People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads
- Thread starter JournalBot
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I don't think it's fair to expect customers to know which devices are subsidized. I just had a look on the Echo Show 8 product page and it doesn't mention that you're paying less because it's jammed full of ads. In fact, I couldn't see a mention of ads at all, which seems like a clear misrepresentation of the product.
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I'm only surprised that they haven't started including ads in their Kindle reading views. I assume it's just a matter of time.
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No. Trailers are ads. If I click on a show, then I expect it to just play the show.
Also, Amazon shows actual ads for products unless you pay extra every month. I tried to watch the new Gundam series and it tried to make me watch a one minute ad for some stupid shit I don't want. I closed the app and added the show to Sonarr. It took me about the same amount of time as I would have wasted on that ad and now I have the whole thing ad-free.
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I think that would be tricky for them because the Kindle doesn't really need Wi-Fi to do it's main job. The Echo Show needs an Internet connection to do almost everything.
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...so are projectors "smart" yet or is that mercifully still free of this nonsense?
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One of my kids just moved out. During the process, he unboxed something, and my wife went to break the box down to recycle it. My son said "but it's a pretty nice box...".
I was so proud.
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Anytime I see an ad on a service or device for which I paid, I will purposefully avoid the product or service being advertised. This goes all the way back to when movie theaters started showing ads before the showtime. It never has been okay. It never will be okay.
Any marketing person trying to spin these ads as some selfless act of "helping people discover new content and products they may be interested in" can put a gun to their head and blow their brains out for all I care.
Any marketing person trying to spin these ads as some selfless act of "helping people discover new content and products they may be interested in" can put a gun to their head and blow their brains out for all I care.
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I completely agree that Amazon, or any other retailer selling subsidized hardware not clearly pointing out that fact, for that matter, are misrepresenting their “smart” (LOL) products.
Where my criticism comes into play is that folks purchasing these products have free access to information as far as competitive devices are concerned - and when everyone else sells smart speakers, tablets, etc. for “price X” and Amazon then offers nearly identical ones for a hair over half of “price X”, one just has to know that there will be a catch.
Be it one’s personal data being siphoned off surreptitiously, or the manufacturer suddenly turning the device into a blaster of unskippable ads, sooner or later one will always get exactly the worth of what one paid for any given product or service.
Echo devices, FireTV, Roku streaming trash, et al… all (future) e-waste worth exactly what was being paid for them in the first place. Very, very little, indeed.
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You mean like in theaters? Because if you show up at the theater at the listed showtime, you'll be subjected to up to half an hour of ads not just for other upcoming movies, but increasingly for local businesses, television shows, and pretty much everything else you can imagine.
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Ads....they're the main reason I ditched my TV and radio a very long time ago.
The day it became possible I installed an adblocker on my PC.
I have a new device coming in soon and as i'm unsure I can block all the unwanted sh** on the thing I'm getting a new Raspberry Pi and will run Pi-Hole 24/7.
Should blocking ads become impossible I'll ditch the affected device(s).
I have enough screenless pastimes to get me happily through the day.
When computers didn't exist I did not miss them - if necessary I can go back to that situation.
Once a year or so an ad slips through. I vowed years ago to NEVER buy from companies that manage to get an ad on one of my screens. I've kept that promise religiously.
That's enough: this time: I'll skip my "true nature of ads" rant.
The day it became possible I installed an adblocker on my PC.
I have a new device coming in soon and as i'm unsure I can block all the unwanted sh** on the thing I'm getting a new Raspberry Pi and will run Pi-Hole 24/7.
Should blocking ads become impossible I'll ditch the affected device(s).
I have enough screenless pastimes to get me happily through the day.
When computers didn't exist I did not miss them - if necessary I can go back to that situation.
Once a year or so an ad slips through. I vowed years ago to NEVER buy from companies that manage to get an ad on one of my screens. I've kept that promise religiously.
That's enough: this time: I'll skip my "true nature of ads" rant.
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Not having one of these devices, but being naturally curious.
how well does a PiHole deal with the problem?
how well does a PiHole deal with the problem?
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No, I meant at home actually, but yes the sheer number of ads being shown at theaters these days is enough to make me dread going. I USED to be able to have some calm conversations with the people I went with in relative silence before the movie began. That'd involve about 5-10 minutes of movie trailors, MAYBE an add for the theater itself, and that's it. Then, TV ads got put in... and now, it's just CONSTANTLY playing ads the ENTIRE time.
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Is it nuts? They've been shoving ads into Prime Video for almost 2 years now and people still pay for it for whatever reason - why wouldn't they try to cram more ads down your throat?
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I once got yelled at for looking at my phone during those commercials. Some people enjoy them, apparently.
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Add that to the long list of reasons I've pretty much stopped going to theaters too.
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This now puts the low price of the new Echo Shows in better perspective! And solidifies I won’t be purchasing one.
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My bedroom Echo Dot, which has been quietly displaying the time in a cool blue light for years, has recently decided to bloop-bloop every day. And I'm ready to unplug it.
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I once owned an Amazon Fire tablet. After that thing there's zero chance I'd buy anything Amazon powered with a screen.
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even if you pony up for prime+ (or whatever they call the new charge for "ad free" prime video), you still get ads. just fewer. i tried it for a month, no thanks.
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At the same time, this is essentially how all services are now. Advertising is overwhelming most consumer user experiences these days
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... why? Why would you buy an Echo Show to watch videos on the toilet? You have a phone...
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Stop the press, corporations will say/do anything for profit!
ETA - Snark reply aside, a) the world isn't fair, expecting fairness is a path to misery, b) assume the worst you can imagine about every corporate offering, and you'll rarely be wrong. You'll have underestimated the enshittification more often than overestimating it.
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Apparently a lot of people have a much higher tolerance for ads than I do. I originally signed up for Prime for reasons unrelated to Prime Video (free shipping, because I ordered quite a bit of stuff from Amazon), but for a while I was actually using Prime Video quite a bit because I already had a Prime subscription.
Then they added ads to Prime Video. I got irritated and immediately cancelled the Prime subscription entirely. Then I had no more reason to order stuff from Amazon, so I started ordering directly from the manufacturer web site where possible, or other non-Amazon stores.
If everyone reacted to ads with as much disgust as I do, I think the advertising industry would have died out long ago, but clearly it hasn't, so I guess I'm just the weird one here.
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you now have to pay extra for "no" ads (you still get some, mostly shows but not entirely). if you don't pay extra, you get ads at the start, ads interrupting throughout the show, some back to back even, and ads at the end. like, swapped with them to the point it's hard to enjoy the content.
and no, it's not fine to show me anything but the show during the show. and if i'm paying extra, don't show me trailers, except maybe one at the end of the thing i'm there (and paying) for.
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Yeah we put a few FireTVs in conference rooms (how can you pass up $500 US for 75" class screens?) and I don't think they lasted a week before department heads started filing purchase reqs agains the IT budget for more carefully selected non-Amazon models.
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I feel so burnt out by tech, and more specifically, this notion that companies have the right to modify how things work after purchase without consent or notification.
Does anyone else feel constantly anxious about how their connected devices are going to change - for better or for worse - at any time without warning?
Does anyone else feel constantly anxious about how their connected devices are going to change - for better or for worse - at any time without warning?
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Unfortunately we lost that fight when the class act against Sony for removing "Other OS" functionality in the PS3 ended up ruled in favor of Sony.
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StarturnCaproc
Ars Praetorian
Then why oh why even keep paying for Prime? There's countless entertainment options out there today, for free.
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What exactly is the point of a “smart screen”? Isn’t it basically an ARM tablet? Why not put a full OS on there?
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