I heard about this recently and read a bunch about it. You get free products but you have to make something like 60 purchases a month and review 80+% of them and then they send you a 1099 or whatever that values the retail price of all the items as income, so you have to pay income tax on all the useless shit you're ordering in order to stay in the program. In a remotely sane world this would be illegal.

[–] JoeByeThen@hexbear.net 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Ya that's why people to tend to fold it into a combo business of pro-reviewing/user generated content (ugc). So they get reimbursed for buying things, they get paid for making reviews, get paid for ugc, and then sell the review product. Plus, whatever their social media, tiktok stores, affiliate traffic, etc pull in.

[–] SchillMenaker@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

My understanding is that Amazon wants you to keep the product for like six months and they can ask you to send it back or prove ownership.

[–] JoeByeThen@hexbear.net 5 points 2 weeks ago

There are many more companies than just Amazon that they're doing it for. We're not talking like one product, we're talking shelves of them. You'll often see Facebook marketplace listings of people offloading lots. A 6 month lag on resale isn't the end of the world.

[–] Assian_Candor@hexbear.net 18 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Lmao 100% they use llms to define what's "insightful"

[–] cbd@hexbear.net 15 points 2 weeks ago

Just like academia in the future, bots grading bots. Pain

[–] miz@hexbear.net 9 points 2 weeks ago

pain