It's a hard problem for a computer to solve - a computer shouldn't be used to solve it... computers were never used to solve it before Amazon because it's clearly a hard problem (and it scales really well with human labor).

Amazon are being a bunch of cheap bastards and skimping on human moderation of product listings - we, as a society, don't need to give them a free pass for trying to make an even more enormous profit. This is only deeply unprofitable to moderate if you have a lot of products listed you're never going to sell any of.

It's not hard at all, it just needs moderation. Amazon is absolutely the bad actor because they allow sellers to edit their listings to utterly unrelated items, rather than having moderators reject those changes. It's not hard to prevent a cheap kitchen utensil with 2,000 positive reviews from being edited into an expensive drone.

And while moderating things like social media at scale has a lot of challenges, moderating product pages does not. There are orders of magnitude less of them, and they don't need to change that often.

Users need more ability to intelligently contribute. I just hit this yesterday. 2-star review that was actually entirely about the third party that shipped expired stock, not about the product itself. All I could do is flag the review as "other", no text. (As it was the only review I also reported it under the something wrong with the product which does allow text.) And specifically give us "wrong version", "wrong product" and "seller, not product" flags. And don't reject my review that clearly called out that this isn't the real thing. I didn't simply get a counterfeit, the whole listing was counterfeit.

Abuse problems? Give more weight to squawks by people with a lot of purchases and not a lot of what are found to be bogus gripes.

> Amazon is not a bad actor here.

Just to be clear, Amazon is the bad actor here, assisting worse actors. This problem exists because they don’t want to spend money managing vendors, and it’s not a problem for anyone else. I never go to Walmart and discover that the cereal has been replaced with sawdust because even a huge, cost-obsessed retailer will hold their vendor accountable for that.

If the government started enforcing real penalties, each order would have an easy way to report this, they’d actually accept abuse reports when you get a contact from a vendor buying reviews, and they’d start spending money reviewing products themselves like other retailers do.

If you haven’t heard of it, in addition to traditional inventory there’s an entire profession around “mystery shopping” where businesses pay normal people to use their services and report their experiences. They’re explicitly trying to catch dishonest middle managers and suppliers who might do things like pull expired food from the shelves when it’s time for the annual inventory or make a better meal for someone they recognize as a corporate employee, and it’d be very, very easy for Amazon to check sellers the same way and if they actively solicited abuse reports they’d have an easy prioritization mechanism. It’d cut slightly into their profit margins but I doubt Bezos would even have to reduce the number of spacecraft he buys because I’ve heard so many people mention not buying things on Amazon because they’ve been burned by fraud in the past.