[HN Gopher] Amazon Smile Gets a Frown ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-01-21 23:00 UTC)