Technology

They probably need to show investors that the money spent developing it is worth it. “We’ve added X amount of users this quarter alone!”

Forced upgrades (or downgrades) really are the worst. Same for opt-out services instead of opt-in. Give choice back to the customer goddammit!

Its the same model as microsoft claiming that all Office users are "copilot" users.

I have the original Echo, and it still works. For some reason I had it running and it had an alert recently. So I asked what it was, and Alexa promoted being able to upgrade and told me how it’s so much better and stuff. And told me I just had to give it the go to upgrade.

So I did. And then AND THEN it told me my device is too old.

Fucking POS. I unplugged it again. I use it as a stand for my HomePod Mini.

Solution: cancel your Amazon Prime subscription. Remember that Bezos also funded Trump's inauguration and he ruined the Washington Post.

Maybe I'm now in the minority, but I never bought a spy speaker, or bought spy cameras to attach to my house, inside or out.

My suggestion is, if you have them, get rid of them. But, I'm probably just an old man yelling at clouds, and am safe to ignore. Carry on.

Gotta begin to question the utility of a device that exists to antagonize you, even after I've explicitly gone through the options menu and disabled all the "Would you like us to continue antagonizing you?" toggles.

Call me old, but save for my phone, I don't have any 'smart' anything. My desktop is running linux mint and my webcam is more than 12 or 13 years old and it is unplugged when not in use. I am doing just fine, thank you. My phone is probably listening to me, but all it hears is youtube political commentary videos against Trump.

The ads I get are super generic and talking about shit I REALLY don't care about or apply to me, so I think that I am doing fine when it comes to ad avoidance.

Yo, they charge the non-Prime people fucking $10 a month for it. Is that just the "ad-free tier" now?

I convinced my wife this was coming a few months ago and its what finally convinced her we needed to drop Prime and Alexa.

This is not at all surprising. We got rid of prime about a year ago and generally have avoided buying through Amazon, but on a few occasions, it's been the only option so we bit the bullet. It was awful.

Prices and shipping listed were for prime members (autoselected of course) with small print nonprime member prices selectable. Their once famously easy purchase process was multiple screens full of "don't you want to rejoin prime??" pages with the option "join" already checked. Even after selecting the nonmember price and saying no to prime, going to the checkout page revealed an option auto checked for 'faster shipping' that was actually an option for rejoining prime. In buying multiple items this was autoselected on each of them separately, so you're agreeing to prime if you miss changing one.

Even if I have to order from them periodically (which I avoid like the plague), I have no intention of paying for prime again. The whole purchase process is an indicator that dropping prime is making an impact and I want that message to sink in.

For those who have Alexa, downgrading the plan, or even better-- finding an alternative home assistant, will send an equally powerful message, even if Amazon isn't ready to hear it.

Wtf is alexa? Voice bot? Why do people need that

Speaking of which, is there a good open source alternative?

Don't they have lawsuits for similar tactics with prime?

Not surprising. I had to remove my credit card information from Amazon because I kept getting automatically signed up for Prime without my consent.

I dumped Amazon ten years ago, when I got scammed by a third party seller and Amazon did fuck-all to help. Amazon doesn't extend the same protections to third party sellers, I suppose that's in the TOS, which I'm sure everyone has read carefully.

I could go into detail how the scam worked, and probably still does work. The jist is, shippers don't provide full addresses to Amazon, only the zip code. So, if the scammer shows that they have a shipping receipt for a zip code, Amazon just trusts that the box was shipped to the correct address. Turns out they shipped an empty box to a local restaurant--it took a lot of calls to find that out.