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Amazon Prime Video will start showing ads on January 29th unless you pay extra for ad-free
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
When they announced this, it was the last straw for me with Amazon that caused me to finally cancel Prime, which I've paid for annually since it was first offered. Things I've been complacently shrugging off until now:
their delivery misses/delays have gotten consistently worse over the past year and a half
they screwed up my combined music library when they changed Amazon Music, which was working great before the change
Audible keeps pushing up-sale subscriptions I don't want, and is inconsistently working with Android Auto now (but was fine until about a year ago)
Prime Video ads and up-sale "channels"
book editions (especially textbook editions): they limit the ability to re-sell old editions of textbooks when newer editions are currently in print. Many classes specify old editions because that's what the curricula and syllabi have built around and the profs can take responsibility for validating the content. This is a serious issue with the number of errors that manage to get past editors for math and science texts, and they publish new editions for cash grabs when no actual new or useful information has been added.
They really don't have to do much to keep me complacent tbh - just stop breaking things that already work(ish). Find whatever the deliverable requirements were in like 2015 and just return to those.
I don't stream much but being disabled, I can't get to the store so I do order stuff from Amazon. What I've seen in the last few years is an influx of Chinese sellers with tons and tons of garbage and all of the reviews are completely worthless, of course.
This has been my main observation with Amazon over the past few years. It’s just cheap knockoffs that have gamed the system. It’s frustrating to shop there and a dice roll whenever you order something.