The Business: Amazon's Algorithm And How It Screws You

The leading Hispanic voice in Science Fiction, Jon del Arroz, cut a video about Amazon and how it's cooking things to favor Big Corporate vs. indies and legacy IPs.

The excuse is that favoring those Amazon (or its partner sellers) have in stock is more relevant than doing an honest search. The backup excuse is that Amazon tracks user searches, which is why a failed first search can turn around when you search again using the same terms later.

This matters because customers, being trained since childhood to favor convenience and ease of use over all else, are disinclined to put in effort to find what they want. Amazon exploits this learned laziness--yes, learned, just like "learned helplessness"--to shape, mould, and influence thought and culture in the population. This is one of the ways that Amazon picks winners and losers, exploiting its monopoly position for its benefit (and those of its allies).

That's without accounting for the recent deplatforming frenzy. That's just Amazon deciding to favor Big Corporate over indies to suppress competition. Yes, you should be making a plan to reduce your reliance on Amazon and setting up alternatives; yes this means ending any exclusivity agreements you may have with Amazon. In my case, I won't be able to fully extract myself for a while, and even then if you aren't are Amazon at all you're cutting your own throat.

In time, we will all have to go what Vox Day did and build our own platforms. Yes, this includes being anti-fragile with regard to payment processors and (for some of us) banking. Amazon presence must be maintained because that's where normies go, and normies don't work for their entertainment (so they won't go out of their way for anything; this is why getting yeeted from the Google/Apple app stores is a threat), but without having your own platform you will not be able to withstand pressure from Big Corporate (via Amazon) when things get hairy.

And yes, this definitely applies to me. It is what it is; no use crying about it. When the resources are there, I'll make the move too.