Tell HN: Amazon shopping is racing to the bottom of quality
As a consumer, I am well aware of this problem. I use Fakespot Fake Amazon Review browser extension to help weed out junk reviews and find quality products. (It seems almost all of them are 4.5 stars these days)Another strategy to counter bad-quality products is to buy items directly from the brand's website. i.e. buy socks from hanes.com instead of amazon.Another problem I see with the shopping experience is that I would sometimes spend 10 or 20 minutes looking for just the right product (which is absurd when you think about just how powerful modern filtering and search algorithms can be.) And then it dawned on me. Amazon is making money off of those 10 or 20 minutes of "engagement" because it gives them time to show a bunch of paid ads as I search.To counter that problem, I always filter my results with "Prime Only" and Filter: Show lowest price to highest. I use Prime Only as a proxy-variable to filter out unpopular items (they are probably unpopular for a reason) It's amazing how much money you can save doing this. Usually you can avoid paying double what the default results are.