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I worked on Prime during the Prime Video launch. All of the marketing was around it being ad free and a new benefit of the Prime membership. Not too long later they started playing pre roll ads for Amazon Video offerings (maybe Amazon Studios, I don’t remember). I brought it up in a meeting and the business folks said it was OK because it wasn’t in the middle of the selected content. I’m pushed back, but it went nowhere.

Thinking about it now, he probably meant it was OK regarding their contracts with studios. Our engineering chain of command was completely obsessed with customer experience. The business side, not so much.

I'm always amazed at how little people will care about the customer experience for a shot at a 20k raise.

In all fairness to the MBAs, the "Customer Obsession" commandment could be interpreted multiple ways.

Such a metrics-driven company will surely know something about how incentives drive outcomes.

For a metrics driven company they sure did not cite a single metric or have any data when they forced mandatory RTO without having enough office space or desks to support everyone returning while I worked there.

Not sure they really care about many metrics these days.

The metrics are there and they were driven by them; they just didn’t want to share what those metrics were because they wouldn’t be received well.

“Our primary investors are also leveraged heavily in the commercial real estate market and they’re losing their shirts and we need their money, so…”

Yeah, it is just very humorous such that normally, all of us in the room are used to a specific kind of presentation, where they show metrics and why that's a good thing because all decisions MUST to be data-driven. In this particular case, it definitely "boosted productivity and was helpful" no Q&A, no data, meeting was over.

And then we didn't have enough desks, outlets, and internet was slow. Lmao.

Try using self checkout at Whole Foods and you'll see how much they care about customer experience.

I always wondered about how this fit with the TOS. People paid for Prime with the expectation it was ad-free. Then it got ads, and now it has tons. I never watch anything anymore, which I guess saves them $ because they don't have to pay the content providers. But it sure feels lousy to be a boiled frog. I would ditch it if my wife didn't insist on keeping Prime.

The TOS of almost any online business says they can change the TOS any time they want to, with the minimum legally required notice.

Plus, most TOSes have very little legal effect, in either direction.

Well ofcourse - the I in MBA stands for Intelligence.

Same thing with Audible. Very annoying. When you open the app, it shows you ads for books to buy instead of the books you already have or the book you're listening to now. Of course, they do not care. Whether you actually listen to the book isn't that important to them, as long as you buy it.

Audible is an Amazon brand, no?

OpenAudible saves the day.

I found the Kindle ads particularly infuriating when they advertised books I had already purchased from Amazon. They were insultingly brain dead in their targeting especially given how much Amazon knows about me

>.. insultingly brain dead in their targeting especially given how much Amazon knows about me.

Fascinating isn't it? It continues over decades. I cannot recall ever once opening an overt ad among, what, hundreds of thousands? Google `subverts' in search I've opened, but that only layers their more desperate enshittings. Newpipe escaped and saved me from Youtube's thousands of bearskin hoodies, butter and bowel movements, pink salt trick, something about men's erections and a tomato.

These must be smart people who engineer this, this `inverse' offensive ad targeting, it must be for some brilliant objective, but I remain completely lost at what it could possibly be.

I just got a case in for the kindle instead of unlocking ad free, I barely notice the ads in the very brief time they’re visible

Jailbreak it, install KOReader.

https://koreader.rocks/

Paid the Danegeld. Hope it works out.

In this case, the original retail buyer was offered a choice between paying $X for ads-free or $X-minus-discount for with-ads. And it was disclosed upfront what they were buying into.

Since my priorities were different than the original buyer, I repaid that discount amount.

Nice deal for Amazon because they get to double-dip as the same device served ads for some time for the first owner and then they still get the ad-free uplift eventually.

Maybe one day they'll turn it into an yearly thing to avoid ads.

It was a fair deal to me.

I respect that they offered the option at purchase time and then at any point after, and at a reasonable price.

And isn't this an option that the everything-is-a-market HN libertarians would like to have: People who want less expensive, say, TVs, can get the existing market price for that. And people who don't like that ads/surveillance, but want the nice economies-of-scale hardware, can pay what the brand would've made on advertising and surveillance, to opt-out, for that unit?

Ideally, a lot of the current surveillance and advertising (implemented almost entirely by HN's own field) would be outlawed, but paid opt-out can sometimes be a reasonable pragmatic individual compromise, for now.

You bought a device that obeys its manufacturer instead of you. A device you have no control over.

Or maybe I'm wrong - did the $X you paid for ads-free also give you root access?

Good question. This is a locked-down device that's controlled more by the company than by me.

Which I bought for pragmatic business reasons.

Don't worry, I have a home full of Debian, OpenWrt, Coreboot, a non-'smart' TV, GrapheneOS, etc.

There are no IoT devices, and I go out of my way to avoid buying devices with IoT shoved in. For reasons obvious to people who know how they work, and who know what their business priorities and track records are.

Also, in startups, I usually use open source, avoid unwarranted vendor lock-in and certain known-jerk companies, and try to work with people who are similarly-minded about such practices (it's a useful signal of better-than-average people who care, IME).

turn off WiFi and transfer by usb.

Amazon no longer allows eBook downloads from their website.

Then don’t buy from them, plenty of venues

I’ve purchased and backed up over 700 kindle books over the years. The day Amazon made backups impossible I switched to Kobo and have never looked back.

Amazon can can go forth and multiply with itself.

Backups aren't impossible, its just a bit harder than it used to be.

That said, Kobo is great if they have the book you're looking for.

Many with trade offs. I recommend the pocketbook 4. You can disable recommendations easily, and the unit mounts as a disk so you can read and write books as if it were an SD card.

No internet required. No sync software required. It’s quite nice!

Ditto. It's also significantly lighter weight than competing readers (at least when I bought mine), has physical buttons, has color models, and has really good battery life possibly because it runs a custom Linux instead of Android.

I really liked my PocketBook InkPad Lite. After the one-time firmware update, I put it into airplane mode permanently, and always just updated DRM-free books on by plugging it in as USB Storage, and `rsync`-ing `~/doc/` to it.

The update script was pretty much this (on a laptop set up not to automatically mount removable filesystems):

    #!/bin/sh -x
    DeviceMountPoint="/media/pocketbook"
    mount "$DeviceMountPoint" || exit 1
    cd ~/doc || exit 1
    rsync -crltv . "${DeviceMountPoint}/."
    Status=$?
    umount "$DeviceMountPoint"
    exit $Status

And the `/etc/fstab` entry was something like:

    /dev/disk/by-id/usb-USB-FS_PocketBook_MYSERIALNUMBER-0:0 /media/pocketbook vfat user,noauto 0 0

I switched to a Kobo device and have zero regrets other than that I didn't switch earlier

my next device will be a kobo, for sure! I just have two old Kindles that I keep alive because they're still useful. I ripped the drm on all ebooks I bought from Amazon because I don't trust rich people (and I was right), and now I only buy drm-free.

the copy of the ebook you download doesn't have to be the one you paid for.

if buying isn't owning, copying isn't stealing.