This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I only use Amazon/Aliexpress/Temu etc if I don't have a choice. Things that are so god damn specific that the normal retailers I have access to in Europe don't have it. Specific cables or things for modding that are in gray area so retailers here don't want to sell it etc.
But I hate everything surrounding Amazon
AliExpress at least lets you buy close to the source of a lot of goods that you won't find made elsewhere than China. Some stuff I find there exists from European makers, latest example, trim clips for cars: you can buy Restagraf but you need to live near a car body shop supplier that will be willing to sell you a few clips without insane markups.
I have never bought anything from Amazon and I don't plan on it. I do understand that sometimes it's the only place to find something that a person might NEED though - and at a price they can afford, so I don't hate on the people on tight budgets that can't find an item anywhere else. (It's like when people buy stuff from Walmart, Target, etc. sometimes it's the only place where you can get necessities.) However, if you can afford to get it somewhere else then do it...or if you can only find it on Amazon maybe reassess if you ACTUALLY need it.
Amazon is already dead to us. Just like Tesla, Target, Starbucks, and Meta.
They will never be purchased from, or supported in any way- ever again.
I avoid buying from Amazon as much as possible, but good luck doing anything online and avoiding AWS.
How does Temu compare to Crapazon?
It's worse than Amazon. It's just cheap crap that will break in two weeks without any of the quality products that Amazon sometimes has.
If you love the Chinese low quality drop shipped items on Amazon, and wish that was the only thing they stocked, then Temu is great!
Shut up! If you don't use Amazon how will the rich people go to space?
I don't mind them going into space. It's the coming back I have a problem with.
ITT: "I agree they're systematically fucking us over (and don't get me started on their horrible politics!) but will continue to enable them because it's convenient and saves me a few bucks" this defense doesn't make you look reasonable it makes you look like a clown
The thing is, it doesn't save money to shop there, either. 90% of what you see is Amazon Marketplace, where you're just paying people to dropship you trash from Aliexpress
The only reason you need - it's a monopoly. Fuck its all.
And I also hate with passion that 5 years ago you'd need AWS in your CV.
People also use it a ton in Europe where they do not have a monopoly.
Heck even in the US they don't have a monopoly come to think about it, Aliexpress is selling the same crap
Also, AWS is so much more expensive than going with your own server.
Amazon makes the majority of its money from AWS. Literally using the Internet makes them buckets of money.
People can boycott it all they want. I just don't use them, but none of that really hurts Amazon in the end.
If people want to actually hurt Amazon they need to call on the Government to break up AWS, Ma Bell style.
Hell, I guarantee there are Lemmy instances running on AWS.
Thanks to my country here is no amazon
As someone from Russia, we have Ozon and Wildberries and Yandex and Mail.ru, neither of which exists in all business niches of Amazon, but in the overlapping ones seem close.
It's not that they are really bad, but I don't like monopolies.
I think for all of these - marketplaces with delivery, social networks, cloud hosting, - there has to emerge some standard, some global system. Similar to the Internet or maybe to the postal service. Something has to be done, because these unfortunately work in a way encouraging monopoly.
Even when I was almost unconditionally ancap, infrastructure was a special case (and it still is for most ancaps, theoretically unconditional private property applies to hypothetical things fully created by a person, and for territory, infrastructure, discovered ideas it's closer to the other extreme). These things are infrastructure.
In the Internet one person can host their stuff on one hosting, another on another, and their email on different providers, but they'll be able to interact. A buyer on Ozon and a seller on Amazon are not.
That's because email and web hosting require only the Internet the functioning system to exist. A social network requires more (if we want it to be interoperable and global),
I think the missing part to make such a standard is automated payments in the Internet. The platforms' inner management of resources is hidden from us, but for a global system computing and storage resources are necessary, and they are neither provided by governments nor pooled by enthusiasts, it's impractical to rely on pure altruism for such. And to have a global system with monetary encouragement of providing infrastructure means that we need payment for resources as simple and general as how we pay for landline or Internet service. ISP's no longer provide shell accounts and web hosting, but even when they did, this wasn't quite the thing.
The platforms emerged because it's bothersome to pay for infrastructure and maintain it, there's not even a straightforward way. You need a humongous service with plenty of computing, someone should pay for it.
So - there was Usenet at some point solving a lot of the similar problems, except, of course, a news server would store lots and lots of stuff for each hierarchy. But that wasn't reimagined for the new things we do in the Internet.
For twiddling and various kinds of power abuse to be impossible they should be technically impossible in the system. So:
Various functions of platforms should be decomposed into different pooled untrusted services (to pool anything you have to design for untrusted) in the Internet. Pooling can be done the way similar to bittorrent trackers - a service comes online, announces itself and repeats that regularly. A client needing a service requests a few trackers and picks a few services from the results. Services might be, say, storage (anything, like FTP servers even), computation (submit bytecode, receive result, or something like that), indexing (a search engine, returning results in standard machine-processable format), notification (like NOSTR relays). Maybe trade for resources can be a separate type of service. And user identity caching.
It should be possible to provide a paid service and pay for that service, easily enough, like MMORPG scripted marketplaces - a setting like "buy no more than 2G of storage, by price no more than N per K, stop if remaining money less than K". Or same for selling on a service you host.
The history of platforms in the last 20 years shows us that the Internet is for the machines. The user representation should be in a local application, and the logic combining those non-application-specific services should work on the client machine. Say, aggregating results of a few indexing services, or aggregating trade offerings from a few trade services, or online users from among friends from a few notification services.
Shit, I wrote this again.
Amazon is a parasite. That's all the reason I need.
I’ve gone 3 years without ordering a single thing from amazon. I never intend to give them anymore money.
I try to use local stores or other websites, and only use Amazon if I can't find what I need there. But at least half the time I end up having to use Amazon because I can't find what I need.
It's probably a kind of vicious cycle: as Amazon eats further into profits of other companies they are more limited in what they can offer.
Amazon basically solved this problem for me: they locked me out.
I have yet to see a single item have a significant discount on prime day, it's not even a sale.
