this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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So, this at least has an answer... if you have it enabled on your account, Amazon will email you about products you've bought or sometimes even just looked at. It's worded as the question someone else posed, so some 60 year old woman gets a "does this steering wheel cover fit my Ferd Fteenthirty?" In an email, and she writes back "I don't know. I don't own that truck." And Amazon scoops the reply and posts it as an "answer".
Yeah, I would really like to see them either stop doing that or make it very clear in their email that you should only respond if you know the answer to the question.
The email does say that, people do it anyway.
Ah, I'll be honest, I don't actually read these emails closely often, but you're right. Looking now through my inbox archive, I see that Amazon added an "I don't know the answer" link in their email sometime between April and May of 2019. It looks like initially they had the text somewhat smaller for the "I don't know the answer" link, but they seem to have increased the text size to match the "Answer/Respond to this question" link sometime between February and March 2020. At any rate, those emails were going out for many years before 2019 without an "I don't know..." link and I think they could still probably make it clearer to people what they're actually doing by posting "I don't know" as an answer.
I once bought a few bits via my 60 year old father's Amazon and he'd forward these emails to me and then ask if I was helpful when we saw eachother in person.
It got better. The mails don't look like personal mails anymore and the amount of "I don't know" answers dropped.