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Comment by josefritzishere | Hacker News Reader

Stop buying this junk. Turn off the service. Only revenue loss will motivate better corporate behavior

That’s what makes this sting: the buyers already did pay a price premium (and subscription) to motivate behavior consistent with their preferences.

And even after accepting that premium, the company is just choosing not to deliver on its end anymore. And to be clear, “its end” here is refraining from pushing ads: a twisted state of affairs where the default condition is the company doing the work to force you to see ads, and you’re paying the company not to abuse you.

this reminded me to cancel my Prime free trial. I quit Prime a while back and then got continually harassed with lights-on-nobody-home sales pitches like ‘You spent $42.31 on shipping last year’ (like that’s a reason to buy a subscription that costs 3-4x as much!)

They say you can only get one free trial a year so I figured taking one and canceling might let me shop on AMZN for another 11 months without harassment.

… now I gotta move my last few things in AWS to Azure…

Right, basically a legal form of extortion. "Pay up or we'll employ our best psychological manipulation techniques (invasive ads) to ensure you spend more money with us in the future". Paying to remove ads is such a grotesque result of hyper-capitalism.

Invasive ads are psychological manipulation? Which part is the psychological manipulation, the ads you chose (by not paying, but still using the service)? So the ads aren't really there to sell you something, they're there to punish you for not paying?

I have so many more questions but this is a good start.

This line of thinking is very "yet you participate in society"-esque. It's disingenous to suggest that I explicitly "chose" ads when I dared to view a singular YouTube video out of the thousands I'm linked to or shown thumbnails of on basically every website or social platform. Yeah I can live in the woods and use a browser without JavaScript or images but that's not a realistic or feasible way to participate in modern society, to the extent that I effectively have no choice but to be subjected to the psychological manipulation of advertising, at some point or another. That's part of its coercive nature: the all-permeating ubiquitousness of it.

What has been done is done, no point wasting time waiting for miracles from amoral companies, accept losses and move on.

Want long term quality without ads? Dont look at biggest corporations milking ads where they can, any words they say are just farts in the wind, long term behavior is the only thing that matters. Either find a long term moral manufacturer and pay accordingly, or hack it together yourself if you can.

If none of above is possible, throw it out, its a gimmick at best. I live in Switzerland among pretty wealthy people and in 2024 know absolutely 0 people having any such device. Happiness and quality of life lies completely elsewhere.

A price premium? Are you aware that Amazon sells these at a loss? Amazon wants to kill Alexa because they couldn't find a way to monetize it.

Amazon is not making money on Alex. Thats the problem. They assumed that people would buy a lot more this way, but in reality people just want a robot servant that sets timers and play music.

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