Google Gemini, FWIW, reports that the first day the email change kicked in was July 8th. Like you, I’m also a longtime Prime member … and I’m wondering if that’s meaningful in some way. Maybe our account options are somehow frozen, and we’re not experiencing the various changes newer Prime users are. Seems odd, but I don’t have any better information.
Something that occurred to me: Could it be anything to do with your browser and/or extensions/ad-blocking software? Have you had a chance to try all this on multiple devices/browsers?
EDIT: Wait a minute – a lot of this is Amazon’s response to AI data scraping and related issues. @Roderick_Femm , see article below:
When you were asked to send an email to see reviews, you are actually asking for an appeal to have your interactions with the Amazon site returned to their prior state. According to that article, once Amazon gets such an appeal and confirms a human is using the account, your usual interactions are restored.
Same here. My wife orders a shit-ton of stuff from Amazon - we get deliveries almost every day. Even at that I easily know what items are shipped from that vague description.
Plus, nothing ever takes longer than two days at the most. When we lived in Visalia sometime we would receive things the same day. I’m just not seeing this as that big of a deal.
I’d be willing to bet they have less complaints now.
I don’t think that’s it. I am a long time Prime member (a quick search shows I joined in 2013) and I’ve got the new, more anonymized confirmation emails. I also don’t care for them much, but it’s not a deal-breaker for me.
Others have had this change. Many others. This is a very weird thing if you’ve been using the Net for 25+ years and haven’t run into any kind of targeted actions from a consumer site. But yeah … now we’re in a world where Amazon can and does deliver wildly different interface experiences to different users, for better or worse.
Man, is the AI stuff THAT big a conundrum for Amazon? I do understand the email changes … but locking down review filtering? BTW – AI will get around all this stuff, too, and probably in five minutes. Do better, Amazon.
Thank you for your suggestions. I have not yet tried it with a different browser, I will do that.
And especially thank you for that link, it makes sense, in that it sounds exactly like the sort of nutty thing that happens when AI is in the process. So I will wait my 5 days to see if my “request” produces any results.
It’s kind of the reverse – these user-interface inconveniences are Amazon’s response to AI being in the process. The process of purchasing items, or collecting review data, and so forth.
Now I’m curious as to what, exactly, a legit human user does (presumably inadvertently) to make Amazon think “That’s an AI bot!!”?
Yes, that question is why I called it nutty. I don’t think it’s some person who has reviewed my conduct and come to a wrong decision, but just another AI bot.
This change happened for me quite recently, although I’m not sure exactly when was the last time I looked at product reviews. Probably not more than a month or two. I wonder if I copied something out of a review once, for some reason? I can’t specifically remember doing so, but it is possible.
There is a thing where you can mark that an item as a gift. I wonder if the behavior now or the old was is different for a gift. So if you were buying a friend size small condoms for their birthday, it wouldn’t have shown up so specifically.
OK, I looked it up. A “gift” won’t have a price if an invoice is included, it won’t affect your personal recommendations on the front page and you can include a note.
I’ll add my Amazon complaint here: it seems to be about 90% cheap Chinese crap, even for products where there are plenty of better options available from known brand names. It’s really put me off shopping with them.