Seller-side here. Amazon combine my author page, with that of A.A. Milne. Some of my products show up under the deceased author, some of his under mine. Reviews for one particular product are combined.
My seller ID is separate, my last name is also Milne, but my first is James.
He wrote a book called "The Red House Mystery", I wrote an homage to it because I am related to the man, called "Red House". Different products, with different ISBNs.
Combined reviews. [0]
That's not exactly a fair process for customers - and no, I can't get them uncombined. I've been trying for years. But if the seller can't get rid of something completely misleading, that seems to have been caused by a very badly automated process, then there are processes at Amazon that cause problems.
I've only ever left one bad review on Amazon. Chopsticks, they came bound together with some sticky tape. Sticky tape left a very sticky area just where your hands go that I was unable to get off despite a lot of effort scrubbing, washing, and so on. I left a polite constructive review saying they were good chopsticks but watch out for this stickiness issue. My review was declined by Amazon on the grounds it didn't meet their "community guidelines" (without elaborating further on which rule I'd supposedly broken).
Ok, well I've left nine 1-star and many other 2 or more star reviews and none of them have been removed for any reason, so I would say you got unlucky and that I stand by my comment that Amazon don't do anything like automatically redirecting all 1-star reviews to customer service.
I bought one to get sticker residue off my windshield, but it's proven useful many times since.
Mind, considering how well it removes glue, I wouldn't stick anything that was touched by it in my mouth... but may be okay for the hand end of your chopsticks.
Orange oil works wonders. It's explicitly not food safe, but you get that stuff on your hand every time you peel an orange and it's also present in juice. Just rinse them afterwards and wear gloves.
I recommend isopropyl alcohol. It’s cheap, versatile and works like a charm for most of your cleaning jobs. Way safer and cheaper than sprays and "super-do-that-thing-4000". No offense to the sprayers.
The community guidelines rejection is such BS. I've done thousands of Amazon reviews and get about 1% rejection rate, and it's always baffling as to the cause. You develop superstition over time over what is the cause. I avoid certain words (sexual, violence, mention of other brands), blur our barcodes, etc. "Sticky" would trigger my "uh oh, sounds sexual" alarm and I'd word it something like "tape around chopsticks left adhesive residue". Like I said, superstition.
Amazon is known for suppressing negative reviews, there are many reports about it. Not sure why the grandparent comment is claiming the contrary - not doing the automatic redirect maybe, but they do remove or just not accept negative reviews.
They absolutely do, it's personally happened to me. My review was rejected because I simply listed what items were included in the box, one of them being a card that offered a bribe for a positive review.
Every review I left for Amazon products (Amazon EU) got rejected until it was diluted into nothing. The explanation was always vague, listing a dozen possible reasons, none of which fit what I wrote.
On non-Amazon products it's a coin toss for negative reviews. Many are published, some are not. Can't explain why.
Google is not better, negative reviews I leave on Maps are published very selectively. Maybe big-tech found a way to monetize this too. I know sites like Yelp are more or less an extortion business where you pay to get negative reviews wiped.
Neither does Temu. They're misrepresenting what Temu does, at least in my experience.
If you choose a star rating below five, Temu asks if you'd like to request a refund or seek other assistance. The one time I said yes -- it was a keyboard where a shift key wouldn't trigger consistently at the peculiar angle that my typing style hit it at -- it immediately gave me a 100% refund and said just keep it.
But I've left other low-star rating without trouble. The refund/assistance suggestion is an entirely optional sidetrack.
I've never (to my knowledge) had a review on Amazon rejected, and I've left very some negative reviews, including when I received counterfeit items.
I always thought the review scams on Amazon were more driven by the third-party sellers doing stuff like listing takeover, astroturfing reviews, bribing customers for good reviews, etc., but maybe I'm wrong. I have personally received multiple offers from third-party sellers of incentives to leave good reviews.
I have written more than 200 reviews on Amazon in the past year and only one got rejected, and quickly approved I corrected one thing that was out of the rules.
More than 50% of those are below 3 stars. They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
Amazon took down one of my reviews because I included a picture of the item's manual which had a page offering to pay for Amazon reviews (the item had unanimous 5 star reviews). To me that seemed like valuable info and legitimate context to include in a review but even after I appealed they disagreed because my picture was "irrelevant".
You're supposed to report review manipulation offers to Amazon. Reviews are for the product itself, not the seller (in theory multiple sellers can offer the same product, but for alphabet soup brands that's never the case).
The review manipulation offer was boxed up in the shrinkwrapped package so from my POV that made it part of the product. If the seller is altering the product then IMO its fair game to review. If a seller removed the batteries or put a sticker on the product I'd consider that an alteration to be part of the product itself... as opposed to when reviews complain about stuff like the seller's shipping speed which is orthogonal to what's in the box being shipped.
How convenient that the information only goes to Amazon, who can choose to do nothing, and isn't allowed to go out to other customers to help them make a purchasing decision.
Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience?
>They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or not. Amazon's algorithm for surfacing and/or aggregating reviews is not something we can audit in any real manner.
> Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience?
> While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or not. Amazon's algorithm for surfacing and/or aggregating reviews is not something we can audit in any real manner.
Most of my reviews are for items with very little reviews due to the nature of Vine, so I can directly see the impact of my score on the average score.
Some people treat it like an adventure or a gamble or are just too curious, they know it's hit or miss but it's cheap and usually you can return it easily. See Atomic Shrimp channel for example. I don't get those people but I don't judge
Building common goods is one thing. Free labor for a corporation (that can at any time decide to throw it away if it's not profitable enough) is another thing.
For the libraries you listed, the benefits of using a native library are much larger, since they’re wrapping a well-known library that is known to be secure and fully-featured, or since the performance benefits are actually visible in any significant code snippet. But here, there is no Rust library to wrap, and I doubt the performance of a date-time library would have any effect on the performance of virtually all applications (maybe except for calendar apps).
datetime handling can absolutely be a hot spot, especially if you're parsing or formatting them. Even for relatively simple things like "parse a huge csv file with dates into dataclasses".
Not saying it's necessarily justified in case of this library, but if they want to compete with stdlib datetime in terms of performance, some parts will need to be compiled.
Functions that you have to document, test and maintain of course. You do that, right? And all the people in your team, they do that and will keep doing that once you leave, right? And they all understand the business domain and all the pitfalls that come with it and have the skill, time, and resources to take care of it, right?
And this for every single problem: time, text, maths, network, parsing, formatting, validating, authenticating...
It's $650 in a world in which you don't have tariffs with China.
In a world in which you do, you pay more for the machines, the materials, the components you can't make in the US (a phone is thousands of component, phone makers don't make most of them), etc.
It's probably $650 to design it, build half the parts, ordering most other parts and assemble them.
Now what's interesting with the tariffs is that it's not just it will make the parts you can order more expensive, it will make the supply of such parts available to you restricted since you are now competing with buyers that don't have tariffs and can outbid you easily.
Or course, all this include rare earth supply which China already restricted for US export, so even the part you can make are going to be super expensive. The premium is going to be way more than the tariff ones.
Finally, since you are not going to be able to sell to the Chinese market of 1.5M of people, you will sell fewer phones, meaning your volume effect will be lower.
Meanwhile, competitors from Asia and Europe will be able to sell to the rest of the world, unrestricted by such problems, so much more price competitive and with a more robust cash flow. So you will lose markets in other areas too, hitting your volume effect even more, possibly sending you spiraling.
Elixir's ecosystem is much farther ahead than Gleam, so if you want to actually achieve stuff without pauses to fill the gaps yourself, then Elixir is the way to go.
And don't get me wrong, I love the idea of Gleam, a lot (Rust syntax, strong static typing, what's not to love?). But my PL early adopter days are over.
