YHK - yet another hacker news clone

32 points tonymet 1 hour ago 11 comments

Amazon now hides nearly all product reviews . Filtering and ordering are disabled . Only the top 5-10 are shown . To opt out, a 5 day email request is required

Here is an example of the UI for members of the experiment

https://x.com/stillmisanthro1/status/2092441592242028986

maxbobby 1 hour ago | parent

It looks like Amazon is starting to hide some reviews to protect against data scraping bots, and in some cases it is affecting real (non-bot) customers.

Were you signed in when you got the message? All of the sorting / filtering / search options are showing up fine for me (as a signed in user).

_vertigo 42 minutes ago | parent

When I clicked “see more reviews” while signed out it prompted me to sign in

CamperBob2 26 minutes ago | parent

That's been the case for years.

Melatonic 50 minutes ago | parent

I haven't seen this yet. Never used the app - I use the mobile site usually while logged in (but not always). Unfortunately a few features are missing (like being able to see all items for some reason by a specific seller) but otherwise it works well.

Is this you on X or did you link to a random post ?

everdrive 37 minutes ago | parent

Hard to know how to feel about this. Bots and such have really ruined the value of customer reviews. The best that can be said is they don't work as intended. The question is whether Amazon can actually fix this problem rather than continuing band-aid over it.

metalliqaz 34 minutes ago | parent

they only care about preventing customer data escaping their grasp

0cf8612b2e1e 36 minutes ago | parent

Amazon has also changed their email receipts to be worthless. Previously, you would get the product name and price paid, giving you a minimal record sufficient for tracking. Now you get an email that says N items, broadly categorized (housewares, pets, clothing) and no pricing information.

Clearly a customer focused decision.

dgrin91 34 minutes ago | parent

This one infuriates me to no end. On credit card bills amazon orders show up as random garbage strings in the description. I had systems that would read these emails and pull out the product data so that I can feed it into my finance tracking system. Now I can't do anything.

sowbug 25 minutes ago | parent

For a long time, it was actually even worse: they obfuscated the product name, and added other products they wanted you to buy. So when you searched your email for practically anything, all sorts of Amazon garbage would come back.

big_toast 4 minutes ago | parent

Ya. The email receipts look pretty silly. Kinda insultingly dumb.

There should probably just be some legislation both making receipts richer and requiring pretty clear, granular and revocable consent by email providers/other services if they want to look at or process them.

josefritzishere 4 minutes ago | parent

Can't trust Bezos, but also can't trust AI spam. Whatever shall we do?