Oh boy, more enshittification
Ahoy Matey!
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Must… make… exponential… profit… Line must go up!”