I bought a bluetooth dongle on Amazon recently. didn't work out of the box, and the instruction booklet told me I had to download and install an unsigned device driver that I should download from a specific dropbox link.
I tried to write a measured review on Amazon explaining the problem, but Amazon rejected the review. I threw it away and composed an angsty tweet [1], but I really should have returned it.
I very rarely write negative reviews, but every time I have was for something of this magnitude and not once has any ever been left up on any platform.
What I don't get is that on Amazon I've purchased 10's to 100's of thousands in product (was an early user, business account admin etc). Of all the reviews that SHOULD have credibility, someone who doesn't review a lot and buys a TON of product - you think would be slightly credible?
Instead, for those (few) times I've posted a clearly negative review - gone for whatever reason. If you buy enough from Amazon, especially in last 5 years or so, you got some total absolute trash in there.
"Genuine" Apple products absolutely totally 100% fake trash. How amazon's supply chain thinks these are legit is mind boggling.
I've had such bad luck with "genuine" and "oem" battery replacements I've given up - most of these things are just crap scam stuff.
I'm actually curious how this even happens sometimes, some of the used crap was BADLY used, think of a bunch of electric pencil sharpeners for an office, all "new" that are filled with old pencil shavings, scratches etc etc. Product reviews that when you go back to understand how the piece of trash product got 5 stars you realize the reviews DO NOT EVEN RELATE TO THE PRODUCT you purchased. I mean, how does this even happen?
So you get out the review - hey, this things was garbage, and many of the 5 star reviews were for a knife set it looks like instead of a powerbank. Review rejected :)
I canceled Prime and stopped buying stuff on Amazon over 3 years ago for these sort of reasons. You cannot trust the product descriptions, you cannot trust the reviews, and you cannot trust that what you actually get is the same thing you thought you were buying.
> Product reviews that when you go back to understand how the piece of trash product got 5 stars you realize the reviews DO NOT EVEN RELATE TO THE PRODUCT you purchased. I mean, how does this even happen?
Several ways:
1. Repurposing product listings for something unrelated and keeping the old sales data and reviews
2. Merging product listings to aggregate unrelated sales data and reviews
3. Fake reviews that were unrelated to the product all along
"Why doesn't Amazon stop this from happening?" is a different question from "How does this happen?".
Any system Amazon puts in place will have a lot of false positives that require human review. And that is entirely aside from the fact that underhanded sellers will try to flood such a system with automated disputes until Amazon relents.
> The ones I've seen are WAY off when you look deeper.
You're assuming these disparate merges happen in a single step.
> I tried to write a measured review on Amazon explaining the problem, but Amazon rejected the review.
This facet of the Big Tech censorship problem hardly ever gets any attention, but it's no less bad than YouTube and Twitter censoring their political opponents.
That's one of the things that's interesting about it being a private company and censoring things. The whole "free speech" vs "not free speech" issues. I certainly understand both sides of the aisle on that one but tend to lean against censorship.
A chinese USB-C to Ethernet adapter had instructions to download and install a macOS kernel extension for it to work.
Thanks but no thanks. This was a product that was (presumably) vetted and retailed by an EU electronics retailer.
I tried to write a measured review on Amazon explaining the problem, but Amazon rejected the review. I threw it away and composed an angsty tweet [1], but I really should have returned it.
[1] https://twitter.com/ojensen5115/status/1351598563751559169