U got beef w Amazon?

I do - Amazon has done a great job at becoming the default place where I go to when doing price research, look for a new book to read, and think about what gewgaw I absolutely need but do not yet own.

However, as their marketplace feature becomes more robust, the general Amazon shopping experience has taken a nosedive. Amazon has taken the posture that vendors can provide whatever product metadata they like. This has resulted in a garbage heap sort of approach to search results that reminds me of the web search experience in the early days of html metadata and google/yahoo search. A vendor can easily provide a carefully SEO crafted product name and description that allows a bluetooth toothbrush to show up in a search for the Frozen soundtrack on vinyl. Especially annoying is when a careful search for products by a particular manufacturer (say, by clicking the link under the product title, then refining using the options on the left) results in a slew of copycat products that absolutely are not from that manufacturer. I do not know of the best way for them to fix this issue, just that it has bad customer experience smell.

Audible was acquired by Amazon around 2008. They’ve tied in plenty of Kindle books to the audio platform so that you can purchase a Kindle book and the Audible version, and your reading/listening progress is synchronized. This is invaluable to those of us who have grueling commutes, even though the interface has some technical hiccups from time to time. The complaint here is that because it ties into the Kindle ecosystem, there is a glut of self-published content on Audible now, and that means low quality editing, low quality writing, and low quality narration become more frequent. Amazon is great about refunding purchases, and this makes the experience somewhat bearable (although I have to be sure to always have more than one book enqueue in case of disaster). Where this breaks down further is the Audible web interface. Searching for a book, or using their recommendations, is terrible. It does not remember what authors I have purchased, then requested a refund from. It does not use my ratings well, and continually recommends authors whose work I loathe simply because they spam genres with garbage content that matches my preferences superficially.

I am tired of Amazon recommending me authors like B.V. Larson, David A. Wells, David Dalglish, etc. just because they keep crapping out word salad and marking it Science Fiction, Fantasy, or whatever. I got suckered into reading each of these garbage adolescent rape fantasists once, and would really like the ability to prevent their content from ever showing up in any of my results once and for all. Please, Amazon, add blocklists tied to the author and narrator fields in Audible, and in the Amazon customer settings. I could block some nutty vendor stuff in the regular Amazon shopping interface, and block crappy narrators and authors in Kindle & Audible.

[end rant]