Banned by Amazon’s Robocops

April 10, 2023 This past Friday I received an email from Amazon titled “Unusual Reviewing Behavior.” The message inside was, “We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon.  If you would like to learn more, please see our community guidelines. To contact us about this decision, please email community-help@amazon.com.” If you’re bored enough to follow that “community guidelines” link you’ll discover it is almost as helpful as FEMA under a Republican administration. That description applies to all of the communications I’ve ever seen from Amazon, too. The company is so big that it no longer feels any need to communicate with its customers.

In the past twelve months, I’d received two notices from Amazon’s “bot algorithm” claiming that “You  have repeatedly posted content that violates our Community Guidelines (available at http://www.amazon.com/review-guidelines) or Conditions of Use ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=508088).” There was no indication of where I had “repeatedly” violated anything and since I used to regularly review music, books, and occasional products I was in the dark. I responded to their “community-help” robot with “If you don’t have a system to help identify what you call a violation for users, how do you expect anyone to self-correct?” And that has been the end of our “communications.” Of course, in the lazy-robo-programmer tradition, there was no way for me to identify what review Amazon’s robot was objecting to, so examining what it was that the bot objected to was impossible. . However, as an obvious “libtard” I suspect the actual objection came when some wingnut “reported” one of my book or movie reviews and inappropriate or some other typical snowflake objection.

For a fact, I know that Amazon’s ‘bot wasn’t activated by an excessive number of positive reviews. I almost never give anything a 5-star review and I almost never think anything, product-person-or-organization rates an “excellent” rating. Likewise, I rarely give 1-star ratings. Again, not many things are outright awful. I do review a fair number of books that I’ve checked out of my local libraries through Kindle. So my “verified buyer” numbers do not correlate to my book reviews. But after the first Amazon threat of banning, I have contained my book and movie reviews to the Minneapolis Public Library system.

Amazon is obviously overwhelmed by the outcome of their AI review “analysis” and banishing pogrom. It seems that there should be a substantial backlash to the company’s actions and I suspect there has been. There has been a sudden rash of complaints about this robocop-crap and you’ll find an almost unlimited number of people wondering what is going on at Amazon on diverse sites from the  amazonforum.com to forums.macrumors.com to quora.com to reddit.com to businessinsider.com to Amazon’s own vendors who complain about informative reviews disappearing.

For me, this forced a self-admission that I have been lazy and this has been a wake-up call. A little on-line searching and I found all sorts of substitutes for Amazon’s dismal service including Rakuten.com, Walmart.com, AliExpress.com, and for a few extra pennies I started going direct to some of the vendors I’d bought from through Amazon in the past, especially my subscription services. This wake-up call comes at a pretty interesting time for me, too. Looking back at my last year of Amazon purchases I discovered that I’ve returned about 1/4 of the semi-major purchases I’ve made with the monolith due to defects, obviously previous use, and gross mislabeling either by Amazon or the vendor. Electronics from Amazon is almost consistently a bad bet.I have had far better results with electronics from NewEgg.com. NewEgg's customer service is terrific and the people who do customer reviews on NewEgg are technically competent.

This is an example of damaged or
used stuff Amazon's Chinese vendors
ship to US customers. I had to cancel
payment through my bank to get
Amazon to refund this purchase.

I’d suspect that a lot of Asian vendors are dumping their junk inventory on Amazon under the safe assumption that Americans who are lazy enough to buy online are also too lazy to complain when their purchases are defective or damaged or even “previously owned.” 25% defects is a terrible batting average and a friend who gave up on Amazon a few years ago swears that the stuff he gets from AliExpress is consistently better quality and far cheaper than any similar products coming from Amazon. It makes sense, since almost everything Amazon sells is made in China and the things that aren’t made in China are available directly from those companies. 

Again, why wouldn’t Chinese companies dump their junk through Amazon and sell their good stuff directly through their own outlets? That is how the long, sad history of vanishing American manufacturing has gone since the 70s and, now, we may be seeing the same thing happen to American retail. If I were in their shoes, that’s what I’d be doing. I makes no sense to be building a brand for another country or business. Remember Superscope from the 1960s? I didn't think so. 

Living without Amazon is a lot easier than I suspected. I gave up on Prime a couple of years ago because their video selection was pitiful and I almost never got anything in less than 3-4 days, regardless of their 2-day shipping promise. There are all sorts of articles about ditching Prime: "How to Officially Break Up with Amazon" is a terrific primer on how to wean yourself from Amazon's clickbait. Buying from Amazon is bad for your local economy and the company treats its employees like crap, so everything about Amazon is bad karma. Like dumping Twitter and Facebook, the longer I stay away from Amazon the better I feel about that decision. I think this is going to be a beautiful non-relationship.