[HN Gopher] Amazon Smile Gets a Frown
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Amazon Smile Gets a Frown
Author : gmays
Score : 88 points
Date : 2023-01-21 16:39 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (seths.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (seths.blog)
| m348e912 wrote:
| I know this is awful, but I always doubted the benevolence of the
| Amazon smile program and figured they viewed at as a nice tax
| write off. That being said, I am sure there were plenty of non-
| profits that benefited from the program.
| guestbest wrote:
| It's effective altruism
| ornornor wrote:
| Ah come on, it's amazon and Bezos we're talking about here...
| hardly paragons of virtue.
| frollo wrote:
| That's exactly what "effective altruism" means. It's just
| philosophical marketing to dress the basest selfishness as
| altruism. Google the phrase up the next time you feel you
| have too much faith in humanity.
| derefr wrote:
| Figuring out which charities 1. aren't scams; 2. aren't
| wasting 90% of your money on on overhead; and 3. are
| doing something impactful rather than something frivolous
| with your money, is "the basest selfishness"?
|
| If that's not how you personally define Effective
| Altruism, then what name _would_ you give to the concept
| I just described?
| cogman10 wrote:
| That's not what "Effective Altruism" is. [1]
|
| Effective altruism plays the game where you can say
| "What's better, to give $10 today, or should I invest
| that $10 and then give it away when I die?" It's all
| about coming up with scenarios like this where you can
| justify selfishness because "eventually, the amount of
| good I'll do will pay off".
|
| It's popular with the rich and famous because they can
| justify building huge empires and hording large amounts
| of resources (while spending a bit on themselves of
| course) because, some day, they'll give back what they
| made.
|
| It's quiet literally the philosophy SBF used in the FTX
| fiasco to justify setting up a ponzie scheme.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
| gruez wrote:
| >Effective altruism plays the game where you can say
| "What's better, to give $10 today, or should I invest
| that $10 and then give it away when I die?"
|
| All of this seems to have little resemblance to what I
| see in the EA community. Specifically, I'm seeing many EA
| organizations doing good in the now and present (eg.
| malaria nets), and have never heard of any EA
| organizations advocating people to invest money so they
| can donate money.
|
| >It's quiet literally the philosophy SBF used in the FTX
| fiasco to justify setting up a ponzie scheme.
|
| Relevant:
|
| "- Mothers Against Drunk Driving is in trouble, with
| their treasurer accused of evading millions of dollars in
| taxes. Something like this was bound to happen at MADD -
| anyone who truly believed that hundreds of innocent
| children were being mowed down by drunk drivers would
| feel licensed to take any action, no matter how
| antisocial, to prevent this calamity. While we admit that
| MADD leaders have specifically said that members should
| always be trustworthy and obey the law, these statements
| are belied by their continued insistence that children
| will die unless drunk driving is prevented. They need to
| do better."
|
| from "If The Media Reported On Other Things Like It Does
| Effective Altruism"
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/if-the-media-
| reported-...
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's changed a lot since Peter Singer started it but what
| it's really supposed to mean is, "stop donating to the
| opera house, kids are dying in Africa."
| archgoon wrote:
| [dead]
| IshKebab wrote:
| How would it be a tax write-off? Or are you one of the many
| many people who think "tax write-off" is some mysterious
| financial trick to turn a loss into profit?
| swyx wrote:
| the venn diagram of "corporations are always evil no matter
| what" people and "haha i cannot do math but i know whats
| right and wrong" people has a huge overlap
| jcadam wrote:
| Maybe too much money was going to non-profits Amazon doesn't
| approve of?
| tass wrote:
| The thing that keeps coming to mind is that they dealt with
| tens of thousands of charities, with the potential of
| requiring expensive customer service.
|
| The cost of running the program is surely a good fraction of
| the total amount donated.
| int_19h wrote:
| Did they actually deal with the charities directly, or
| through one of well-established platforms like e.g.
| Benevity?
| tass wrote:
| Couldn't tell you, but who would ultimately have to
| answer for payouts being incorrect, etc.? I'm imagining
| hundreds or thousands of questions like "why am I only
| getting $2 this quarter when I got $10 last quarter"
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| metadat wrote:
| Also discussed 2 days ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338 (560 comments)
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _Well, we're paying our affiliates 5% for referrals. If we pay
| charities a tenth of that and call it a donation, it'll be great
| PR and we'll also make a profit on every sale because we won't
| need to pay a full commission..."_
|
| This is a very good point. When a customer goes to the Smile URL
| it supersedes whatever other referral link they might have come
| through, or might be lingering from a prior search/click. Given
| this framing, it's hard to understand why they would have
| eliminated it. My uninformed guess is this is about simplicity
| and saying 'no' to things that are not core to the business. This
| is something that makes money, but after factoring in the dev
| time that goes into it, the total incremental revenue is probably
| not large enough to justify. Amazon says 'no' to lots of new
| things that would generate revenue, so at some point it makes
| sense to cut existing programs that aren't making a big enough
| impact.
| fortituded0002 wrote:
| I often wondered why it was a different URL and that it wasn't
| enabled by default. This is explains it really clearly why it
| always felt disingenuous. Thanks.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I thought the same, but others here were arguing that smile and
| affiliate were separate:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435592
| ABeeSea wrote:
| Amazon affiliates referral payments are based on the last
| referrer within 24hours of an order. Eg, you can click an
| affiliate link, not buy the item and then buy something
| unrelated 12 hours later and the affiliate will still get the
| commission. (As long as you didn't click a different
| affiliate's link).
| barnabee wrote:
| I always assumed that Smile was about making customers who
| might have clicked an affiliate link switch over to the Smile
| site so they could avoid paying _that_ referral rather than
| trying to make charities into affilites as the article
| suggested. I know I always did it.
|
| Perhaps more people were moving from the base, affiliate-less
| Amazon site to Smile than from affiliate links, by a large
| enough margin that the payouts were a net cost even after
| factoring the savings on those that had come via affiliate
| links. This is believable: I bookmarked the Smile site and very
| rarely click affiliate links.
|
| Would be hard (but not impossible) to believe the cost of
| developing or maintaining this programme was a significant
| factor at their scale.
| password4321 wrote:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_...
|
| > _Internally, Amazon thought that if they could force users to
| go straight to Amazon, offer a small but obviously less amount
| of money to charity from each customer than would have been
| paid to google, it would help kill customers going to google,
| save Amazon more money than paying google_
|
| > _The intent of the program was to be cost neutral - the
| amount Amazon donated to charities was about equal to the costs
| it saved by not having to pay Google for advertising clicks._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338#34447006
|
| > _smile was invented as a way to bypass having to pay Google
| for the referral link_
| draw_down wrote:
| [dead]
| hourago wrote:
| My best guess is that Amazon have just moved the Amazon Smile
| team to do something else that may bring more money. Sometimes
| someone may want to do something good in companies like Amazon,
| but in the end, corporate structure will optimize for achieving
| maximum bonuses.
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