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Comment by koalaman | Hacker News Reader

This has been pretty obvious for a while. Whenever I do product searches on Amazon the prime eligible results are more expensive by exactly the shipping costs of the non prime vendors.

The only reason I keep it is for the video service which I'm guessing is the same for a lot of people.

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> The only reason I keep it is for the video service which I'm guessing is the same for a lot of people.

Which will start having ads unless you pay a fee for the ad-free experience starting next year [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/22/1201028854/amazon-prime-video...

Tangentially related, even in YouTube Premium you can still see ads if the content creator embeds ads as part of their content. This seems like double-dipping to me and I am seeing more and more of this.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ is your friend :)

crowdsourced auto-skip for in-video adverts.

I consider that stuff part of the content and weigh it appropriately. Creators who get too obnoxious with sponsored content are dropped from my subscriptions.

The creators I tend to watch the most these days either don’t have sponsorships or they only run their ad at the end of the video in which case I just stop watching or click to the next video.

Yeah I have zero issues skipping host read ads as a YT premium subscriber. I'm already paying not to see ads.

This never bothered me much since I can skip them immediately. I've been trained at this point to immediately skip a minute or so into every video

I love the take that talking about a sponsor isn't an ad. <facepalm>

Even the lame concept of throwing up Pateron supporter's names on the video for mere frames scrolling by is just moronic to me. Do people really think they are special for having their username flashed on a screen? What value/meaning is derived from this?

> What value/meaning is derived from this?

Someone is supporting a creator whose content they like and the creator is publicly saying thank you.

How is this confusing to you?

They can say "thanks to all my supporters". it's just fallacy to think the creator actually cares. it's a simple copy&paste from a list from their patreon (or whatever) to the text editor of their editing software. it's even less if they aren't even the ones doing the editing. sure, they all say "we love our supporters". it's just like people that donate to NPR so they can have their names read out over the air.

how is their sincerity (more to the point, lack thereof) confusing to you?

> They can say "thanks to all my supporters". it's just fallacy to think the creator actually cares.

How deeply cynical and also, besides the point; even if you believe all creators don't give a shit (I believe many do), people still like being thanked.

I mean, clearly you don't ...

what you call cynical, I call naive on your part. We clearly have different opinions on creators and their level of sincerity towards supporters. i hold them just this side of influencers. i understand that they may depend on the support, but it's not like adding someone's name on a screen for .5 seconds means "they care about me". it just means they're fulfilling some obligation they used to entice people to donate. people that decide "because my name will be on the video for .5s" is what pushes to donate is beyond silly.

I think we follow different "creators" ...

A more charitable take is that Amazon is raising the price (for the nth time) of prime, and introducing a small discount if you put up with ads.

Amazon doesn't need charity; they can afford to pay.

The shareholders (me, you, our 401ks) demand growth.

Nice, looks like I have an actual reason to convince my wife that we switch to Instacart next year.

Is Instacart an Amazon replacement for you? Generally, if I can buy something at a store within 15 minutes of me I'll usually just make the drive to buy it rather than going to Amazon. I use Amazon for the things that I generally can't get locally (such as heavy duty floating shelf brackets that I bought recently. No idea what store sells those near me).

But the idea of replacing Amazon with Instacart is definitely intriguing to me

> such as heavy duty floating shelf brackets

Try a local hardware store, not a big-box like Home Depot or Lowes, though they’re likely to have it too! I’ve found that so long as I am patient, local hardware stores are happy to order things for me.

Amazon is great at instant gratification and that’s about it IMO.

Instacart has about an 80% accuracy rate IME. Which is pretty bad…

I use Target for many things now, they also have free shipping and usually lower prices than Amazon

The “hidden tax” described in the article is to sellers, not consumers. Free shipping is subsidy for consumers that costs Amazon billions of dollars. I have personally never seen what you’re describing.

I fairly frequently see a little "may be available at a lower price from other sellers without Prime shpping" thing on listings.

this is pretty common from what I have seen. especially with books.

Which products do you observe this for specifically? I buy from Amazon US all the time and I can’t say I’ve ever noticed that discrepancy, so I can only assume we’re looking at different products or from a different region.

While this varies by territory, I'm UK based, I find the main benefits of Prime to be the next-day (even weekend) delivery, Saturday (even if not next day) delivery, and sometimes the locker delivery option.

Even where prime price is the same as other+delivery this wins out. Though at each price rise or other change I have to rethink if I consider I'm getting a good deal.

That’s likely because the non-prime vendors have to lower their prices to match prime, or they wouldn’t sell much.

Fast delivery of things i want is good too

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