Oh boy, more enshittification
Ahoy Matey!
Three cheers for ProtonVPN! Make Amazon walk the plank!
As someone who hasn’t sailed the 7 seas since PB and BitTorrent days. Is there a good guide on how to best utilize this now a days?
I literally pay for every single streaming service + YouTube tv and it’s ridiculous. Time to cut the cables again.
PB and bittorent will always be there for you… use a vpn though
Stremio + torentio or downloading your movies + jellyfin
Stree… me… oh…
Veee—-peee—-innnn
Someone else who uses ProtonVPN! Don’t see too many users out in the wild. I love it!
ProtonVPN was killswitching on me 3x a day and NordVPN are criminals (read their ToS it’s 2 pages of fuck you we took your money) after you discover they built in a leak feature. PIA is capped at 10mbps. Is there any other decent option out there?
Mullvad, hunny
Or: the library
Cover your bases, wear an eye patch to the library. 😉
Yar! 🏴☠️
I’ve been a Prime member from the very beginning, but I’m seriously reevaluating whether I should drop it. The value proposition is decreasing for me. At $99 I thought it was pretty good considering the perks like video and music. But then they crippled Prime Music a few months back so it’s a shadow of what it once was (pushing you to subscribe to Unlimited). Now Prime Video is getting ads. Those “extras” are becoming less compelling. So I’m paying $140 annually for just free shipping? Hmmm, these numbers don’t add up anymore.
I cancelled last year. Slower shipping is annoying, but it also encourages me to shop elsewhere, which is nice. I haven’t missed Prime Video, and I’m considering cancelling other streaming subscriptions as well (Disney+ and Netflix left, and both raised prices for my ad-free tier).
At current prices, I could probably just buy physical media for nearly everything I care about and come out ahead.
Amazon typically hasn’t been two business days consistently for years for me. I also found out many of their prices are massively inflated for certain products. A lawn mower I was considering was at least 30% more expensive than the same one on a competing website.
They’ve been pretty consistent for me, sometimes faster, probably because I live a few miles from one of their warehouses. But you’re absolutely right about prices, I’ve found Target to be competitive or cheaper if they have it, and their delivery is just as fast as Prime.
Amazon pricing seems heavily weighted on whether you shopped around online or not. I think they have tracking cookies that check whether or not your comparing prices. If you do, they keep their prices reasonable, if not, they slowly jack them up until you start, then they back off a bit.
See that’s the wacky thing for the mower specifically. Not only do I shop with a browser that has all cookies disabled, I must have checked on the price for the mower ten times over many months along with some alternatives and even other websites. I think they inflate the price if it’s a 3rd party vendor selling on Amazon sometimes.
Great news is that Amazon has also added delivery fee for same day and overnight deliveries for Prime members. At least in UK
So basically it’s too much payment for not much of benefits
Additionally, ordering from other sites was a gamble a few years ago. Now its a well mapped path and its pretty painless.
If they are gonna run ads, I may drop it and just stick with their ad streaming service freevee if they gonna do that.
You still get free shipping as a non member if you buy like $25 worth of shit. And you might get it in 3 days instead of 1 (the horror)
But yeah, that’s about all you’re getting and no it’s not worth it.
They just recently upped free shipping to $35 in stuff
I figured it might have changed considering the last time I ordered something from there was about 6 months ago
You’re getting it for 140? I think I pay 180. Seeing the service continually get worse and worse has me close to canceling too.
Just do it. For $140, you could buy like 10-15 DVDs and rip them onto a USB drive or something.
I also highly recommend your local library (if you’re in an area with good library service), we get lots of shows and movies there for free.
Their change to Music already made me go and get Spotify instead.
Shoving ads in Video as well makes that shit an easy cancel.
This is a disturbing trend. Apparently a lot of these major streaming services are discovering that they can make more from ads than people paying for the service. At least when calculated with the subscriber counts they currently have. It seems they don’t anticipate people leaving their services over this.
Personally there is no way I would ever pay for a service that has ads. I’m not going to pay for a service even if its paid service doesn’t have ads if it has a free or cheaper service with ads as that would just be rewarding them for implementing ads.
For example with Amazon’s plan here. If you pay this $3.00 to remove ads then you are paying Amazon $3.00 because they added ads. This only increases the amount of ads that will be added to things.
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It’s so frustrating. I pay for YT Premium bc that’s probably what I watch the most of…on my main TV in the living room.
The “sponsored” videos have the content creator do multiple commercial spots in their own videos and it’s so annoying. I don’t mind if they advertise their own stuff, like merch, but it’s everything from cereal to VPN’s to mental health apps. Irritating af.
Newpipe + Sponsorblock.
Thanks! Will it work on AppleTV?
I, too, would like to know this
(spoiler alert: nothings gonna work:( )
I’m not sure about this (I use NP on an Android phone) but the clever folks on the Divided by Zero instance on Lemmy should be able to get you sorted.
For example with Amazon’s plan here. If you pay this $3.00 to remove ads then you are paying Amazon $3.00 because they added ads.
That’s just a stealth price increase that they can implement without admitting they’re raising prices.
I think it is a little different. They might even want you to not pay for it if you are a prolific user of Prime Videos.
It’s exactly this. Netflix makes more money from the average basic+ads user than they do from someone on the standard plan. It’s incremental revenue from all users that even occasionally use the service, and invisible to those that pay for Prime but don’t care about Prime Video.
If you pay directly for Prime Video only, it’s a little different.
Apparently a lot of these major streaming services are discovering that they can make more from ads than people paying for the service.
Nah. They’re discovering they can make people pay and shove ads in their face.
Which is worse.
Personally there is no way I would ever pay for a service that has ads.
Somehow we got used to it when it comes to sports events, a long time ago.
But yeah, I get you, and fully agree. Seeing no ads is like the major selling point.
“Must… make… exponential… profit… Line must go up!”
Looks like I canceled Prime right on time. Literally just did it after having it for years because it no longer provides any meaningful benefit, and it’s grossly overpriced for what it is.
When I used to get two-day shipping all the way here in bumfuck, South Dakota, then it was worth it, but it’s faster now just to order from some other site.
Fun fact - if you order a bunch of stuff non-prime, the ship time will be like a week and a half or whatever. If you then upgrade to prime (even the free trial), the delivery estimate suddenly recalculates and it’ll be there in 2 days.
It’s artificially slowed, by obscene amounts, to encourage paying for the subscription. Which other sites don’t do.
I haven’t received anything in 2 days since early 2020, and what finally made me cancel is they took forever to even ship one of my items that was in stock. I ordered two things, one was shipped by the seller and arrived in 3 or 4 days, the other was from the same seller but shipped by Amazon, and they didn’t even initiate shipping until a week later.
I was paying for a service that’s objectively worse than the norm.
I think it depends on where you live. I’ve been without Prime a while and haven’t seen the artificial slowdown. It always says it’ll take 9 days or something when I order, but most often I get a shipping update the next day and things show up in 2-3 days anyway.
Ad free is the only way for a service im paying anything for. If they introduce ads then i will no longer be paying.
The minute something injects ads is the minute I pave my exit strategy.
I hate ads with a passion.
Amazon about to lose my membership. It won’t hurt them but what it’s done is made me consider whether it’s something I want to support.
Companies need a new era of marketing because this generation reversing all their gains.
And if they don’t offer a paid ad-free service, I just won’t use it at all.
I hate ads, and I’m not giving one fucking second to them voluntarily.
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Well that’s getting fucking cancelled then. The constant FreeVee ad supported shit was annoying enough, but they can properly fuck off now. Prime is just a vehicle to sell you more shit.
I would pay for Amazon Prime if they offered purely a free 2-day shipping only version, but I refuse to pay for Prime if it supports the media companies, so I don’t pay for Prime. I have zero interest in DRM-filled “you will own nothing and be happy” streaming bullshit, and I have negative interest in the same thing with ads. Enshittification at its finest.
I canceled mine a year or two ago. Tbh I have not missed it much.
I also did not miss the shipping part as much as I thought I would. If I need to make an order, I wait until I have enough needs to hit the $35 level for free shipping. Even though amazon claims otherwise, I usually end up getting stuff in 2 days just like I used to with Prime.
This has the added benefit of making it less likely for me to be lazy and order a bunch of smaller things. I thus end up getting those things locally.
Time to cancel Prime. Removing perks. Increasing prices. Saturating us with ads.
Too much money is never enough! We need to monetize monetization! Assholes.
Imagine if any of these rich assholes were actually good guys?
Amazon Prime shows begin to be pirated by Amazon Prime Subscribers, until the end of the billing ear when they are no longer Prime Subscribers.
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Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum for me!
