What's this about?
Reports that Amazon has started hiding customer reviews, prompting sign-in when you click through to read more. Whether it applies to signed-in users too is disputed in the thread — some see it everywhere, others not at all.
Why would a retailer hide its own reviews?
The stated-in-thread theory is anti-scraping: review text is exactly the corpus AI companies want, and it is Amazon's asset. The cynical theory is the same fact with different framing — this is less about protecting customers from bots and more about preventing customer data from leaving Amazon's control. Both explanations predict identical behaviour, which is why the thread can't resolve it.
What's the community saying?
HN 69 points, 31 comments
- Reports conflict on whether signed-in users are affected, which suggests a partial or gradual rollout rather than a policy change.
- The resigned assessment: bots have already ruined the value of reviews, so the question is whether Amazon can actually fix that or is just applying another band-aid.
- The most concrete complaint is adjacent: Amazon's email receipts now say "N items" with broad categories and no prices, removing the minimal record people used for expense tracking.