New article for @Wired on Amazon's issues with health misinfo: cancer quackery misclassified as science, gameable recommendation engines, and dubious
ratings amping up antivax content. Among other things.https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-and-the-spread-of-health-misinformation/ …
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Timing with the QAnon book's runup to top billing on the ranking lists is entirely coincidental. I wrote this days ago. Also coincidental, today's Senate hearing on vaccine misinformation. Just things that happen sometimes...
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If you liked this and want to read more about how Amazon - which increasingly shapes consumption - suffers from many of the algorithmic manipulation woes plaguing social, here's last year's article on how some of the review manipulation is carried out.https://medium.com/@noupside/manipulating-consumption-42f2e9013d0b …
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Replying to @noUpside
Wonder how much rankings affect lifetime sales outside of mainstream fiction categories.
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Replying to @vgr
i think they matter a lot for stuff like products & clothes, based on the efforts of the review fraud rings there...and in the Documentary category, too. books...not sure how much Top lists matter, though there are blog posts devoted to how to get yourself a Best Seller sticker
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sellers also seem to really want Amazon Choice labels in the product categories. (I read a couple of 'FBA hacks' message boards where people trade tips and try to reverse-engineer what'll get it)
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Sigh. All hail the algorithm. Sometimes I think the best algorithm would be one that changed unpredictably every week.
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