But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be generated just for you, filled with AI-made reviews and users. The entire internet will just be a computer that guesses what you want and shows you its best guess as the truth. a little matrix-y.

Reading back I sound like T*d K but the next 100 years is going to be unimaginable in terms of what silicon is going to be able to do. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough most of the time. Like a mcdonalds drive thru.

If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it or shift to shopping from trusted sellers who recognize the tremendous amount of value they can capture by not scamming people.

That slide has already started. I can't buy stuff on Amazon anymore, because I don't trust the quality or that I'm not scammed. Unless I trust the author I'd question buying self published books. There's a number of Chinese website, like Wish, that I don't understand. Why bother shipping an item to a customer if you're running a scam? People order dress and get a plastic Christmas tree... Why even bother sending the tree? Why produce shitty products that break after first use, why not just straight up rob people, seem more genuine and with less environmental impact.

There are whole categories of products that can not longer be bought online and an even larger category that can only be purchased from trusted companies.

The level of scams have reached new heights in the past year and unless we do something to address "A.I." generated content the internet will drown in useless nonsense.

Could be the same reasons Scam Contractors do "some work" if you hire someone to redo your bathroom, and they take the money and run, that is clear criminal fraud. If they take the money, so some amount of work, then run it becomes a civil contract dispute.

Plausible deniability.

"There seems to have been some..." looks up excuse for the day "... unfortunate mix-up with your order."

Lots of people will just not react, because it's not worth their money and at least they received something.

All you need is a system to authenticate reputable sellers. Instead of looking at the stars on a product and clicking “buy now,” folks just need so ask: do I know this seller? Is this the ACTUAL publisher selling me this book?

I’d rather go into a real shop anyway. Unless it’s buying some hard-to-find item there’s no excuse.

You’re assuming that scams don’t make their way into regular distributors as they try to cut corners and maintain competitiveness.

You already see established brands lower the quality of their products after the first round of reviews online. If found out, they just blame manufacturing. Sorry.

In most ways, buying from a brick-and-mortar establishment is a better choice than buying online.

In my mind we’re talking about what is a better solution to the problem, and it’s that companies WILL protect their IP. If someone buys fake Patagonia, Patagonia loses out on a sale.

Amazon doesn’t own much of anything IP-Wise on their marketplace in the grand scheme. And they don’t care who buys what as long as products are moving. It’s easier for them to just pay out returns than handle the actual problem.

And when you have a dispute with a seller that came through a marketplace, your dispute should be with the marketplace and it is then up to the marketplace to recover the value of the goods from the seller.

Costco bucks this trend though

Because they have a warehouse full of ugly misprinted clothes and need to get rid of them. and those clothes still cost (some) money to make or acquire.

and as others have said, not sending anything is wire fraud, and outright scams will catch criminal charges; one more line on an Interpol indictment. Crappy or underperforming goods are a civil issue, and no one is launching an international lawsuit over a $100 item

"How to verify any claim" has to become a formal subject like math and reading to be taught in stages over several years. It has to have real homework problems to practice different strategies. But in the end, do we come up with different ratings or logic categories to say this particular question is fifth degree hard to get right? Can we identify the elements that build trust? Does it help in poker if you know another player's family? Does it help in voting for student body president if they previously served as class president? Is it better to buy a blender from the same company that made your favorite dishwasher? Can you take a chance on a newcomer if they don't speak your language or have your accent? What if some claim hasn't been published in a peer-reviewed journal I recognize?

Scams are high, but not so high that you won't usually get what you asked for.

Obviously in a world where every online retailer is nearly useless, a guy who creates an online retailer that is not useless would immediately have anyone he personally tells about it as customers, and anyone they tell about it, and so on (since in this hypothetical, everyone is desperate for a good retailer).

Plus they send you candy

I mean you get scammed maybe twice by a company, then buy somewhere else. You quickly realize that it is better spending 3-4 times the amount of money for something that will last 10 years than buying stuff that do not work or keep breaking after a few months/years.

I am too poor to be able to afford buying cheap stuff.

Most people still just buy the cheapest version of an item they are looking for.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Also, I am not trying to hyper optimize my use of time, but rather I find the experience of huge selection, fake reviews mixed with sponsored listings to be very unpleasant. I have slightly more faith in quality control at a department store, or even a dedicated housewares store.

One of the depots used by DHL when they "can't find" my building (even though the place predates the formation of the Soviet Union, let alone its collapse) is about a mile away and I don't have a car. This is fine unless it rains, but it's not even conveniently on my way to anything interesting.

I bought a VOIP phone from the media store recently. When I was there looking at them, and feeling them etc, I was thinking how there is no way I could have picked the right one from an online shop. I might have never known there was something better, I guess. But being able to hold them helped me pick one I thought I would like.

Roost Stand

Accessories4less

Svsound

Maybe Amazon brands will at least be predictable, but the non-Amazon brands on Amazon will be increasingly counterfeits and noise.

(A contributor to the current problem of eroding non-Amazon brands with counterfeits seems to be Amazon's commingling from different marketplace sellers of the "same ASIN". And the current mass-spam search DoS of random-name brands and near-identical products from overseas sellers is also a problem. Amazon can not only shield their own brands from both of those problems, but can also exercise more supply chain integrity control for its brands than is possible for the non-Amazon brands if Amazon doesn't cooperate.)

They identify widely ordered products and source their own version to sell. Why is that a negative? Costco does the same. As long as they vet the quality (my experience with AmazonBasic products has been fine), seems like a win-win?

Of course, because that helps sell the Amazon brand goods.

You’d have to duplicate this to take them on.

Very difficult to get a hold of someone when they lose a package even when they explicitly tell you “contact us”.

But if you stick to inconsequential items, it’s great. I needed a few USBC cables and charging cables the other day and got them next day at half the price. I checked the local stores and none had what I was after.

But yeah, I agree with your point

I realize that it’s apparently way worse in the US, but there supposedly are issues here as well, I just never encountered them (or the products are so well-faked that it’s a distinction without a difference).

Fast delivery, a lot of choices, both "Aliexpress but faster delivery for a price", but also EU products, and a customer service that does pretty much anything asked.

I don't know if we can say that a store with unlabeled aisles can be a source of curation.

What they said is that Costco is upfront about what they're selling, rarely sells defective products, and offers a very generous return policy in the (rare) case you are dissatisfied with a purchase.

Those aren't that far off from Walmart or Target, because those are also generally reasonable retailers. I would say Costco offers better value on their products overall.

If you ask more of that from any retailer, good luck finding anyplace to purchase anything.

And speaking of convenience, it would be a big shame if we had to go back to physical stores for non-trivial purchases because we can't trust anything online.

In short, the store that serves what I want is usually the huge sell-everything store.

This already happens over and over, and with AI it’s only going to be worse. Company makes a decent product, gains reputation, and then strip mines their good will for quick cash while quality plummets. After a while, you just distrust the whole online shopping experience. Even if someone is selling a good product, the lemons are ruining the whole market.

I’m surprised that places like Walmart or Target haven’t gotten burned by cross listings. They could drop the program and advertise as alternative to Amazon. If Amazon had “sold by Amazon” filter, it would be a lot more usable.

Some people have. This is one of the main reasons why I stopped using Amazon years ago.

But lots of people won't. If people were that rational, then the thousands of straight-up obvious and traditional scams perpetrated every day wouldn't still work.

at some point technology is going to stop being something that we interact with through a screen and a keyboard. Google maps will be there, where ever you go, all the time. No more getting lost or wondering where anything is located. You will just know. or at least, be told.

Something else to consider is the fallibility of human memory. As we generate more information we're gonna have to start abstracting and delegating some of those storage and retrieval tasks to the computer, trusting it completely. Today maybe you can remember things but what about your parents?

You don't need to be able to generate correct regexes to create a blogspam article about regexes that will go to the top of the search results.

I think this puts the blame in the wrong place; LLMs are too dumb to be useful, but it's the users who are too dumb to realise that, or too unethical to care.

I buy board games on sites that only sell board games.

I buy electronics/computer parts on sites that only sell that.

dead internet theory -- the idea that the internet will eventually be mostly or entirely bots talking to bots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Radio stations would get paid to make songs that weren't popular seem more popular than they were so people would blindly buy them. It's the same old snake oil just taken to mass media.

Since both behaviors revolve around profit, you can apply the same means to mediate them. Further, the open plan "user generated content" model has been dying for a while now, the wills of some well moneyed monopolies keep it alive. We will iterate to something much better anyways. Perhaps this is just a force that drives it.

Same with weight-loss or exercise programs, that's basically impossible to search for due to the amount of spam and garbage content.

Authenticity will be a valuable currency in the future.

Also, during the collapse of yahoo, it was a poorly kept secret that google had already mostly abandoned page rank, and had large manual curation teams.

To add insult to injury, in unbranded head to head tests, Yahoo search had better search result quality than google for many years before it was sold to Microsoft.

See "Parasocial interaction".

    Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms. Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusory experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show hosts, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. The term was coined by Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956.

Yes, and doubly so if they say something like "this is not sponsored".

if 90% of the market is bullshit, the key is to find the people you trust and want to be similar to.

"This is who I am, and who I'd like to be, and this is what they do and use".

And admittedly, a lot of these oft maligned influencers are actually trying on the makeup on camera, eating the food, etc. Not a random bot but a human.

We'll see if GPT and Midjourney are able to hack that, too.

We already know what happens when piracy is the most convenient/highest quality option, but I’m guessing media distributors will need a reminder soon.

Taking things off the net would be a huge step back for economy.

LLMs will cause a total collapse of trust online. This problem will be solved by a brand new online trust model (instead of the old one "has gained some followers by formulating text messages and forwarding gifs").

The trustees (bots/humans/orgs mixed) would probably need to sacrifice much more of their privacy. Not for the sake of orwellian Big Brother, but for re-establishing any trust whatsoever online.

I'll just ignore the internet instead. The internet cannot be trusted when it comes to privacy, so I'm not going to give up any in the first place.

"The entire internet will just be a computer that guesses what you want and shows you its best guess as the truth" - you just described Google Search, like, 5 years ago.

"the next 100 years is going to be unimaginable.." - not really. What we're capable of is not what happens. We only reach the minimum viable capability that meets a societal expectation. Once the expectation is reached, progress stagnates, until something exceptional changes the expectation. As a more specific example, regardless of how advanced hardware gets, software remains a gas that fills any container, so what we can actually do with the hardware is always limited by our horrible software.

People keep talking about AI like it's going to transform everything. It's actually more like colorized talking movies vs the black-and-white silent ones. Reshapes industries and changes expectations and experiences? For sure. But the films, plots, characters, actors, industry, viewers, their effect on society, etc remain the same. 3D didn't take hold, neither did smell-o-vision, drive-ins, and countless other "innovations", even though they were feasible. This is just one example, there are tens of thousands of other examples I could give. It's like a law of nature. We don't accomplish what we aren't motivated to.

Also, mcdonalds drive thrus work all the time, not just most of the time. The drive thru is the engine that generates most of the revenue; it's a conveyor belt for cash. A franchise would go out of business if the drive thru broke.

as for the rest of the post, the application is not limited to consumer products. Imagine the 2016 election season in 2056. or another covid pandemic.

In the 1918 Flu Pandemic, we had the technology and knowledge to end it quickly. But nations around the world chose to spread disinformation and cover-up the story, which made it much worse. A third of the world died because of how society chose to act.

And when we make a product that can do harm, we also make a product that can revert it, clean it up, or institute laws to restrict it. Now that we've seen things like Russian bot farms, we look for them and shut them down. Despite that we have good AI, we can also detect AI. Our ingenuity can almost always be surpassed by more ingenuity. As much as it can cause harm, it can also fix said harm.

AI is just a hammer in a toolbox, and it isn't any worse than any other hammer we've had. Don't worry about the hammer; worry about the person holding it.

Amazon would hate this, but make a deal with shopify to speed up spidering their sites. Then, spider all other retailors.

You put in a product id/name, and it only shows results from amazon, shopify sites, and vetted retailers.

The manual curation part, is vetting the retail site. Walmart would be a problem(for example), unless it was easy to tag 'sold by walmart'. Amazon's filter would only include shipped by amazon stuff.

So like 'hanes t-shirt', and you get 7 links, from 7 sites, all woth prices and shipping cost estimates.

Amazon has horrible pricing, bordering on predatory for some things. Maybe I'll do this, I'm bored this summer.

It all depends on how well you connect the dots on your way.

But the whole notion of "I just buy from one place and one place only without comparing anything at all ever again" is a bridge to far in my mind. So the whole "Siri send me whatever I tell you" I doubt will catch on with the majority of people. A niche maybe, sure. But not the majority of us.

Otherwise it's all downhill until the singularity.

Only half kidding, about both statements. Corporations also have rights. How terrible it will be when we have "companies" that are just AI programs. All human weakness, eliminated.

South Korea requires you to register with your national id if you want to access the internet there, which sounds like the wrong direction but might be necessary if we want to maintain some semblance of sanity on the internet or whatever it is going to become in the future.

Wouldn't it be elegant though if the new trust scheme applied the same to LLMs/bots as humans?

Assuming that LLMs are a polar opposite of humans seems short sighted. Or assuming that humans are sole heroes of the story. It will be a spectrum, soon. For example when you say "all human weakness, eliminated" it's a weird lens to use. Every relative weakness is a challenge, whether its origin is in human ancestral environment or not.

I'm curious whether the entirety of the system (I mean the current civilization) would morph itself into a pipeline disgorging specifically human "happiness". As of today, it's far from obvious!

I honestly don't care if a human augments their output with an LLM. What I care is that they act in good faith. As long as new identities can be spun up automatically with negligible effort, human or otherwise it's too easy to flood the zone with shit.

I want to be able to say "This post was made by an ID that is tied to a human being that has a history of acting in good faith, and I can see that history". Even if "I" am the owner of a crowdsourced-content site and I'm keeping that ID private. If the person who uses that ID is leveraging an LLM to create what looks like good-faith content, that's fine. The problem this solves is one person using LLMs to create a sockpuppet army that looks like a hundred thousand humans, not one person using an LLM to generate a flotilla of good content. Or even a flotilla of bad content but we still konw who's doing it.

A requirement like that would be the final death knell for the few remaining parts of the web that are actually good.

Any content from a known author needs to be verified to be from that author by letting that author sign the content.

> As of July 20, 2023, the AI classifier is no longer available due to its low rate of accuracy.

https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-...

- Identify a problematic trend

- Extrapolate into infinity

- Assume nothing will be done to correct it

- Apocalypse!

It’s very popular among journalists and experts, despite the fact that this literally never happens, because it turns out people don’t just stand still and drown if they see a wave coming for them.

I see you had a typical customer service experience with Amazon.

Out of curiosity, how do intellectual property laws handle someone publishing a work under someone else's name? Is that a trademark violation?

Of course the actual entity posting the fraudulent books are probably overseas somewhere and will disappear if anyone tries to contact them. Maybe if it happens to enough people a class-action lawsuit against Amazon would force them to do some due diligence when listing a book to make sure that the author is actually who they claim to be.

Then large language models utterly annihilated this as it becomes obvious that you just write spam books and hope people buy them, job done…

Kind of amazing to see thevalue collapse reaching a new phase, where the only reliable way to drive sales for garbage books is to try and parasitically leach reputation by pretending a real author who has a real reputation is the author of the garbage book.

In addition to being a professor with The Great Courses (How to Publish Your Book), she is the author of The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press), which received a starred review from Library Journal.

Amazon is an international, but is certainly bound by the laws of the United States of America. At least the ones it can't buy itself out of.

"I didn't know" isn't an affirmative defense if your employees are on the record saying they know.

The (frustrating) argument Amazon would make here is that they weren't "aware", there was just an "accusation", and since the accuser didn't supply evidence...

I mean, really, you cannot lie about who authored books you’re selling. Especially if the author is well known and their reputation has value. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37043061 has a reasonable if blunt assessment. But, honestly, this is obvious to everyone who isn’t customer obsessed ;)

Amazon itself is the entity attributing the book to the more famous Jane Friedman. This is a case where the "impersonator" appears to be legally fine and Amazon is on questionable ground.

Sort of. Publishing under a pseudonym is fine, but most US states have laws that prevent you from using someone else's name and likeness without their permission.

Here's an example of a literary forgery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_forgery) where the author ended up in prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries ... But it would probably take some digging to see what particular action he was had for.

It sounds like maybe this is not happening? If they are just appearing under the search for “AuthorName” I am not sure there really is a problem with Amazon’s system.

IANAL, perhaps Amazon still has some liability if an author is using a fraudulent pen name for books they submit.

For example, this is a blank notebook on Amazon Canada that a seller has stuck her all-lowercase name upon. If I click the author name on the listing, I'm taken to an author search page that intermingles it with her real books.[1]

That strongly implies Amazon asserting they're one and the same.

Knowing that in the reverse this does not hold tells me that this us probably an unconsidered edge-case and not intentional design. But still, Amazon is, in that search, saying "oh you're looking for more jane friedman (lowercase) here's Jane Friedman (title case)" which implies they're the same person.

I'd call that a software bug... but now that Friedman has informed them, they can't plead ignorance of the bug.

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/NOTEBOOK-Notebook-journal-jane-friedma...

Agreed it does seem like a bug.

> Showing 1-1 books for Dr Spock: > * Baby and Child Care > > Search instead for: > > * Mr Spock (10 albums)

Quite often, that link goes to the kindle version of an unrelated book.

That said, a quick poke at TESS shows a bunch of trademarks containing Friedman, including some personal names (Alan, Rivka, Angela).

Update: Yes, common law (unregistered) trademarks are a thing in some countries including the US, but they offer much less protection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unregistered_trademark

In the UK at least if you could show your name gave it some weight, and that you'd suffered some financial harm as a result of its use, then you'd have a case without it being registered.

>Similarly, personal names (actual names and pseudonyms) of individuals or groups function as marks only if they identify and distinguish the services recited and not merely the individual or group. In re Mancino, 219 USPQ 1047 (TTAB 1983) (holding that BOOM BOOM would be viewed by the public solely as applicant’s professional boxing nickname and not as an identifier of the service of conducting professional boxing exhibitions); In re Lee Trevino Enters., 182 USPQ 253 (TTAB 1974) (LEE TREVINO used merely to identify a famous professional golfer rather than as a mark to identify and distinguish any services rendered by him); In re Generation Gap Prods., Inc., 170 USPQ 423 (TTAB 1971) (GORDON ROSE used only to identify a particular individual and not as a service mark to identify the services of a singing group). The name of a character or person is registrable as a service mark if the record shows that it is used in a manner that would be perceived by purchasers as identifying the services in addition to the character or person. In re Fla. Cypress Gardens Inc., 208 USPQ 288 (TTAB 1980) (name CORKY THE CLOWN used on handbills found to function as a mark to identify live performances by a clown, where the mark was used to identify not just the character but also the act or entertainment service performed by the character); In re Carson, 197 USPQ 554 (TTAB 1977) (individual’s name held to function as mark, where specimen showed use of the name in conjunction with a reference to services and information as to the location and times of performances, costs of tickets, and places where tickets could be purchased); In re Ames, 160 USPQ 214 (TTAB 1968) (name of musical group functions as mark, where name was used on advertisements that prominently featured a photograph of the group and gave the name, address, and telephone number of the group’s booking agent); In re Folk, 160 USPQ 213 (TTAB 1968) (THE LOLLIPOP PRINCESS functions as a service mark for entertainment services, namely, telling children’s stories by radio broadcasting and personal appearances).

She should have a personal web controlled entirely by her, show a list of her real books and mock-destroy the fake books from there with some dark humor or cynicism. Her job is to write after all. That could be even an opportunity to improve her brand.

Taken one to one small writers are easy fish. Should join and press for regulation change.

Depends on jurisdiction. There is a a lot of case law (precedent), rather than statute, and it’s up to the infringed party to make a case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

In many cases it is regulated by state law, rather than federal law.

It is basically a slam dunk, if she were to take them to court and if they weren't Amazon who can just grind her down with years of litigation and tricks.

I assume in the same way they handle somebody else who actually has the same name publishing books... they do nothing. Unless perhaps they are associating themselves with you "By the author of Such and Such"

I don't think I can permalink the USPTO TESS page.

Would you hold the same opinion about stuff you'd eat such as supplements? What does `indistinguishable` mean in this context? Say lower quality fish oil which as it's a pill, you can't tell the difference? This would be the fortunate case, I wouldn't even want to bring up mislabeled vitamins or stuff which can actually cause harm that's hard to trace back.

So what did they see that finally convinced them?

A child’s account can’t buy books - you have to do it for them.

1. I open Amazon app on my iphone and find the book - “This app does not support purchasing of this content”.

2. I open Kindle app on my iphone and find the book there - “This app does not support purchasing of this content”.

3. Turns out - you can only buy a book by opening a web version of Amazon in Safari on the iphone. I open up Safari, go to Amazon, dodge and dismiss repeated prompts to open the Amazon app, find the book - it says “Kindle”, it says “Available instantly”, it says “$2.99”, but there’s no “Buy” button. Instead - “The Kindle title is not currently available for purchase.”

4. I find another book, I buy it. Now I need to find how to share it with my kid.

5. I open app Kindle app on my iphone, click on the book expecting some kind of “share” - nope, nowhere I look am I able to find share functionality in the app.

6. I google “how to share your kindle book with child account”, here’s the answer I get: “ On the Amazon webpage, click “Account and Lists”, then click “Manage content and devices” in the “Digital content and devices section of the page”. On the “Digital Content” page, click “Books”.

Delightful experience.

compare this with the piracy option: search for torrent or download link, click, wait for download to finish. Upload to device. Read and enjoy.

Commenter's point was that it's obviously easier to pirate. This is exactly the point; As an author, I'm upset that the system is like it is, I'm not upset at the many people who are undoubtedly going to pirate my work if it's difficult to get, whether it's right or wrong.

No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase." It's the PLATFORM.

IMO, the logical conclusion here is obvious: copyright should provide the author with the right to money, but not with the right to control actual distribution - we should be legally allowed to send the author $X in the mail and then torrent the thing.

This notion that the author should control the means of distribution? It's a historical artifact of old technology when publishing literally meant printing presses, and setting up a competing printing press without the author's authorization was an expensive choice that was inherently, obviously a means to rip off the author.

IMO, every ISBN should have the author's bank account number next to it and obtaining a copy of the ebook should be as simple as sending $X to that bank account, then finding a torrent by ISBN.

which is fine, except what happens if the author sold the rights to another company that then demand a different set of condition?

Or are you saying that the owner of said copyright does not have the right to decide such (for example, they would want to decide that the works is only available as part of something else sold)?

I hear 30-year old overpaid software engineers brainstorming how to cheat the ticket checks at the ski resort. I watch people at all-you-can-eat buffets piling more food on than they can eat and bring something with them for consuming later at home or by their family. People discussing tax loopholes. Or how to get train rides for free if nobody checks the ticket. All well-off folks. Cheating their way through life. It's sickening.

It makes me wonder whether religion may actually be a (partial) solution to this. An atheist myself, I can see value in brainwashing people into believing that they are constantly being watched by an almighty being which will ensure they go to hell if they steal or similar, even if nobody else is watching.

It's really sad that people can't just be decent.

Now, arguably this has even worse consequences on culture than the banning of copying ebooks. Still, it complicates the expected cost of a book significantly, so replacing current copyright with your proposal would require some alternative for this case as well.

It's not though. It's the trademark that prevents that. Copyright only prevents them from making a Spiderman movie based on a story that's already been written. Nothing prevents them from writing a new story about a guy that shoots sticky goo from his wrists, and making a movie out of that.

I guess that story wouldn't be considered canon. But canon also has nothing to do with copyright.

I kid, they are payday loan services for authors.

but the post above explain an arduous process for a purchase, and i would expect that there's not an insignificant number of people who would've given up in the middle.

So do you also feel that you need to make the same complaint of a lost sale to amazon? Why target pirates specifically? Whether they _consumed_ content or not, is irrelevant - in both scenarios, you would've "lost" a sale.

Honestly, I would have given up at the very first step. It clearly says that the content is available, but vendor is explicitly refusing to serve the content.

Words have meaning. Arduous it ain't.

> Tiresome doesn't necessarily mean physically tired.

Not necessarily, no, not at all. I suggest a dictionary. Back in the day, people who cared about reading and the meaning of words would keep one handy, often next to the bed.

> a : hard to accomplish or achieve : difficult

~ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arduous

Pretty sure this process qualifies as "hard" when compared to standard methods of purchasing digital goods.

Always fun when someone wants to argue about the definition of a word without actually using the definition of the word.

If you knew how to use a dictionary you wouldn’t have left out the helpful examples:

> 1a : hard to accomplish or achieve : DIFFICULT an arduous task years of arduous training

> b : marked by great labor or effort : STRENUOUS … a life of arduous toil. —A. C. Cole

> 2 : hard to climb : STEEP an arduous path arduously adverb arduousness noun

Life, years, climb. No, it does not count as arduous in the slightest. First world problems, is that in the dictionary, I wonder?

... right?

Anyway, you seem very confused with internet vernacular; everyone else was able to grasp the context. You appear to be the only individual experiencing difficulties. Just saying.