's a bad idea to trust control of your home to a company that will make such boneheaded decisions.
IMHO, the only correct response for Amazon here is firing at least two people involved in the debacle, apologizing publicly, and promising to review and adapt their policies in response to the incident. Any halfway decent PR department at anything other than a mega-monopoly would be scurrying to do exactly that, but not Amazon apparently.
> firing at least two people involved in the debacle
The idea that after a mistake companies should fire people leads to company cultures that are overall worse for everyone, including customers/users. Demand that they apologize, even that they give compensation, but not firing.
During my tike there, Amazon's failure culture, as in yes, mistakes and failures happen, and as long as don't happen twice and lessons are learned nobody gets blame or the axe, was one of the things I liked best.
This whole asking for punishment is what actually drives a culture in which these kinds of things do happen more frequently, because everyone involved just wants to cover their asses.
Okay, "firing" might be too strong, but that policy of "tolerating mistakes" (as long as it doesn't happen twice and lessons are learned) seems to have created a corporate culture where (if this story is true, and it seems to be confirmed):
- A customer can be mistakenly called a racist
- Their home automation systems they bought and paid for disabled
- Any digital content (Kindle books, Amazon Prime Video purchases, Audible books, etc.) they bought (sorry, "licensed") revoked.
- It takes more than a week to resolve after being provided with clear evidence of the company's mistake. I mean, good grief, at least the manager/executive should have reactivated the customer's account during the review process, but they opted for "guilty until we've taken our sweet time reviewing the evidence and make sure they're innocent".
- After all that, the customer isn't even offered an apology, much less compensation.
This isn't just a "mistakes and failures happen" situation. Failures and mistakes occurred at multiple points in this process and along the decision chain, and apparently no one involved had the common sense to break out of the resulting insanity-loop.
Yes and I find it similarly extreme that a company would disable someone's doorbell because one person claimed something racist was said through it (?!?!). Are they going to set up a little Amazon Ring court to adjudicate every claim??
If Amazon hadn't taken that extreme step in the first place, the stakes wouldn't be so high, and there would be less reason to discipline the employee (for the record I don't think they should be fired in any case).
Ironically, the doorbell was the thing that wasn't an Amazon product and wasn't disabled. ;-)
And yes, I recanted on the 'firing" part, but I still feel that Amazon's "resolution" here was weak-sauce compared to the "extreme" action taken in the first place. At this point, I'm guessing they wish they'd offered the customer some minor token (say 2 years of free Prime at a minimum) compensation in return for an NDA on the topic. 20/20 hindsight ;-)
Amazon is a large entity with complex processes. Firing one of the people involved in implementing those processes does not make things better for users or affect how much power Amazon has in the situation.
Someone implemented this process, as well as the policies that drove it. They clearly needed an incentive to think through the PR consequences (if nothing else) before imposing their incompetence on a paying customer.
Firing people for negligence in similar situations would likely have had just such an effect.
Amazon suspended a persons account because a Amazon delivery driver thought they heard a racist comment come from a video doorbell...
in reality it was a standard automated response that the customer happen record from another camera but they had to prove to amazon there was no racist comment made, and it took 1 or 2 weeks for them to unsuspend the account
During that time all of their Amazon Devices (echo, alexa automation, etc) were also non-functional
That's the problem with giant do-everything companies like Google and Amazon. People should never be locked out of critical infrastructure without (the equivalent of) a fair trial. I mention Google because they have been banning people who [feces]post on Youtube, locking them out from all services including accessing content they paid for, checking the calendar on their phones, and even receiving emails.
It is possible to do better. Valve does what should be the absolute minimum; tracking community forum bans separately from anticheat bans, neither of which stops you from accessing single-player content you paid for.
> all of their Amazon Devices (echo, alexa automation, etc) were also non-functional
Great way of not-selling those.
I already not-bought Kindle because of the Orwell debacle way back when. Not-buying any echo/alexa stuff is clearly the way to go too. I just buy from the store occasionally.
Same for Google properties, I don't do squat on anything other than Gmail, don't want that messed up.
>He believes Amazon is becoming less accountable as it grows in power and treats customers worse
this is basic monopoly in action, less competition so a business can make more money with a lower quality service because customers don't have other options. Same reason most government services are so bad, they have a natural monopoly
"In a YouTube video titled "Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for 'racist doorbell'," the speaker shares his experience of Amazon cancelling his seven-year-old affiliate program account, claiming he violated their operating agreement. Despite using the same links to promote products on his YouTube channel for seven years and earning meagre profits, Amazon cancelled his account without any reasonable vetting. The speaker argues that Amazon's decision is an example of the lack of accountability of big companies as they become more powerful, and invites viewers to share their feedback on the issue in the comments section." [1]
Easy way to use tools to achieve something similar:
yt-dlp (YouTube video downloader), whisper.ai (STT), and then you can use e.g. ChatGPT to summarize the text data.
<from whisper.ai website>
Notice: Whisper has made the decision to complete a voluntary market withdrawal of our Hearing Systems as our business direction changes, effective June 8th, 2023. There are no known safety concerns with the devices, but this means we will no longer service or produce the Whisper Hearing System
whisper.ai is apparently something completely different, I’m pretty sure OP meant OpenAI’s whisper [0] which is mainly used with whisper.cpp [1] I think.
Good one! Not always reliable, but pretty good (this video it does not seem to work with, says no subs). Not sure if Whisper.cpp (yes I did mean OpenAI Whisper) is better though, or has similar issues on the edge cases I encountered with YouTube subs.
Here's the output by Whisper.cpp
> $ whisper --verbose False --language English --output_format txt transcribe_me.wav
> [...] (removed, comment too long)
> $ cat transcribe_me.txt | mods -f "summarize this in Simple English"
> The speaker discusses how Amazon accused a customer of racism due to something a robotic doorbell said. They also talk about the concept of companies limiting how fixable devices are, and how this limits the freedom and sovereignty of consumers. They mention that Amazon canceled their seven-year affiliate program account, claiming that they violated terms of service by having employees and friends use the links to buy items. The speaker argues that Amazon overreacted and that this demonstrates the problem of companies becoming less accountable as they gain more power. They call for more scrutiny of such behavior.
> $ cat transcribe_me.txt | mods -f "summarize this in English"
> The creator discusses how Amazon accused a customer of racism because a delivery driver claimed that he heard something racist from a robotic doorbell. The creator explains they often discuss the concept of "right to repair" and how companies are making devices less fixable over time, requiring customers to buy new ones or rely on the manufacturer for service. The creator talks about how having a system in your house that can be turned off by Amazon if an employee claims that your device said something racist to them is concerning. They also receive an email canceling their Amazon Affiliate account that has been open since 2016, claiming that the purchases resulting from special links are in violation of the operating agreement. The creator disputes these claims and argues that such actions demonstrate the problem of companies becoming less accountable as they become more powerful.
It's pretty good, but misses out that it's a Louis Rossmann video, who is a big spokesman for consumer rights against tech companies (also a very popular vlogger and highly skilled electronics tutor). I feel like an AI would be less likely to pick up on this wider context, but possibly the OP just didn't realise who it was.
The giveaway for me was the sentence "While not excusing Amazon's actions, he questions whether enough vetting was done before canceling his account." It makes no sense - why would questioning whether enough vetting was done be interpretable by anyone as "excusing Amazon's actions"? It obviously goes in the other direction; the sentence might have read "While not directly condemning Amazon's actions, he questions whether enough vetting was done before canceling his account."
I basically never click a link if I can see that it leads to youtube, because I'm rarely in a situation where it's convenient to watch a video, and even if I am, it's usually the most noisy & inefficient way to receive a given piece of information. So a summary is incredibly useful, whether it's written by AI or not. What makes you refer to it as spam?
That and it was a 9 minute video that a 10 second read is more efficient.
For me, it’s the time spent on these banalities. The concept is interesting but this YouTuber has an audience that likes long videos about short subjects and it’s not for me.
I like the summary because it helps me understand and choose to watch or not.
Louis Rossmann is a well-known figure in the maker/hacker spaces. He has been making top-notch instructional videos for a long time.
Amazon is one of the largest tech companies in the world.
Amazon's hostile relationship to their users and abuse of their monopoly position are important, frequent topics of conversation (especially on HN). That such an abusive action happened to someone like Rossmann means it can happen to anyone.
Summarizing what happened "eceleb drama" is not just inaccurate, but totally bad faith.
This isn't some personal drama. If true, this is serious cause for alarm
If Amazon is really retaliating against people critisizing them in public like it's really really bad.
Like he said, if Amazon came out publicly and said that we don't want to partner with people that have an adverserial relationship with us, that be bad but at least more straightforward.
Punishing people like this indirectly is dangerous in so many ways that I can't even explain it. It's especially dangerous for a company like amazon that's invovled in so many ways in everyday lives.
> Like he said, if Amazon came out publicly and said that we don't want to partner with people that have an adverserial relationship with us, that be bad but at least more straightforward.
Why does it need to be said? Why would anyone want to partner with someone who has an adversarial relationship? Would you?
Because being direct with the truth is far more preferable than some bullshit weasley unrelated excuse for why they're terminating the relationship. This is the case in all situations, even when the truth "hurts".
Amazon is large. One would hope that the two internal organizational units would have sufficient separation so as to allow normal operations to continue between affiliate-linking and life-ruining. And, come to think of it, door-unlocking.
Amazon needs a process before deleting accounts to check if the target has a big social media presence somewhere that it might create a backlash. Such accounts need to be handled differently.
How much of a nuisance it really is if an American got cancelled by Amazon+Google?
Assuming any attempt to create an alt account will be thwarted by the process (name won't match credit cards or bank accounts, etc.), I can imagine a dystopian future ~20 years from now where such people will become absolute pariahs in the society. Especially if the current trend of smaller tech companies cow towing the lines of established big tech players continues.
I’m imagining a dystopian future where to KYC gets way out of control and you are required to undergo a credit, background, and reference check to make an account on a major platform. My guess is that as more of the internet turns to shit that feeds an AI machine that consumes this shit only to regurgitate it later, there will be a need to find out who is really human anymore.
> My guess is that as more of the internet turns to shit that feeds an AI machine that consumes this shit only to regurgitate it later, there will be a need to find out who is really human anymore.
Big tech is already setting up to take advantage of the situation and the “AI influx” is the narrative they’ll use to sell it to the average person. We’re going to end up with a verified ID system and Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook will be the gatekeepers.
IMO it’ll happen via Passwordless (auth) and I think the recent push for verification systems on porn sites is just a dry run for what they’ve got planned for the mainstream.
Well, there are often scare-articles running about the "social credit system" in China, and I think that many corporate leaders are watching China very closely in order to establish the same systems in the West. I think that likewise, consumers should pay attention to how this takes shape in China, because we'll be next on the list for implementation and deployment.
We already have something far more insidious in the United States - Credit Ratings. Not only are the tendrils woven so thoroughly into nearly every aspect of modern life, they are run by for profit corporations with zero transparency and accountability. Getting access to credit/loans/housing/jobs/insurance and likely a whole lot more depends on your credit rating. Mess up your credit (often by no real fault of your own) and watch whatever tenuous grip of financial normalcy you have disappear - everything will now be much more difficult and much more expensive as you try to reconstruct your life over the next decade or two. Good luck.
China would love to have our credit ratings system - but I suspect that they don't fully have the financial transaction transparency and society-wide buy-in just yet to be able to really make it work. I'm sure they'll get there eventually, but for now, they still have a large enough 'alternative' economy/non-regulated transactions and exchange that would both allow people to escape the scrutiny of a more official credit ratings system and these unregulated economic channels would likely grow larger due to people's displeasure and avoidance of the ever increasing authoritarian reach. Social credit introduces this concept using data and tools they have available, and eases this into daily life with less existentially disrupting capability - at least for now.
> I think that likewise, consumers should pay attention to how this takes shape in China, because we'll be next on the list for implementation and deployment.
What information source(s) do you recommend for having a pulse on this?
....With rich people getting around it by hiring proxies, who are required by contract to lead bland lives for the duration not to get their accounts blocked.
I got cancelled by PayPal for arbitrary "we can't tell you" reasons. I'm already a pariah. I can't send money to my friends (especially internationally), can't commission artwork (because people use PayPal), can't buy stuff with protection online...
With more and more stuff requiring online enrollment and access, getting a decades-old email account with everything in your life attached to, the surface area for potential life disruption is going to be similar to being canceled. We discovered during the pandemic how reliant we actually are on uncaring platforms that will issue a permaban on an account with sometimes no stated cause. This problem, IMHO, is the one big tech regulation that literally every government has been sleeping on. Instead they are focusing on dumb-shit, asinine issues like cookie warnings that (surprise) seem to do very little to actually protect people because nobody has the will, knowledge, or stones to make a regulatory change that actively targets behavior they wish to see eliminated (nonconsensual internet tracking) and would rather focus on a proxy for it (cookies), ultimately causing collateral damage by making a monster out of a core HTTP concept and contributing to banner fatigue through a hellish design-by-government-committee swill of utterly useless regulations. But I digress.
The USPS does not stop delivering mail nor does it revoke your home address if you send or are sent content they deem unfit for delivery (as is the case for many postal services around the world). A meaningful consumer protection would include an expansion into the concept of a “common carrier” to legally mandate a certain classes of online communications providers to not remove access to one’s account (barring an order coming directly from the courts) or they must provide a clear flow to migrate your data to a new email account and forward all messages there for the next N days. In return, they are given expanded safe harbor and indemnification from what the user does on their account.
What I found particularly troubling about twitter banning Trump was that this move of deplatforming was more impactful that literally anything other action taken towards him. Where one stands on the former president is largely irrelevant as this should be concerning because it exposes the elephant-sized lynchpin we have in modern communications: power to silence is heavily consolidated among a small number of players who do not answer and are indifferent to the needs of the general public. To be fair, they are not required to be, and with normal market forces, users are usually empowered to choose where to spend their time, but unfortunately the network effect is more powerful than market forces here resulting in a winner-take-all situation for each major platform subtype.
While having a biased and unequal system like that would be beneficial to Amazon's bottom line... it sounds as if you're also saying it's a normatively-good thing.
The flip-side of that approach is that the company can maximize unjust or arbitrary rules against "nobodies" who lack fame or political-clout.
I actually think triage systems like this are part of the problem. I know some social media management platforms offer this type of insights, so brands can be more responsive to people with large followings. But do they deserve better support than the rest of us?
I'm certain the comment was ironic, emphasizing that there's a real possibility, if not probability, that Amazon has done this exact childish vindicative behavior on others, but we'd never know about it for those individuals lack the ability to reach millions at the tap of a button.
It's also another warning about just blindly sacrificing your privacy or other interests to a massive corporation. Because that massive corporation, like any entity, is made up of lots of people - plenty of them just as petty and immature, as any other person.
But humans are vastly more inclined to discrimination by caste / class / fame / etc. than they usually admit to, and failure to give special treatment to the "right" people will often generate a serious backlash. A CEO is responsible for his company's reputation and financial results - does he "deserve" his job if he ignores that unfortunate fact about the environment in which his business operates?
It is surprising, that there is so little competition for affiliates these days. Amazon seems to be almost the only game in town.
Sure, there are thousands of other affiliate programs. But they pay surprisingly little. Often affiliates earn only like $0.05 per click (on average). While the same company pays $1 per click on other channels like Google Ads.
I am not sure why, but I suspect that it is because companies are so afraid of getting scammed. They trust Google, but not individuals.
They pay $1 per click on Google Ads, need 20 clicks to acquire a new customer and are happy with a $20 price per customer because they know the lifetime value of a customer is higher.
But to affiliates, they pay 5% of the customers $20 order, so $1. Divided by 20 clicks, that is $0.05 per click.
So the affiliate channel is underpaid by a factor of 20.
Why is no company tackling this inefficiency in the market?