Amazon scooped up data from its own sellers to launch competing products - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015 <comment><USER2> About 10 years ago I met the head of IT for B&H cameras in NYC. Among many things, he was in charge of the hosting for their online store. After he complained about dealing with physical servers, I asked him if he had ever considered using AWS ec2 for the website, and he replied that his boss refused because he believed that Amazon would pull data on B&H products and use it to compete more effectively.

I'm not sure that Amazon would be able to pierce the veil of the hypervisor like that, but his instincts were in the correct direction.

<comment><USER3> Throwaway account for obvious reasons.

In the past, AWS has used the data from third party hosted services on AWS to build a similar service and in fact start poaching their customers.

Source: I used to be at AWS and know the PM & his manager who built a service this way. I was hired on that team.

<comment><USER3> As for talking to journalists, I didn't leave with any ill will and don't want to complicate my life. I personally know a friend who got involved with journalists... his past employer came to know about it, sued him... and he became almost unemployable in the valley.

Edit: fixed a typo

<comment><USER4> > ... his past employer came to know about it, sued him... and he became > almost unemployable in the valley.

You might have a family to protect. A home to maintain, etc. I understand. It's scary. But the world doesn't and cannot change for the better if we let corporations bully us into silence. The world will and does change when brave individuals, with the support of society, stand up and blow the whistle.

<comment><USER5> Lol exactly what support will you be providing? Will you contribute to paying this person's salary for the next 10 years? I wish people would quit with the empty platitudes and the rhetoric.

<comment><USER4> Your comment reminds me of the kind seen from Russian bots. Everything about what you said matches the algos I've seen. Very interesting.

But yes, I would be happy to contribute to a support fund to support such individuals.

<comment><USER5> lol yea right now people that call you out on your meaningless blather are russian bots haha

>But yes, I would be happy to contribute to a support fund to support such individuals.

cool you can start by donating to absolutely any charity in need right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the exact reason why Shopify grew rapidly. Sellers knew they needed a platform where they own the data and could abstract the operations outside of Amazon seller dashboard.

People also forget that Amazon doesn't have to pay to advertise its own products, but 3rd party sellers do. This immediately puts you at a disadvantage if you want your product at the top since you pay seller commission and advertising fees to Amazon. Next time you want to buy something from Amazon, I would encourage you to find the seller's website directly or find them on eBay. eBay charges less seller fees and is not in the business of selling products directly.

<comment><USER7> With Shopify you don't pay ~20% sales commission to Amazon per se, but you sure as heck will end up paying for that if not more to Facebook.

Where by FB has no direct incentive, yet. It could be a FB Marketplace PM team someone has already copied Shopify outright and is just waiting for the right time to roll that out to all FB user worldwide.

With Amazon Marketplace the strategy has always been to convert customers off that platform into your own.

Most top listings in most niches/categories are priced for break even inclusive of the multitudes of keyword PPC campaigns they're running with the hope that you leave a review and that you actually pay attention to the little postcard that comes inside the package asking you to register your email address.

Both games suck tbh.

<comment><USER8> Does amazon allow seller sites to have lower prices?

<comment><USER9> Just sell a "variant"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So many comments about, "doesn't everyone know they do this?", and "everyone does this!"

I say there should be an explicit difference between "running a platform", and "selling on a platform", and never should the two meet. By "platform" here, and in the context of selling stuff online or IRL, I mainly mean that the store should never compete with their suppliers ... it's madness and unethical. If everyone can get a piece of the pie, it makes for a healthier ecosystem. We should _want_ the rising tide to lift more than one boat.

And yes, I believe this should be regulated at the policy level.

This of course has implications for other forms of "platforms", such as operating systems, APIs, and clouds; but I'll leave those discussions for another time ;)

<comment><USER11> The major question I don't have a good answer to is, "Why is this different than brick and mortar store brands like Safeway signature?"

Surely a part of is is placement, but Safeway could put own brand ketchup at the same level (and I think sometimes does) as Heinz and still wouldn't sell the same volume.

Amazon is clearly getting a big advantage here, I'm just curious about what the underlying dynamics are that allow them to be so much more successful in their context than it seems store brands are in other contexts.

<comment><USER12> The difference is that Safeway does not have any other _sellers_ on their shelves. Safeway buys inventory at wholesale and sells it at retail. Everything that is sold in Safeway was intentionally selected by Safeway to be there.

If you see a product on a Safeway shelf, the company that makes that product already got paid--by Safeway. If Safeway puts a generic ibuprofen bottle next to a bottle of Advil, that's fine with Advil because Advil already got paid! Safeway is assuming the risk that those bottles of Advil might not sell because everyone buys the generic.

Amazon is different--they sell things themselves, but they also offer to run a logistics platform for other folks selling things. Folks who use this platform _believe_ (are led to believe) that they are going to direct to consumers, NOT selling wholesale to Amazon. Amazon purports to be a neutral infrastructure provider, like UPS or Verizon.

Now, you can say that these folks are naive for believing Amazon about their neutrality, but it is what Amazon said! Many of these companies would never have used Amazon for logistics in the first place if Amazon had said "we are going to use all your data to copy your products and go direct-to-consumer ourselves with our copies, including placing them above yours in search results." Who would take that deal?

<comment><USER13> I don't see as big of a distinction between Safeway and Amazon. The demand for pain medication is relatively constant, so if sales of Safeway's generic ibuprofen increase it will come at the expense of Advil because Safeway will start buying fewer units. The harm is one step removed but is still there.

I think a better argument would be the scale of the data collected by Amazon vs physical stores. But on the other hand, Safeway has an online store where they can collect the same information and if they are anything like Walmart then they also already have startlingly detailed insight into the supply chains and logistics of their suppliers that surely rivals what Amazon sees if you use their warehousing service.

I don't think it makes sense to draw a clear distinction between Amazon generics and Safeway/Walmart generics. It seems like a fuzzy line at best.

<comment><USER14> Maybe. One distinction I want to argue is placement: Amazon always places the Amazon Choice options at the top of the search and product listings. They also always include them in the "Popular, Editor's Picks, Highest Rated, etc." box that appears in the middle of most pages on the site. This would be like you walking into Safeway for a bag of sugar, and as soon as you turn down the aisle, there's an employee telling you everyone buys the Safeway brand Sugar or an advertisement with three boxes showing Safeway's as the Most Popular option, and two others next to it.

Where this gets real distinct is in delivery: Amazon is currently purging its warehouses of stock from thousands of vendors so it can keep stock of Amazon- brand and big box brand alternatives to those same products. (See: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/amazon- is...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/amazon-is-poised-to- unleash-long-feared-purge-of-small-suppliers)) So, the Safeway equivalent of this would be you going down the sugar aisle and finding exactly 1 or 2 bags of competing brands with a note that says, "Hurry! Almost out!", and each bag has 10lb. anchor attached to it. But there's 100 bags of Safeway sugar, and there's a line of employees offering to carry it through the store for you do you don't hurt your terribly sore shoulders...

How would you feel if a Safeway associate slapped a tracking device on you when you walked in the door, and then didn't tell you they were recording everything you thought while you were working your way through the store? That's how Amazon.com works. Oh, and if Safeway could just look at your other recent thoughts and know you fapped about 20 minutes before you walked in the door? That's also Amazon.

<comment><USER15> Another issue. At Safeway, Heinz ketchup is the real deal. No duplicates.

Amazon, on the other hand, has allowed duplicates, cheap reproductions and false reviews to proliferate. Now the only way you are assured a product is what it says is if it is an amazon brand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I saw this happening a decade ago, but I had no real proof.

I had a profitable Amazon store in 2010. I found niche products that Amazon didn't sell. As soon as I started getting traction on any one product, Amazon would start undercutting me, and my sales would drop to almost zero over the course of a couple of weeks.

I had near 100% feedback and I had a single customer complaint that I sold them the wrong product. Within a few minutes of me receiving this claim, my account was suspended. I had no chance to rectify the situation.

No amount of calling or emailing Amazon could get me in front of someone that could help me. All responses were an automated rejection.

This was a rough time for me as it was my only form of income and Amazon held almost $30,000 of my money for 3 months. I ended up having to close my business and move on, though I did eventually get all of my money back.

I've built multiple successful businesses since then and Amazon has recently had many business reps try to get me to sign up with a business account, because we purchase lots of items on Amazon/month. I always try to get them to re-investigate my old seller account and our email correspondence stops shortly after this. It's crazy to me that after 10 years and in a completely different industry, I still can't open a seller account.

It taught me a valuable lesson not to build my entire business on someone else's platform.

It only gives them more control over you and they will most likely use your customers, data, and more resources to out-compete you, if you get too big. Twitter has also done this to their app developers.

My wife runs a small business on Etsy and it's just as bad. They make random code changes, which bumps listings up or down and you suddenly have no orders for weeks at a time.

What's even scarier is if a handful of companies run everything we use online. Will I suddenly not be able to get a home loan for a decade because of an account closure?

<comment><USER17> Same happens to us but we split sales to Shopify. Any idea if Shopify does same? It seems their ambitions keeps growing, they started charging percentage of revenue instead of flat subscription.

<comment><USER18> I've had this thought as well, and certainly there seems to be nothing preventing them from going down that road. Though at least with Shopify, it's theoretically easier to move your website to another platform/service or just roll your own.

I'd say that you're basically at their mercy with regards to the charging a percentage of revenue though. I mean, that's how all card processors work.

By default I trust Shopify more than Amazon, and in both instances your business is essentially succeeding 'at their pleasure' so to speak. So I thought on it for a minute.

I think the main difference comes down to individuals in the business and culture. I'd elaborate more but I'm not sure I want to write that much speculative crap on the internet this morning, and I should get something productive done with my day.

EDIT: Also just realized, that if you look at my spending habits, they 100% imply I trust Amazon more than Shopify.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The solution isn't hoping the free market would solve this with a competing platform. The solution is to create regulations & laws that prevent this behavior.

You're either a platform/retailer or you're a manufacturer. You don't get to be both because we see the perverse incentive that happens when it's allowed.

<comment><USER20> What really is the issue? That Amazon is leveraging its success to be successful? It's unfair that Amazon is able to see that a product category is doing well so it invests its own money into manufacturing a product to sell through its site?

Do you really think that if Amazon couldn't use the data from its own site that it wouldn't procure it elsewhere? Before any product is developed there is extensive market research done to get an idea of how much money this product could make.

Anyone can and does do this, why should Amazon be punished that its data collection mechanism is cheaper than others?

<comment><USER21> Vertical monopolies are anti-competitive. It works like this:

1\. Amazon clones independent manufacturer's product.

2\. Amazon strangles manufacturer because they can promote their own product more and have lower overhead because they control the entire chain.

3\. Competitor dies.

4\. Amazon has no competition on this product.

5\. They raise prices and/or lower quality.

6\. Consumers pay more for a shittier product.

<comment><USER22> You forget the other big competitors.

Sun pushed OpenOffice to cut MS's profits from Office

Google and MS are pushing into the Cloud to reduce Amazon's influence

Amazon is creating its own ad network and offering Twitch to reign in Google

Walmart is slowly creating its own global online shopping platform to compete with Amazon

Should Amazon ever have no competitor, monopoly regulations would kick in. But usually, all the other big players will make sure that Amazon has enough competition to not be invincible. It's not fun for small players, but they obviously don't care enough to organize and take their products off Amazon.

Btw, Amazon does not necessarily have less overhead due to Price's law: [1]

>The square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work.

Should Amazon expand into every business, they would be so huge that all their efficiencies and more would be eaten up by the overhead.

[1][https://brainlid.org/general/2017/11/28/price- law.html](https://brainlid.org/general/2017/11/28/price-law.html)

<comment><USER23> Price's law is of questionable empirical validity, it's more like a useful guideline/urban legend. On the other hand, there is substantial economic research demonstrating the harms of monopolies, including vertical ones.

I'm a bit confused. Are you claiming that because of Price's law, Amazon doesn't actually benefit from it's monopoly position?

<comment><USER22> Almost. I think that Amazon cannot hold a monopoly position in all markets because its size would be so big that a smaller competitor could compete.

As a consequence, there will be an optimal size where Amazon is serving many markets, most likely the most profitable ones, thus massively benefiting [ * ], but they leave every other market open.

Depending on the future, this is not necessarily a bad position because low interest rates could seed plenty of startups which means that competitors could operate below break even points.

The question is: will Amazon ever reach that position or will its competitors make sure that all its profitable markets will dry up and its growth will be limited?

[*] Actually, not Amazon is profiting because the value of that dominant position would be priced into Amazon shares in advance. Amazon would just execute its dominant position that its investors had foreseen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Stating the obvious I guess. All retailers do this and create their own white- label brands to squeeze profit from well-performing categories. Target, for instance, is very upfront about it and they have like a gazillion white-label brands that compete in hundreds of categories, which makes it very gray for the customer.

Does anyone really think that any retailer launches a competing product in a category without looking at all their supplier data?

If you want distribution you risk this. The only way to avoid it, it's to do direct to consumer or having a product that is extremely hard to copy.

<comment><USER25> This is totally false - the number of retailers who have testified before congress that they don't use seller data to compete against sellers - and then who go ahead and do just that is basically zero.

Additionally, most other retailers actually BUY the third parties products and take the risk of promoting and selling it. On Amazon third parties take the inventory and many other risks and may have to pay amazon to promote their product.

The story here is that amazon has testified it does not do something, has supposedly the "highest ethical principals" \- yet goes ahead and does exactly that which it said it doesn't do.

Do that not matter to you from a trust / credibility perspective?

<comment><USER26> How would Amazon not use sales data of comparable products to evaluate the launch of a new white label product?

<comment><USER27> Amazon agrees that what is being reported goes against their policies.

'"However, we strictly prohibit our employees from using nonpublic, seller- specific data to determine which private label products to launch." Amazon said employees using such data to inform private-label decisions in the way the Journal described would violate its policies, and that the company has launched an internal investigation.'

<comment><USER28> That carefully phrased language could be technically accurate but still allow them to use seller-agnostic information about the market for batteries or speaker wire to decide to launch Amazon Basics batteries or speaker wire.

(Which by the way, I'm totally fine with, because there's no reasonable way to prove you're not doing it and any brick-and-mortar retailer is almost surely doing it as well.)

<comment><USER29> It's also ethically fair game to base your decisions to launch a product on the amount of consumer interest the category gets. Everyone does that.

What they promise not to do is take a look at seller specific data. That makes sense because it won't get them much extra compared to looking at categories, and the sellers ethically claim it's their data.

<comment><USER25> Actually - as the article described, they DO spend a lot of time looking at SPECIFIC seller data for unique products because it gives them LOTS extra that category details don't provide.

<comment><USER30> Could you please stop using allcaps like this? This is in the site guidelines: _Please don 't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized._ [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I thought this was common knowledge. Don't the chains like Walmart do the exact same things?

<comment><USER32> It's a little bit different because Amazon claims to be a marketplace at the same time as curating its own specific product offering. It would be kind of like if a mall required all transactions from independent stores in the mall to go thru the malls servers and then the mall started its own product lines to sell based on that data.

<comment><USER33> Walmart has had their own marketplace for a while. For example, I can order a HP DL360 Gen10 from a third-party seller on Walmart's site right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The key difference between what Amazon does and Costco/Walmart etc does, is that regular retail takes the risk of buying the product to resell, prior to gathering data and considering whether to clone it.

Amazon is able to snoop on all the sales data without any risk.

<comment><USER35> We sell an ERP catered to distributors and many do sell on Amazon. I've always wondered why on earth they would continue to sell on a platform that's constantly gathering their selling data, or even inventory if they're going FBA, and eventually try to undercut them if their products sell well.

Their response is usually "I'm making enough money now, why worry about later?" or "our product category is too niche for Amazon to enter." It seems like that kind of reasoning makes sense for traditional retailers like Costco/Walmart/Macy's etc., but not Amazon where Amazon virtually has no risk in listing a product.

<comment><USER36> When your customers say that their product is too niche, they're probably right in a lot of cases. The argument that Amazon can enter every niche and cater to every consumer want is essentially saying that planned economies can actually function. But they can't. Amazon is skimming the highest volume product categories and that's it. They couldn't manage the complexity of branching out into every single long tail product.

<comment><USER37> Not highest volume.

Highest gross profit (volume * margin).

And how would you ever know either of these two (volume, margin) if you were an arbitrary 3rd party?

Amazon doesn't need to branch out into every single long tail product to cause severe disruption to a retail sector that is often predicated on low single digit margins.

<comment><USER17> How does Amazon know margin?

Amazon know volume, Amazon goes to suppliers on alibaba and gives them the quantity they require and then Amazon figures out what margin they'll be making if they sell it at the same or lower price than the original seller.

<comment><USER37> If you can't see volume, you can't estimate profit, and you can't differentiate which products are worth considering as a primary seller.

Start with volume as a suggestion of which products to investigate for purchase price with sellers. If you can get the "right" price with the "appropriate" volume, start selling the product direct.

Also, at Amazon scale, you can estimate margin by looking at price variation over time and throwing in some well tested assumptions.

<comment><USER36> > Also, at Amazon scale, you can estimate margin by looking at price variation > over time and throwing in some well tested assumptions.

You really can't. You have to do research and modeling to figure out margins. There are probably half a dozen factors that determine a product's margin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Amazon makes life so hard for their suppliers it doesn't even surprise me. I once shipped a box of 10 laptops to sell on FBA (retail value ~$10k) and UPS showed the box as delivered, Amazon checked in the units and showed them available for sale on the website. Then 24 hours later all of them got removed saying I sent the inaccurate quantity in the box and none where now available for sale. The laptops disappeared and I had to do an insurance claim with UPS. Amazon's support was horrible and made me never want to sell with them again. Lots of stories like mine on the Amazon subreddit.

<comment><USER39> Subreddits tend to wildly misrepresent reality due to survivorship bias. People generally don't post or noodle through such communities when things are going well. That's not to say there isn't a significant supplier issue -- just be aware of the company you keep. I often forget to be critical of the bubbles I inhabit.

In any case, I do wonder if Amazon's treatment of folk like you would improve considerably if Amazon had competition. It seems they can push you around because there are no consequences to pay.

<comment><USER16> "Subreddits tend to wildly misrepresent reality due to survivorship bias"

I disagree. If Amazon had great customer service, there wouldn't be a large volume of people complaining.

"In any case, I do wonder if Amazon's treatment of folk like you would improve considerably if Amazon had competitio"

I agree with you here. The only two marketplaces that actually get traffic are Ebay and Amazon. I've tried them all over the years and the rest combined don't even come close.

<comment><USER40> > If Amazon had great customer service, there wouldn't be a large volume of > people complaining.

Volume of complainers is an absolute number. Customer service can only reduce the proportion of complainers. If you have 50 complainers on 100 customers, bad customer service. If you have 50 complainers on 1,000,000 customers, good customer service.

You can conclude nearly nothing based on the absolute number of complainers in isolation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> What is the difference between this and the store brands at supermarkets?

<comment><USER6> This is different that Costco selling their own brand vodka or toilet paper because buyers can see those items side by side when shopping. Amazon has their products on the top every time and if 3rd party sellers want to be next to them, they have to pay for ads. Amazon doesn't pay for its own ads so they can effectively hide their competition.

<comment><USER42> I believe amazone should pay for their own advertisement to well themsell and prices should be transparent (amazone has to pay them self what other would have to pay), _because then they would still need to pay tax_ for this. At least in countries where taxes are not very low this could make the situation slightly better. Through not that much better tbh.

<comment><USER43> Yes this sounds like an antitrust situation to me (I know they are not technically a monopoly but different countries have different takes on these laws so it's worth considering why they exist).

A phone wholesaler with a retail business will be broken up since it is a problem for their other retail customers.

This is quite similar where Amazon is acting as both the provider and a retail customer competing against their other retail (marketplace business) customers, with a number of advantages.

Having them forced to provide services at arm's length, at published costs, with audited public books and no inside information would level the playing field. They probably already account for advertising "spend" internally anyway if they're smart, since as another poster alluded they miss out on PPC when someone clicks on an Amazon product so need to know what it cost them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Important line from the article

> a practice at odds with the company's stated policies...

> .. as stated to congress

<comment><USER45> You want to start a discussion about company stated policies and how each person feels they do or do not live up to them? That could go on for quite awhile!

edit: it was mostly a joke, calm down.

<comment><USER46> You're either missing the point or strawmanning, I'm not sure which.

In speaking with Congress, they're stating to everyone that they are there to act as a platform for third parties. They're a "pass-thru" service.

That implies that while metadata may be being collected, you shouldn't be looking at it, as it isn't "yours". It would be like a cloud provider going into business undercutting their client's because they weren't savvy enough to encrypt their business records. Or the post office going through your B2B mailings, figuring out your footprint, them becoming a competitor.

You have one job. That's it. Once you start abusing your access to your seller's transaction data to figure out where to or whether to diversify into their vertical, there is a fundamental breach of trust, and a very reasonable case to be made in having exploited something you shouldn't be.

That's the Hobbesian Leviathan for you; you don't need all those little businesses anyway!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So this seems to be getting drowned out a bit; but the core issue here is _not_ that Amazon is creating their own labels to compete with seller's products. It's that they've publicly stated, including to congress, that they don't use non-public, seller specific data to compete with them; and now former employees are claiming that's a lie.

Amazon agrees that, as claimed, this is a problem.

'Amazon said employees using such data to inform private-label decisions in the way the Journal described would violate its policies, and that the company has launched an internal investigation.'

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm not an Amazon fan boy, but _I am_ a Costco fan boy, and they do the same thing, so I don't really think I can be too upset about this.

Retail is ruthless.

<comment><USER48> I've lived in Kirkland, Washington, off and on since 1994. It's amazing how many people all over the world know of Kirkland from Costco branding. For a log time the reddit tag line[0] was "We're more than Costco!"

[0]: [https://old.reddit.com/r/Kirkland/](https://old.reddit.com/r/Kirkland/)

<comment><USER47> Same actually! Grew up in Juanita from '89-'03 then went to UW and have stayed in Seattle proper mostly since.

I always thought it was funny, as a young kid, that my city's name was on all sorts of products, not making the connection.

<comment><USER48> Nice. My youngest was born in Juanita at our apartment! I like the area well enough, obviously, to start a reddit about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> There is going to be a coordinated attack on Amazon ahead of the US presidential election and it will have valid information and misinformation. The WSJ will no doubt be involved.

Question why and when old news is being dredged up. For example, is Amazon any worse than Wal-mart or Oracle or any other number of companies out there? If something is not contemporaneous news, then why is being being used at the point in time you are reading it? What is the motivation of the group pushing that information? Sometimes that is the even bigger story.

</comment><comment><USER50> Quick link to AmazonBasics

[https://www.amazon.com/s?rh=p_89%3AAmazonBasics](https://www.amazon.com/s?rh=p_89%3AAmazonBasics)

I am happy to buy these products over generics because of the higher quality. Batteries, paper shredders, water filters, electronics accessories, household supplies, office products...

<comment><USER51> AmazonBasics is just one of Amazon's brands. Take a look here: [https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-owns-these-brands- lis...](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-owns-these-brands- list-2018-7?r=DE&IR=T#buttoned-down-mens-clothing-11)

<comment><USER50> "Amazon owns more than 80 private-label brands" !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> _every_ major retailer has store brands, and I fully expect they all use their sales data to inform their generic products business, and all of their suppliers expect that too. As a consumer, I like that Amazon is upfront about what products come from their brand. Good luck browsing through the plumbing and electrical fixtures at Home Depot or Lowes and figuring out what crappy store brand stuff and whats not.

<comment><USER37> (1) it's not just about generic products. Amazon uses the same approach to decide what non-generic products it should become a direct seller of, potentially (and normally) negatively impacting 3rd party sellers.

(2) HD and Lowes have almost no generic/store brand stuff at all. There are a few exceptions, and they likely do represent fairly profitable sections of their overall business. The main ones I am aware of: lighting, ceiling fans, toilets/sinks, flooring. That leaves huge sections of these stores without generics.

<comment><USER52> (1) You don't think HD and Lowes and Safeway and Walmart and every big retailer doesn't use their sales data to decide which products to try to disintermediate distributors and other middle-men in the supply chain?

(2) I'll concede HD and Lowes have a lot of departments without store brands [1], but raise you the local grocery store, which doesn't.

[1]: The pattern I see is that the stuff marketed mostly to contractors is less likely to be infected with crappy store brands than the stuff marked mostly to DIY'ers. I suspect its in part because pros will learn whats quality and whats crap a lot faster than DIYers, because the latter only buy a ceiling fan or whatever once a decade.

<comment><USER37> Amazon has done a lot more than you describe. Their marketplace has been a major online venue for _retailers_ not just manufacturers and distributors. Companies (typically small) that focused on small niches (e.g. triathlon equipment). Amazon has siphoned off the best-sellers and high margin items from these sellers, making their businesses somewhere between less profitable and completely unviable.

The model here is not "Safeway and Walmart and every big retailer [ using their sales data]". It's more akin to the flagship store in a mall actually owning the mall, and requiring that all customers check out via their registers. Every other vendor in the mall surrenders all their sales data to the flagship, which it uses to decide how to use its own internal spaces to sell with higher volume and/or profit.

The own-brand stuff that Amazon is doing is dubious, but sure, I agree that many large retailers do it. Most large retailers do not operate 3rd party retail marketplaces, however, where they can siphon sales data from largely unsuspecting 3rd party retailers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Up front disclaimer: this is my own personal conspiracy theory with no objective proof. I have quite a few pieces of anecdotal evidence to support this, but anecdotal is anecdotal.

Looking through the comments, everyone is talking about Amazon.com purchases, but the much quieter, arguably more valuable move on Amazon's part would be to do this via AWS. If you're running your entire system on AWS, Amazon immediately knows what kind of scale you're currently running. Depending on the type of product, they can pretty easily ballpark what your profit margin is based on your pricing model and all the metrics they have on your application (which is basically everything).

The application of this data could be used for acquisition targets, deciding which products to build into AWS, ongoing competitive analysis when they do build those competing products...

<comment><USER54> This doesn't pass the smell test for me at all.

First, Amazon has no idea whether you run your whole business on AWS or only 5% of it. Second, different businesses have such vastly different computing requirements, which make up drastically different percentages of budgets, that there is virtually no signal here to figure out profits.

You're going to be _far_ better off just looking at publicly available data -- funding, employees, pricing on the website -- and having a business analyst put them together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Wow, lots of comments stating that it was common knowledge, but some fact doesn't become common knowledge simply because everyone knows it. Everyone should also know that everyone knows it and know that everyone knows that etc. which only becomes true after the article is published. The situation is materially different - this is illustrated e.g. by the famous 'island with a blue eyed population' puzzle: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_\(logic\))

In this case one of consequences could be that previously during negotiations with Amazon suppliers couldn't effectively use the fact that Amazon would scoop them (even if both parties knew that it was true), and now they can.

<comment><USER56> > Wow, lots of comments stating that it was common knowledge, but some fact > doesn't become common knowledge simply because everyone knows it.

Common knowledge: something that many or most people know.

[https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/common%20knowledg...](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/common%20knowledge)

<comment><USER55> Sure, not going to quibble about word choice. The point is that many comments are like "so what, everybody knew this", but there _is_ a material difference between "everybody knows" and "everybody knows that everybody knows".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Is this any different than what other stores do with their own store brands?

<comment><USER58> Because it amounts to IP theft.

It's one thing to see that unbleached toilet paper is selling well, and getting a supplier to sell you a store brand version. But it's completely different to see that a particular office stand is selling very well, determine that it has a 20% margin, and have someone build an identical product which you sell 5% margin.

If you look at many Amazon Basics products, they are clear ripoffs of existing products. To the point where they are indistinguishable from the images. I was looking for a Lodge braisier just yesterday and saw that AB produced an identical product, down to the unique blue color Lodge uses in their enamel.

I guess you could go through the trouble of suing Amazon, assuming you had the resources. But then you'd be booted from the platform and they'd still be selling your knockoffs for years.

I think it's fine if Amazon sees that cast iron cookware is selling well and decides to enter that market. What's not fine is to blatantly steal the design of the best selling product in a category, then make your ripoff more visible on your site. At least make an _attempt_ to differentiate the product.

<comment><USER33> > " _It 's one thing to see that unbleached toilet paper is selling well, and > getting a supplier to sell you a store brand version. But it's completely > different to see that a particular office stand is selling very well, > determine that it has a 20% margin, and have someone build an identical > product which you sell 5% margin._"

Those two sound like the exact same thing to me. There is no real difference.

It even happens between electronics manufacturers; you'll see a company noticing a competitor's product is successful, dissecting it to figure out the manufacturing costs and estimated margin, and tailoring its product line to provide a competitive product.

(Aside from all that, I though HNers didn't believe in IP?)

<comment><USER58> Well, you can patent or trademark designs. And our legal system protects the holder of those patents and trademarks for good reason. Amazon is able to leverage their position in the market to abuse suppliers and get away with illegal behavior because the suppliers lack the resources to fight Amazon.

There's a difference between a clean room design that takes inspiration from a product and an identical copy. I can write and perform a song in the style of The Beatles, but I cannot write and perform "Hey Jude" without paying royalties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Oftentimes this is done to circumvent paying patent license fees- for example if a patented component in a BOM would cost 75 cents per unit from the manufacturer, and the in-house team found a way to perform the equivalent function for 15 cents then it would instantly allow your product to undercut the competition. In Amazon's case, all it takes is a query to find high margin items in which knockoffs can be made and self-promoted to eventually outrank sales of the original item.

<comment><USER60> Another approach ... they could also identify which products either have wide- supplier diversity for the same thing (commodities) or narrow supplier density with many branded variants (OEM suppliers). In either case, they can go direct to the manufacturer without ANY innovation, slap the label on, and cut out the middle-man/sub-retailer costs. I think Amazon, in particular, has a team analyzing these factors as input into their sourcing (on top of general considerations like margin).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Sometimes I wonder if Shopify's long-term plan is to do something like this.

It's probably the leading direct-to-consumer platform out there right now, it's touted sometimes as the anti-Amazon. The leading D2C brands I've seen are on there (Allbirds, Atoms, Untuckit) as well as random drop shippers. Shopify is also expanding into a fulfillment network too: [https://www.shopify.com/fulfillment](https://www.shopify.com/fulfillment)

<comment><USER36> I think they _want_ to do something like this. The problem is that Shopify has zero traction with consumers. Until they solve the problem of getting consumers to search for products on their platform, they'll have no success. That's a tall mountain to climb.

<comment><USER35> Yeah I mean, the brands themselves have generated a lot of buzz. But the average consumer still doesn't know what Shopify is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Based on how much Amazon will grow during this pandemic, I wouldn't be surprised if they are cut up by government to reduce their power to destroy any competitor.

<comment><USER62> has there been any antitrust activity in the united states recently? Like... past 10 years?

Particularly given the current administrations disposition, I think pinning your hopes to anti-trust is like financially planning around lottery tickets.

<comment><USER63> > _has there been any antitrust activity in the united states recently?_

Yes, lots [1][2]. (I count fourteen cases year to date.)

[1] [https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases- proceedings/terms/217](https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases- proceedings/terms/217)

[2] [https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/terms/217](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/terms/217)

<comment><USER62> I mean, no one's concerned amazon is going to merge with someone, my god I hope the FTC would block that. But I think the grand parent comment and I are talking about breaking up gigantic pre-existing monopolies. Not any general activity that can be categorized under "anti-trust"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> All the platforms do this. Many of the big online travel agencies (booking.com, expedia, etc.) are some of the biggest buyers of AdWords (or at least were before coronavirus), spending billions on Google. Last fall Expedia's stock tanked (again, before all the coronavirus stuff) because Google's search results started including the ability to go through directly to booking sites without going to an OTA.

</comment><comment><USER65> why marketplaces are able to compete with their sellers is beyond me.

<comment><USER66> Why sellers would use a market place that is obviously going to compete with them is beyond me.

<comment><USER67> Because for any individual seller there's a heavy short/medium term advantage to using the marketplace in the form of dramatically increased reach and simplified logistics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Anti trust and anti monopoly oversight is urgently needed. Amazon is growing like a rapidy mutating weed on coronapocalypse fallout and the centralization is rapidly getting out of control imo. [https://slopeofhope.com/2020/04/locking-in-amazon- gains.html](https://slopeofhope.com/2020/04/locking-in-amazon-gains.html)

</comment><comment><USER69> I worked for a small health products reseller around 2008 that had stores on Amazon, Yahoo (when that was a thing) and other marketplaces. It was well- known that any exclusive distribution deals between the health products reseller and manufacturers had a very short life: if the product was profitable Amazon would go around the reseller, negotiate a better deal, and sell it themselves.

Fast forward to today, and companies that are direct competitors with Amazon (like Netflix) are completely committed to AWS. Amazon is watching, learning, and evolving from every piece of data they can get their hands on. What better way to learn about your business model than to watch them being tested and deployed on their infrastructure?

I'm not specifically pro or anti Amazon...but I find it surprising the C-suite of most organizations seems content to think of AWS as a separate business un- related to the business that is actively trying to corner the market they are competing in.

</comment><comment><USER70> How long until the headline is: "google datamined your emails to detect and squash disruption to its business models?"

<comment><USER71> Does this count?

[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/26/gmail- hiding...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/26/gmail-hiding- bernie-sanders-emails-google-inbox-sorting-consequences-2020)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Ethically, I don't see how this is much different from hiring someone at the lowest possible wage, then using the hours and vital years of their lives to enrich oneself. In the end, one either cares as much about the welfare of those in one's employ, or just uses them as tools in some Pyrrhic victory.

</comment><comment><USER73> Is there any Business to Consumer intermediary/platform that doesn't do this?

All big retailers (Walmart, Costco, etc) Apple Google Amazon.

Once you sell or distribute through a marketplace where they also sell or offer products to the same audience, expect the best ideas to be copied by the platform owners.

That's one of the downside retailers have to deal with.

</comment><comment><USER74> Like any soft vendor on the marketplace, They launch products of their own based on the others.

It reminds me one of the post I've seen here [https://www.inc.com/sonya- mann/aws-startups-conflict.html](https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/aws-startups- conflict.html)

</comment><comment><USER75> [https://archive.md/7cdD3](https://archive.md/7cdD3)

</comment><comment><USER76> This is not only obvious, it's Amazon's explicit strategy to have their own products listed alongside 3rd party products. It's been that way ever since they made the then-controversial decision to launch a 3rd party marketplace business in 1999 to compete vs eBay.

<comment><USER37> The competition with eBay started before 1999, and 3rd party sellers was not a major part of the strategy nor was it really concerned with eBay (which is 1999 was literally NOTHING but an auction site).

Amazon had its own "auctions" site in the late 1990s which many people forget even existed (it's one of the few things that Amazon tried and failed at). Bezos knew that eBay was a problem as soon as they emerged, and worried that Amazon would never compete effectively against them. In many senses, he was right.

How do I know this? I worked with Bezos in the legendary "garage" in Bellevue, WA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> The fact that Amazon can argue they don't do this with a straight face tells me that they have no fear of regulators and feel confident they can get away with just lying about it.

Any observant Whole Foods shopper can see this happening over the arc of weeks and months. New products from small brands show up on the shelves at Whole Foods. If they sell quickly, it's only a matter of time before a Whole 365 knock off shows up in the exact same spot on the shelf with similar packaging and a lower price. The predecessor brand is relegated to a low visibility location nearby, and eventually disappears altogether. They don't even try to hide this practice, they just say they don't do it.

</comment><comment><USER78> Given Amazon's willingness to spy on their business customers (traffic data in this case), should I be worried to deploy code on AWS that has high IP value in source code form (JS, Python, etc) or bytecode (Java/C#, which can be easily decompiled). I ask this because I noticed on AWS EC2 the default behavior is that Amazon produces the private/public key pair (as opposed to having the user add their SSH public key) so if they wish, they can access any code I deploy. Let's say I make a product on AWS that competes with a current or future product of AWS itself, and let's say it gets a ton of traffic, should I be worried? Should I be using only native binaries? (C/C++, Go, Rust, etc) ??

</comment><comment><USER79> Amazon is a cesspool of scammers now. I created a listing for a physical book. I have yet to send a single book out to anyone and there are already two sellers trying to sell the book on the listing I created. And one is listed as a "collectible"!

<comment><USER80> Not sure I understand. Are you saying you are the author of a new book, you haven't sold any copies yet, you created a listing for your book and people are offering to sell it as a collectible (presumably as an arbitrage where they'd fulfill on your book)?

Or did you create a new listing for someone else's book, that others might credibly own already?

<comment><USER79> Author of a brand new book no one has any copies of yet.

<comment><USER80> Hmmm, why not jack up the price of yours and immediately buy one from the scammer, just as an experiment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> This type of practice right there is why there will always be a place for at least one cloud competitor. No company that is slightly invested in retail (directly or indirectly) want to increase Amazon's profitability by paying AWS.

</comment><comment><USER82> _Amazon draws a distinction between the data of an individual third-party seller and what it calls aggregated data, which it defines as the data of products with two or more sellers_

Oh, definitely. Two sellers is "aggregated".

</comment><comment><USER83> Any seller will do this, it is natural. Watch how WholeFoods for years has replaced successful independent brands with "365" competitors. Any seller will act this way; only regulation will prevent it.

<comment><USER45> Regulation would not prevent Whole Foods and "some independent company" sharing data and producing these white label products to be sold exclusively at Whole Foods.

This very easily defeated regulation is a perfect example why they aren't a silver bullet. Throwing your hands up and saying "just make government fix everything" isn't realistic, there is overhead and cost and bad precedent in that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> This reinforces the belief I have that antitrust regulation of online companies needs to force them to pick between being a platform or being a store (or publisher), but they're not allowed to be both.

</comment><comment><USER85> Of course they do. Like everybody else. Who doesn't do market research?

<comment><USER86> Some companies foster cordial relationships with their partners by staying strictly in their lane.

For example, ARM licenses CPU core designs to chip manufacturers, but they don't make their own chips, as doing so would turn their customers into their competitors.

Businesses like contract manufacturers are similar - Foxconn wouldn't start making their own smartphone.

Of course, not every company takes that approach.

<comment><USER87> > _Some companies foster cordial relationships with their partners by staying > strictly in their lane._

That happens to be ARM's business model at the moment. It isn't guaranteed to be their model tomorrow, nor are they doing it be friends with partners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> "Amazon.com Inc. employees have used data about independent sellers on the company's platform to develop competing products"

Don't brick and mortar stores do this too? Not sure how popular "own brand" products are in America but in Europe grocery stores will sell "own brand" produce at cheaper prices. How do grocery stores choose what products to sell under their own brand, surely this is based on how well certain products are selling?

</comment><comment><USER89> Didn't anyone read Brad Stone's book? This is Amazon's play. Jewelry was one category they had trouble making work, but many other categories fell to them. They did it with Diapers.com and really everyone they wanted to acquire. And really the only thing keeping the regulators off of them is that it doesn't harm the consumer because prices are kept low. That's really the only test for antitrust cases to proceed because of a slippery slope.

</comment><comment><USER90> I wonder if issues like this combined with the COVID crisis will impact customer and supplier behavior?

For me, Amazon has been a shitshow for the last month. For in-stock product, they project delivery for Memorial Day and deliver in 24 hours, or promise prime and deliver not-so-much. Other retailers seem to be fine. Target, NewEgg, Walmart, etc seem to be fine. Small online retail seem to be fine.

I wonder that their awful practices are biting them now... once they hit a bump the whole system jams up.

</comment><comment><USER91> From what I have gathered at various user group meetings Scraping online web prices is pretty much done by everyone in the industry to provide for competitive pricing. It looks like Amazon took this up a notch.

On the other hand at least for Amazon's first party products you don't have to worry about them being counterfeit and I haven't had a bad experience with what I have bought from them (HDMI cords).

</comment><comment><USER65> I guess they just cut their affiliate commissions too.

<comment><USER92> ebay did too. :(

i know a number of people that derive decent income from those affiliate channels that are scrambling right about now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As someone who sells on Amazon India, we made huge money on Amazon India.

Our process is rather simple.

Buy 100 units of some new promising product from Alibaba, list it on Amazon. Work on our marketing copy.

If it sells well, optimize packaging and sales copy, increase price and order 1000 units.

Then rise and repeat.

You'll be suprized how low is the competition on Amazon India and how high is the volume.

It seems local sellers are clueless for now.

</comment><comment><USER92> so did a lot of retailers. Walmart, Target, REI, every major grocery chain, etc. have all done it. IMHO, this is just business as usual, not sure why it's worth pointing out that Amazon did it when others have been doing the same for years.

Direct to Consumer is the way of the future, only way to protect your brand, sales numbers, and other proprietary infos.

</comment><comment><USER93> At the same time, Amazon makes its corporate employees sign non-competes and actually sues former employees from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER94> A point that I have not seen mentioned while skimming through the comments is that the relationships between traditional retailers and their brands is one of buyer <> wholesaler (in simple terms, I understand there are complexities here) and that in itself is different from Amazon Marketplace (as compared to sold by Amazon.com).

</comment><comment><USER95> The obligatory, "I'm shocked I tell you, shocked!" but unlike say the "Kirkland" brand at CostCo, this is more like UPS using the data it has on what is being delivered to peoples houses to start stocking their trucks with things people order often[1].

[1] Maybe the next step after food trucks is "mini-mart" trucks.

<comment><USER96> Mini-mart trucks used to be a thing with ice cream trucks a while ago... they use to sell laser pointers.

<comment><USER95> Good comparison, except in this case it would be like, "Hey we've been delivering USB chargers to all of your neighbors, why not get one from the van here, same quality, lower price and you get it right now? How about it?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> This was banned by india in december. It got a lot of press about 'uncertainty' when that happened.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/05/amazon-how-india- ecommerce-l...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/05/amazon-how-india-ecommerce- law-will-affect-the-retailer.html?new)

</comment><comment><USER98> Invent and Simplify Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by "not invented here." As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.

</comment><comment><USER99> Those were the dirtiest business tactics of Amazon Nobody can beat Amazon's margin. Amazon "invites" you to sell on their marketplace. You hustle. You innovate. You test the market. You risk your time and money. Until FINALLY you nail it! After weeks or months of hard work you finally find the right product at the right price… SUCCESS! You start making money! Everything is amazing…

But "someone" has been watching you! The "owner" of YOUR customers has been collecting ALL your data. Watching your progress, your growth, your competitors, your margins, your shipping costs, etc. THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING! Amazon will copy your product. Add their private label "Amazon Basics" to it. Sell it at an unbeatable price. Attach FREE Amazon Prime shipping to it. Position the exposure of their product on their website better than yours. In a matter of days, you will be OUT of business! THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING IN AMAZON MARKETPLACE!

<comment><USER100> It's almost like there should probably be some oversight on one of the most powerful entities on the planet to stop these anti-competitive practices.

<comment><USER101> Is it really in the spirit of anti competitive laws if the consumer wins?

This is more like one business owner (FBA seller) trying to sic the authorities on their competition (Amazon Basics) in order to keep a competitive advantage. This seems more anti competitive than what Amazon is doing

<comment><USER102> Yes. Anti-monopoly laws are about overall society health, not just consumer protection. Having only a few large companies controlling large segments has massive negative effects on suppliers, employee wages, etc. etc.

<comment><USER103> You might wish that this was the case, but in the US, the anti-trust law doesn't work this way.

The law doesn't prohibit monopoly by itself. Monopolization is only prohibited if it restrains trade, or if the monopoly position was improperly gained. If Amazon attains monopoly position through superior products, innovation, or business acumen, it is very much legal in the US[1].

I think it's hard to argue that Amazon undercutting the participants in its marketplace is restraining the trade: the complaint here is, as I understand it, that through better knowledge of the market, and better integrated and more efficient platform, it is able to offer same or better products at lower prices. I can't see how it restrains the trade, according to how FTC understands it. It would only be illegal if Amazon did sold these products below their own costs, and then planned to recoup the losses by raising the price after the competition is gone. I haven't seen any evidence that this is what's going on.

[1] - [https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition- guidance/guide-a...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition- guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined)

<comment><USER102> Obtaining a monopoly via legal means is irrelevant if there is then monopolization, the examples given in this thread of "product tying" via Amazon Prime, essential facilities denial via superseding with their own products, and predatory pricing via not having to pay platform fees are all restraining trade.

Whether these could be sufficiently proved is a whole other matter.

<comment><USER103> > the examples given in this thread of "product tying" via Amazon Prime, > essential facilities denial via superseding with their own products, and > predatory pricing via not having to pay platform fees are all restraining > trade.

If you don't trade on Amazon's platform, you're not affected by any of these. You might as well complain about Safeway's (or whatever grocery chain operates in your area) anti-competitive practices, because Safeway will also do product tying via membership card, rewards and coupons, deny you facilities to put your products on their shelves, and won't pay carrying fees for its own store brand products.

Sure, it might be much harder for you to compete with Amazon if you can't use its platform, but then the argument is that the Amazon is too competitive, not anti-competitive, and that is in fact legal (and a boon for customers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> I am believing more and more that these big companies are really bad for the economy and size should be discouraged. In the short run they can be very efficient and create cheap products for consumers but this comes at the cost of killing innovation that may come from smaller players.

</comment><comment><USER105> They are doing this with AWS as well.

<comment><USER106> Any details you can share?

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> I've heard about these kinds of practices anecdotally. We really need some anti-trust action in the US. We have these laws that give the federal government a lot of power to force companies to play fair, but we don't use them because of politics.

</comment><comment><USER108> It is actually illegal in EU, I wonder the implications of these actions for them.

<comment><USER109> Learn from US businesses and launch same white label product in Europe. This avoids running afoul of taking advantage of any data on European Amazon sellers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> Same thing happens on Etsy. You work hard, get your product out there. You are successful. Then, 100 people copy you. And you tank. And copyright, trademark, and patent laws all fail you miserably.

</comment><comment><USER111> Years ago I said amzn should buy shopify or another vendor, host it and get transaction revenue for those anti-amzn. Would have been huge. Similar to how people use insta thinking its not FB.

</comment><comment><USER112> Target and probably other physical retailers do the same exact thing. Bring a product line in. See how it sells. Replace that with a white label brand they own once data proves a winner.

</comment><comment><USER113> In long-run, I predict that sellers de-listing because of this and moving elsewhere will have not been worth whatever money it is they will make as a seller on their own platform.

</comment><comment><USER114> Good. Once Amazon has gobbled up all competition, we can have one reliable place to buy every thing we'll ever need. All detractors are impeding on the approach of utopia.

<comment><USER115> Let's call those happy customers the Eloi, and call the Amazon employees (who are by then manufacturing everything) the Morlocks. See where this is going? I for one don't want to be living in that timeline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> This is probably illegal via antitrust law -- it's inherently anticompetitive -- and just hasn't been tested. Another example of Amazon being an unethical company.

</comment><comment><USER117> Don't grocery stores do this with own-labeled items?

<comment><USER118> Grocery stores dont prevent you from selling your product elsewhere for cheaper.

<comment><USER106> Does Amazon? Any details you can share?

<comment><USER118> Yes amazon does, its widely reported.

<comment><USER106> Not anymore I guess?

[https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/11/tech/amazon-price- stipulation...](https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/11/tech/amazon-price- stipulations/index.html)

<comment><USER118> Interesting, looks like it took the FTC starting an investigation for this to stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> This is completely unconscionable. I've reached the tipping point in my opinion of Amazon re: antitrust. Set the dogs loose on these bastards.

</comment><comment><USER120> They also get free advertising, while every merchant has to pay $1+ cost per click on the Amazon advertising network to advertise the same product.

</comment><comment><USER121> Is anyone really shocked by this? Number 1 rule when building a business. Never build one on someone else's platform. Never ends well.

</comment><comment><USER122> Not related to this particular story, but:

You are transparent. I see plans within plans.

We are coming after you.

And if you on HN, reddit etc? understand this, either join or be fearful.

</comment><comment><USER123> Is this any different than Walmart selling Great Value products, or Google putting its Flights module first on the search results page?

</comment><comment><USER124> Of course they did, and what's wrong with it? Regular brick and mortar grocery stores do the same thing. It's called private label.

</comment><comment><USER125> Paywall bypass [http://archive.is/7cdD3](http://archive.is/7cdD3)

</comment><comment><USER126> This has been happening for years. I personally remember hearing people complain about it as far back as 2010 or 2011.

</comment><comment><USER127> Amazon is the worst company when it comes to ethics. They don't even pay taxes. Horrible company.

</comment><comment><USER128> This is not that different from smartphone OS makes building functions from popular apps into the OS

</comment><comment><USER129> Jeff Bezos has once said, "Your margin is my opportunity". Well... don't said he didn't warn you.

</comment><comment><USER130> The title of the article says it all. I mean what do you expect? This is just business.

</comment><comment><USER131> isn't this what Costco, Walmart are doing? I thought this is pretty common in the retail world - i.e to cut out the middle man and price it just below the name brand so people buy the store brand because it's cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER132> Relevant to this: Lina Khan's influential analysis - "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" [https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust- parado...](https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox)

</comment><comment><USER133> And? Every supermarket chain does this... First they look for good-selling brand products in their assortment, then they launch a very similar product under their own house brand following the "80% of the quality for 50% of the price" principle

</comment><comment><USER134> This is not something unique to Amazon. Everyone does it. Costco, Target and even smaller ones do it. However the problem and scale is magnified because Amazon has a monopoly on online shopping so given their volume they can always undercut everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER135> They've been doing this for ages, it's nothing new haha

</comment><comment><USER136> Is this surprising though? Bank owners do this all the time

</comment><comment><USER17> Who knows if Shopify employees are not doing it privately!?

</comment><comment><USER137> no shit

we're in the era of 'all out competition', rules be damned

look at China

</comment><comment><USER138> That's the reason Walmart use Azure Cloud and Not AWS.

</comment><comment><USER139> Surprise Surprise. So did HEB, Safeway, etc.

</comment><comment><USER140> Isn't this what Walgreens, CVS or even Costco do? It's called capitalism. When you want to invest, build and grow the channel then you can do the same. Not totally sure why people think this is unfair.

<comment><USER141> Well, there are antitrust laws, aren't there. So it's not that straight forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER142> Apple does this with apps too.

</comment><comment><USER143> Breaking news: Amazon is evil

</comment><comment><USER144> How Wal-Mart of them.

</comment><comment><USER145> "its own sellers" aka its own data, why the surprise here?

</comment><comment><USER146> Why is this news?

</comment><comment><USER147> If true this is Crony Capitalism at its finest ... I almost think a competitor planted operatives inside Amazon to pull this off - Pure Evil

</comment><comment><USER148> nothing new. Read the book about it and it mentions this process on virtually all the categories they list for selling

<comment><USER149> What book?

</comment></comment><comment><USER150> Am I the only one who could not access the article because it sits behind a paywall?

</comment><comment><USER151> duh.

</comment><comment><USER152> Thanks for the enlightening insight, captain obvious.

Every single platform company, whether online or offline, does this. Apple does this with their appstore. Microsoft did this with their windows platform. Every retail or grocery store does this by developing their own native brand that blatantly copy existing products but with a bit lower quality and lower price.

Is this good or bad? Well this is how the vendors are forced to innovate, and that's good for the consumers! If we just all become social justice warriors and shame all these platform companies to do nothing because their products shouldn't hurt others like a bunch of communists, then it is US, the consumers, who lose from this. And even these social justice warriors, at the end of the day, are all consumers.

I also find it weird how they say Amazon "scooped up data", when all that data has been on Amazon's own server all along, voluntarily.

<comment><USER153> Important line from the article

> a practice at odds with the company's stated policies...

> .. as stated to congress

(per the comment of user "so_tired" above)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Hmm, I see a lot of people here mad and arguing for regulation to stop Amazon from making their own white label products, but it seems like selective outrage.

When the discussion is about censorship online (demonetizing, blocking people who they don't like but have done nothing against explicitly stated rules, banning anyone critical of the WHO) the argument often becomes "They're a private business, they can do whatever they like and you don't need to use them".

How is the solution if you don't like what Amazon is doing with white label products (that almost all major retailer does) to just not use Amazon?

Even if you consider Amazon a monopoly, they don't prevent the name brand product from being sold there. If they did it would be a similar issue.

This really seems like a Rorschach test for a political ideology.</comment>


Compatibility and IE8 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx <comment><USER2> I don't understand. It's right in front of them. "Make IE standards compliant, and your market share will sky rocket!". But instead of doing the obvious they brainstorm cluelessly to try to correct the mistakes the made in IE7. Their only option? To continue to be different, and make IE8 act more like IE6.

This is a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER3> "In short, there was an expectation that even under standards mode, IE would keep working the same way," while in the meantime, "we changed behavior under standards mode to become more compliant."

But wait: if they already had a standards mode, why did they need to make it more compliant? Answer: because "standards mode" wasn't standard! Now they have to make a "standards standards mode".</comment>


How Raygun increased throughput 20x with .NET Core over Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://raygun.com/blog/increased-throughput-net-core/ <comment><USER3> Here's what I read: they had a solution written in Node.js; they rewrote the solution in .NET Core; it was 20x faster. It's anecdotal, sure, and Microsoft prompted them to write it, and YMMV, but they did a thing and it had a remarkable result so they've remarked on it. It's not realistic to expect them to take the time to build a representative sample that doesn't expose any of their proprietary business logic; they're running a business and have more important things to do.

Anecdote of my own: I was working on a web bug that had to generate a few v4 UUIDs on every request, and using a version of Node for which the libuuid wrapper wasn't working, so I was using the fastest script-based generator I could find, but it was still too slow. A .NET Core version of the same code handled something like 40x the number of requests on the same hardware.

If nothing else, it demonstrates that using the same solution for all your different problems is A Bad Thing, because there are surely things that .NET Core is not particularly good at either.

<comment><USER4> The biggest problem with .NET Core imo is that .NET just seems to be permanently uncool, despite how good it is. Maybe one day this industry will be less fashion driven...

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but not everyone is a hype-train riding, super-cool hipster intent on switches languages every 6 months as some kind of fashion statement.

<comment><USER4> They aren't, but there's still a lot of irrational hate for anything even remotely associated with Microsoft, even amongst people who aren't chasing the hype. I can't really think of any other major general purpose platform that has this kind of PR problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This, and the AgeOfAscent piece it links to, both read like PR pieces commissioned by Microsoft. Both are absent of actual information to really determine what exactly they were testing, or what this means to anyone else's problem space.

Because, of course, when you get to the fun of benchmarks there's always a faster options. With .NET Core offering them 20,000 requests per second (on a C3.large), that is a terribly low bar to hit. Again, maybe they're doing something amazing, but many frameworks have rates in the seven digits on that sort of hardware. And I know .NET Core can process basic requests in the six digits, so even it is hardly the limiting point, and it comes to the logic.

[https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#)

Still terribly flawed, but better than someone rewriting an app and then gloating about speed improvements.

<comment><USER7> With respect to the TechEmpower benchmarks, if you look at Round 13 [1] they note that ASP.NET got 859 times faster in their benchmarks since Microsoft dedicated effort to improving it.

[1] [https://www.techempower.com/blog/2016/11/16/framework- benchm...](https://www.techempower.com/blog/2016/11/16/framework-benchmarks- round-13/)

<comment><USER6> Indeed (though it's worth noting that they're talking about the performance of ASP.NET Core versus Mono, which was notoriously disastrous performance wise, and that story got somewhat misrepresented). In no way am I saying that the .NET Core is slow.

But if we want to use that benchmark, doing the most trivial useful thing of all -- serializing a simple object to JSON -- and node.js beat core .net. In the recent iteration it beat it by almost 2x (which makes the "node.js is slow we all know that" bit in the linked piece humorous given that it beats aspnetcore in every test but plaintext, which is an irrelevant test anyways given that they put their service behind nginx).

I don't use node.js. I don't advocate it. I personally think most node.js solutions end up being a spaghetti mess. But these sorts of "the details are hidden but look at the magic we wrought!" benchmarks are worse than useless. They're fools gold for people choosing platforms and thinking this sort of advocacy is guidance to learn from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > when we started to look at .NET Core in early 2016, it became quite obvious > that being able to asynchronously hand off to our queuing service greatly > improved throughput. Unfortunately, at the time, Node.js didn't provide an > easy mechanism to do this, while .NET Core had great concurrency > capabilities from day one.

This is a mildly maddening article - not because I have any emotional attachment to either platform - but because it never really gets to the heart of the matter. It's like they can tell us, but they'd have to kill us afterwards.

<comment><USER9> I'm with ya. All hype, no details.

A 20X improvement cannot be attributed to .NET core, it must attributed substantially to some implementation/algorithmic issue that they resolved once they got to the .NET core platform. There's a big problem somewhere with node.js if it is 20X slower. If true, then its simply a bug or series of bugs to be fixed in node.js.

<comment> UK-AL Just a basic request/response with barely anything thing in it, shows the .NET core is faster than node.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43920942/unexpected- outc...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43920942/unexpected-outcome-of- node-js-vs-asp-net-core-performance-test)

Obviously this isn't very scientific without a benchmark suite.

<comment><USER10> It's not 30 times faster. Also, it doesn't matter which one is faster unless there is. Huge speed improvement. Your web server is not the bottleneck.

<comment> UK-AL "Your web server is not the bottleneck." \- Highly depends on your setup.

But removing any 3rd party libraries, and external requests. Generally .NET core is faster.

<comment><USER11> Actually 3rd party libraries and application code is where .NET is likely to be faster unless node lib is wrapping a C library - .NET can easily beat JS an order of magnitude simply by having control of memory layouts and high performance/specialized data structures. Meanwhile JS has crap structures (doesn't even have primitive arrays) and everything is it's dynamic object where you pray the JIT eventually figures out a constant structure and tries to optimize.

<comment><USER12> Just to nitpick a bit, JS does have primitive arrays using TypedArray.

<comment><USER11> This is a good point - it's also why you can still optimize JS on microbenchmarks but for real world code where you'd want to use an array of structs in say C# for eg. there's just no JS equivalent other than write obfuscated stuff around typed arrays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm a .NET fan, but it sounds strongly like these guys knew what they were doing on .NET and not so much on node. It's amazing how many of these rewrite stories actually boil down to "and the new version didn't do some incredibly dumb things the old one did".

If you really wanted throughput and large numbers of simultaneous connections, you'd be looking at Erlang, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER14> The fact that they were only getting 1k reqs/sec with Node gives me concern. It clearly shows something went wrong there very early on at a very fundamental level. By no means is Node the end-all be-all for performance by any measure, but you should definitely be getting much much higher throughput than 1k reqs/sec.

Simply booting up a single core http server should net you around 4-5k requests per second. Spin up an instance per core and you should be _at least_ in the 10k realm.

<comment><USER15> > The fact that they were only getting 1k reqs/sec with Node gives me concern. > It clearly shows something went wrong there very early on at a very > fundamental level.

Because the program is performing CPU compute for each request. Node is single threaded.

It's a shame that the Node project killed off the multithreaded web workers pull request. It sorely needs that functionality. Pools of node processes are a poor substitute.

<comment><USER16> Looking at my Prometheus stats right now, I've got a Node TCP server doing 12k concurrent connections with 3-5% CPU and 130 MB memory. At least 4 DB queries are done per request, sometimes 10 queries. Raygun either has some nonobvious stuff going on, or Microsoft paid them to write PR fluff. After 6 years with Node it seems odd for their performance to be so bad. They should dive into more technical details to explain what specifically was made faster.

<comment><USER17> You've described a classic I/O bound server application (waiting on the database) that Node handles well. As soon as you introduce serious computations or server side rendering into the request handling performance would fall dramatically.

<comment><USER18> And Raygun, according to what the website says it does, is doing a significant amount of work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Obviously they did something terribly wrong in the first place and now are showing off being all right. Netty would probably faster. As there're no details at all, I feel free to just guess :-).

I recently found Node much faster then .NET Core for a very specific scenario:

Elasticsearch - Node / ASP.NET Core (Kestrel) - NGINX - <USER2>

where every connection must be TLS. So, Node / ASP.NET Core have to decrypt traffic from Elasticsearch and encrypt to NGINX. For a minimal workload the whole trip took 50 ms with .NET Core and 20 ms with Node. Obviously there's something wrong with the .NET setup - maybe some setting with Kestrel and TLS.

Anyway, that's my anecdote. And I wouldn't dare writing a block post how node is 2,5 times faster than .NET.

</comment><comment><USER20> >> Node is a productive environment, and has a huge ecosystem around it, but frankly it hasn't been designed for performance.

Isn't/wasn't part of the hype behind node that it's fast? Compared to what?

</comment><comment><USER21> Has anyone any code they can show which performs the same job on both and is close to comparing apples to apples? It'd be interesting to me, not for performance comparison, but as a real world application structure comparison, a kind of more advanced Rosetta Code[1] example.

[1] [http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code)

</comment><comment><USER22> It looks like they ran their last node.js benchmark around Sep 2015. I'm curious if this was still with node.js v0.x, or if they had already adopted the latest version of io.js (3 or maybe 4).

<comment> drew-y Or node.js v6.x for that matter. Seeing as io.js has merged back into node.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is no technical information in this article. As a result it reads like Microsoft marketing and is off-putting to .NET Core, something I'd otherwise be interested in.

</comment><comment><USER23> > From the questions we received around the specifics of our performance > improvements, there seems to be two schools of thought:

> 1\. Of course it's faster, Node is slow

> 2\. You must be doing Node wrong, it can be fast

Allow me to offer a third :)

When you rewrite something, it had better be faster! You know a lot more about how it works and how it's used than you knew at the outset. There was a recent post, about going back to Ruby after creating the first version in Clojure, that touches on this point.

<comment><USER24> Hey! Where could I find this post?

<comment><USER23> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14405132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14405132)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I never trust any benchmark stories from Microsoft ever.

<comment><USER26> Well there are plenty of public not run by Microsoft benchmarks that show this same trend: [https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r14&hw=...](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r14&hw=ph&test=plaintext)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The article is an excellent example of sneaky PR practices. Not only it lacks the technical details, it deceives the masses with insane amounts of artificial hype. "How AstroTurf invented astroturfing" would be a better title for it.</comment>


Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeffheaton.com/2014/05/review-of-the-first-three-johns-hopkins-coursera-data-science-courses/ <comment><USER2> _I am probably not the typical student for these courses. I already work as a data scientist. Additionally, I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science, and the author of several Artificial Intelligence (AI books)_

Coming from HN, this is one of the great things about Coursera courses for me. But it seems to freak out some students when the bar for top of the class is set by people with extensive professional backgrounds. [1] What can make for a corrosive environment is that there is often someone who stokes their ego by talking about how easy the course is in the forums...though this is rarely anyone at Jeff Heaton's level [or an HN'er].

[1] I took an introductory programming course with an HNer who had been on a c++ technical committee. But I am used to looking around the table and not seeing the dimmest bulb in the chandelier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google web cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8LyCs4h...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8LyCs4hlAsYJ:www.jeffheaton.com/2014/05/review- of-the-first-three-johns-hopkins-coursera-data-science- courses/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

</comment><comment><USER4> I completed the first two courses in the first four-week block and am currently taking the third course. Mr. Heaton's review provides a really good summary of what to expect.

Overall, I'm also happy with the course. I was expecting a little more degree of difficulty and a little higher workload than what I've run into so far. If you're an experienced developer with a Github account, the first course can be completed in a couple of hours. The R Programming course was more along the lines of what I was expecting. So far, the third class is closer to the first than the second (in terms of difficulty...does require a bit more time).

Going into the course, I wasn't expecting to come out a "data scientist" ready to land a full-time job in the field. My experience so far confirms that expectation. But it's a fun course, a good way to get started in R, and a good way to spring-board your exploration into the field. It's nice to have deadlines as a motivation to keep on track and stay on a track for learning. I'm hoping by the end of the curriculum I feel confident enough to try and land some small free-lance projects.

I'm paying for the "official" certification. I'm not sure if it's really worth it, but at $50/class it's not putting a big dent in my finances.

<comment><USER5> My interest was piqued by this article, but upon initial investigation, I'm having trouble stomaching putting $50 toward learning how to use github... Any reason I shouldn't just skip ahead?

<comment><USER4> The $50 is an optional fee for the Signature Track. If you pay for this track, Coursera adds some extra checks to validate your identity and issues you a "Verified" certificate.

You can still take all of the courses for free and get a certificate, but Coursera won't validate that you actually did the coursework.

I'm guessing you could pick and choose to pay for only certain classes, but you have to pay for all of them to earn the overall "Specialization" certificate.

See the following url for details: [https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1?utm...](https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1?utm_medium=listingPage)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To employers out there, how much does the fact that a candidate completed a Coursera/Udacity course factor into your decision to hire him? Does it matter if he paid for the certificate?

<comment><USER7> 0, pretty much the same as a traditional degree. It wouldn't even cross my mind to ask about the certificate.

<comment><USER8> The certificate does not matter to me, but completing the course is a bonus if the candidate mentions it. It demonstrates to me the ability to affect self- improvement.

<comment><USER9> I'm about to finish the ML course (after 3 tries.) And essentially you have to battle the huge amount of boredom and keep doing it week after week without stop. Just yesterday I took a quiz without even watching the lecture or anything: scored 4.5/5\. Proceeded to finish the programming assignment, again without bothering with the lecture, 100/100\. Not to say I won't watch the lecture later, I want to make sure I know exactly the way it's done (will do today probably, I wanted to finish the assignments fast this week because last I almost passed the deadline.) But they are passable without that much effort. Just persistence.

<comment><USER10> I've become good at understanding lecture videos played back at faster than real-time. Sometimes I can get up to 2x playback speed with VLC and still understand what's being said. It'd be so boring watching things in real-time. I'm so glad Coursera let you download videos so you can do that.

<comment><USER11> Yes, absolutely have to agree with this! The lectures can be time consuming in some of the classes and this really makes it bearable. You really just need to get the gist of what the professor is presenting and then use the lecture notes/presentations as-needed. I would probably skip the video lectures altogether, but occasionally there is something in the lectures themselves that you need to pick up on. At least this has been my experience with the "Data Analysis" classes, my first foray into MOOCs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think we are doing the specialization at the same time.

As an open source maintainer I can say that "question asking etiquette" is NOT common knowledge.

I don't have any problem with having that as a credit earning question. But I hated it when it carried 20-25% of the credit in one of the quizzes. This course could have asked more questions in the quiz to test its students more.

</comment><comment><USER13> Could anybody say how these compare to Andrew Ng's ml-class? I'm almost through ml-class and I'm wondering, whether these courses add much.

<comment><USER12> Andrew Ng's class has hours and hours of content each week and it is pretty thorough (I am just auditing, don't have much knowledge).

I feel that Data Scienctist Toolkit was a slacker course, it could have covered more topics or tested the students more. Five questions in each quiz and four such quizzes and you are done.

These courses are morale boosters, you can earn a certificate in four weeks and that keeps some motivated.

I like the concept of five late days for the whole course, lets you stay on track despite one's busy schedule.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are we doing here? - <AUTHOR> I'm not trying to give any answers or make any demands, but I'd really like to hear what you all think.
HACKER <-- News has changed a lot over the past few years. Todays top stories include a failing Pizza place, Alzheimers insights, a great story about psycadelics and an odd link to millionshort.com.
Its no secret that you can buy positions on hacker news, various websites sell upvotes for cheap, but Im confident this community could gain a lot by narrowing its focus and speaking openly about what that is.
Personally, I love it when I come on here and someone's written/shared a cool paper on a new algorithm (or a new take on an old one, like the 3d Ken Burns), some ground breaking developments (like Googles quantum leap), but especially when someones opensourced some massively helpful project.
I dislike all the company props, the lengthy articles written by non-technical people and especially the content thats already floating around in the mainstream, like anything Elon Musk does. I hate all the content thats strictly irrelevant as my function as a hacker/entrepreneur, like some lady dying from eating Wasabi in a 1000000000000000:1 freak accident.
What do you love to see here, and how do we get more of it? <comment><USER2> I didn't see this earlier and need to respond:

> _you can buy positions on hacker news_

That's false, as far as we know, and we've put a lot of work into this. If anyone knows otherwise and cares about HN, please tell us at firstname.lastname@example.com so we can counteract it. Anti-abuse measures are our priority.

If you don't have specific evidence, please don't say "its no secret that you can buy positions on HN". People repeating things doesn't make it true. In fact, when it comes to matters like this, people repeating things is mild evidence that it's not true.

> _various websites sell upvotes for cheap_

What websites exactly? I know of one, and we've been tracking their nefarious deeds and banning their customers for a long time now. Don't confuse buying votes with buying prominence. I can't say for sure it's not happening (that would be a Rumsfeldian known unknown), but can tell you for sure that what many accounts are actually getting in exchange for paying these spammers is an instant ban for themselves and their sites.

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone posted here long ago, that HN is like a gym.

You walk in to a gym, there are people of all types. Lots of activity, the clank of weights and whirring of cardio machines. The heavy lifters are grunting out squat sets and chalking their hands. A yoga class is starting and the lycra and mats are flowing into that. It's not all workouts, though. Others are standing chatting to each other about energy drinks. Some are fiddling with their phones or watching the one of the mounted TVs.

My point is, HN has always been that gym: yes the overriding theme has been hacking in startups, but there's many adjacent and often even more things going on than just that. Is that bad or distracting? I don't know, but it makes this place interesting.

</comment><comment> non-entity Honestly, I love good technical discussions the most. I've had good interactions learned a lot from very smart people discussing some of these. I'm fascinated by many articles that get posted that cover societal or cultural things, but the comment section usually ends up being garbage. In the end they just end up being filled with off topic flamerwars, downvotes and occasionally really negative content.

Not sure that theres much that can be done about it though.

</comment><comment><USER4> _What do you love to see here, and how do we get more of it?_

The collective answer is "whatever this community upvoted into the frontpage"

If you have evidence of people abusing the algorithm, please email the moderators.

</comment><comment><USER5> One issue is that the hacker culture got contaminated by the cultural wars. And is hard because is a reflection of something that permeates society as a whole. Tech amplified it in many ways.

</comment><comment><USER6> From the guidelines:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic.

If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

</comment><comment><USER7> > _" I dislike all the company props, the lengthy articles written by non- > technical people and especially the content thats already floating around in > the mainstream"_

Well that's your personal opinion, and that's okay, you can upvote/downvote whatever submissions you like.

The democratic and objective perspective of Hacker News discussions is what I like... Not the content/topics specifically

</comment><comment><USER8> I love to see exactly those articles you hate, and I hate all those articles that used to define very early HN, namely all this startup and investing in startups stuff.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would be great if HN could have some content recommendation system.

<comment><USER2> What do you have in mind?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > anything Elon Musk does.

Might add zombie Steve Jobs stories.

</comment><comment><USER11> I actually like to know what Elon is up to

</comment><comment><USER12> The defining characteristic of HN compared to subreddits is age. Most people here are older than reddit, and while i love well-moderated communities on reddit (and HN could be one), talking to a much younger audience (and cynically deflating their hopes) feels kind of wrong to me. That said, the discussion on HN is still more or less OK , especially in the less crowded "ask hn" and show hn sections. But it's not really impressive or exciting and sometimes outright disappointing, at least compared to 10 years ago.

HN is now a legacy website. It's not about hackers (esp. of the illegal kind) neither about news (esp. (geo)politics). You 're not going to learn the hot new tech, but you 'll read what marketing dept. thinks of it a year later. You 'll also find articles about things that HNers don't really understand (e.g. neuroscience) yet keep getting upvotes.

It's still in my top 2 communities, but feels like going to bar that s now boring and its patrons are looking for new and exciting venues. I find fresh- er discussions in twitter lately.

<comment><USER13> >top 2 communities

What is the other community?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the problem is that people are using HN as their only source of general news. People upvote anything that even remotely amuses them and hence the situation.</comment>