I think I might cancel. I’m not watching ads and I’m not going to pay the extra $3/mo to opt out. I don’t know if I’d end up paying more than the subscription cost in shipping though…
Are other online retailers so hopelessly sucky that you can’t live without Amazon over in the states? It just blows my mind because Amazon honestly sucks compared to the more local stores where I’m at in the Nordics.
I hate Amazon but there are several reasons I use them. Wide selection, free shipping, easy returns, and typically low prices. Every time I have tried avoiding Amazon for everything, I’ve run into annoying issues before long.
Also, sadly there are a lot of less common products that aren’t super available elsewhere. And even when they are, I feel like it’s a risk buying from some random website I’ve not dealt with before.
I wish others could/would compete with these advantages but most don’t. And no I don’t buy everything from Amazon but it is a safe fallback for the items I can’t get at better retailers.
I feel the only thing they do well in my area is provide safer access to random bits and bobs that I buy from AliExpress. But that business is not what makes them rich, of course. It’s people buying everything from them, but that that is even compelling is mind blowing to me due to how atrocious their website and shopping experience is. And I work in e-Commerce as well…
I’ve found Walmart+ and Sam’s+ to be better for my needs lately. I only have prime when I can get it for free for a month. I only care about free shipping. I can give a crap about anything else that comes with prime
I’m in the UK but I’m largely housebound. Prime is life changing for disabled people like myself. I won’t cancel my subscription but I’ll probably pirate anything I want to watch on prime video in future, which isn’t much now they don’t have the tennis rights in the UK.
Some products are only available on Amazon, altough there’s always an alternative on another shop.
I try to avoid Amazon because of how many bad products are on their platform. Other shops also list third-party sellers, but by avoiding those platforms and only buying on proper non-marketplace shops the products usually meet a minimum quality. At least my experience with shops that actually specialize in a specific categorie (pc hardware -> mindfactory.de, electronics -> reichelt.de, …) is generally better.
Ebay for stuff, because you are usually dealing with a person that has some care for your order. Ebay doesnt wait 2 weeks to ship my stuff. Amazon now waits to ship so they can combine my orders. So in the past few months my ebay use is way up and my amazon use is way down. As far as content goes, piracy is still an awesome thing. I pay for physical books and music from bandcamp, the rest is acquired. I think people get lazier and dumber the closer you get to the equator. Thanks for your comment. a guy at 59.9n.
And I continue adding primevideo’s content to my Jellyfin server
Announced just after Christmas, a time when I assume a lot of people sign up for Prime so they can save shipping on presents.
Seems like that would backfire as people recently remember signing up.
Depends on whether or not they signed up for monthly or annual, and many get it in November so things they order show up in time before the xmas postal hell.
It seems like it would work because people wouldn’t think they got their value out of their prime membership yet and are reluctant to cancel after such a short time.
What the hell do people watch on prime? I got it for Thursday night football. There’s nothing interesting on there and half the content is “rent/buy”
“rent/buy”
You mean rent for x amount of time, or rent for an undetermined amount of time.
We don’t do ‘buy’ anymore, that’s just rent without knowing when your rental is over.
prime has some really good shows (invincible, the boys, and good omens are the ones i’ve watched) but ultimately it is WAY too expensive
Half? That’s optimistic.
It still has a better selection than Netflix.
And Usenet has a better selection than both combined, for cheaper and a better experience.
I wish I could just get Prime shipping and drop the video service. I may still drop the whole thing.
Nothing quite like paying an annual fee to ensure that stuff you can’t be bothered to go to the store for are handled by a multitude of people who are systematically abused by their employer.
I don’t know where you live, but around here stores only carry what most people buy. If you want something other than plain vanilla, you have to find it online.
Then take a look at the manufacturers website and see what retailers they use.
Many stores will also let you order items for pickup that they don’t normally stock at your local location. Ask a clerk or again, check their site.
You got hit with a bunch of down votes but it’s not incredibly hard to avoid Amazon, it’s just a little less convenient. Of course, it’s going to depend and vary based on where you are located.
Amazon – If you get a pee bottle your order is free!
This is essentially what’s happening, but instead of them lowering the prime fee and removing videos, they’re adding the additional fee to remove ads from the video service
This and the rising costs plus adding ads to ‘basic’ tiers and attempting to create limitations (resolutions, “screens”, offline downloads) is what might push me to build a nice, large NAS. We don’t want Cable again.
Jellyfin + Synology NAS was a great investment for me! ;)
Wouldn’t go back.
I appreciate the advice! I am thinking of Synology or perhaps DIY with either TrueNAS (Scale likely) or Unraid. Synology would be cheap, small, easy on power and thermals too though and I’ve been looking at the latest and previous gen DS2XX lines.
Also I appreciate the Jellyfin mention. I’ve been using Plex so long and was thinking about something else like Jellyfin especially but I’ve never worked with it before.
The nice thing about Jellyfin is that you can point Jellyfin and Plex to the same media folders and both will work, to try it out.
I would get a Synology with intel Quicksync if you go the Synology route for hardware transcoding. Unfortunately, a lot of the new models don’t have it.
I just have a 220+ but would maybe get a 4 bay model if I did it again.
i do this with jellyfin and kodi. the media library is standalone. they both get read-only access to all the metadata which i manage with a different tool (mediaelch)
I went the DIY route a month and a half ago and it’s been great. I opted for a larger case so I could add a bunch of HDDs and not be limited to the 2 or 4 that’s the standard in a syno, and I’ll keep adding more over time. I got carried away with the CPU and went with ddr5 so it’s been quite more expensive than it should have been and it cost about 700 euro without the spinning disks, but it’s been great with proxmox + a truenas VM (plus a bunch of extra vms for the arrs, tinkering, media servers, web stuff, pihole, nginx, some game servers…)
Pretty much sounds exactly like I was thinking of doing for the DIY. miniATX/ATX for all the expansion potential + SATA ports + large case to handle it + a CPU with 6 to 8 cores at least. Case would probably be a rack form factor but it doesn’t really matter. Probably 32 GB of RAM + a Quadro GPU/Some cheap AMD GPU or something cheapish like that strictly for encoding + Proxmox + TrueNAS or perhaps just unraid. Probably no desktop environments unless something really needs it for some reason. Not sure if I’ll go with a motherboard with an ILO/IPMI with its own NIC + vlan or not.
I was going to mix SSD/NVME for performance (if I mix these two, it’d be two separate performance tiers) and HDDs for capacity. Probably two 1+ Gbps NICs bonded and maybe a LACP port channel down the line. VPN with killswitch of course.
I could def. go cheaper on the hardware if I just wanted to use docker/podman mostly but I want VMs too. I’ll probably manage updates and backups of what I really care about off network via ansible + rclone + restic repos. I might would use zram + lz4 for most of my VMs because why not.
Yeah, sounds good. My proxmox is installed in a couple of raid0 SSD for redundancy and the VMs are in a 1tb nvme. All the remaining data (media, files, Arma/other game mods, backups…) is stored in spinning HDDs. I’m using an Intel CPU so I didn’t bother with a dedicated GPU and it’s working without a problem, but I still have to stress test jellyfin when transcoding multiple streams.
If I was to do it again I’d downgrade to ddr4 and get much more RAM though, 32gb it’s not that much when factoring in truenas, VMs and a couple of gameservers.
To add to this. Look in to the Arr apps. Sonarr Radarr and prowlarr work all nicely together.
We won’t get cable again. Video streaming is already much worse and declining rapidly.
If they need more money, they can just take about $2,000 USD per second from Bezos’ money. He makes over $3,000 USD per second.
I forgot to mention. over 99% of all online sales go through amazon. They don’t need to raise their prices.
Regarding the shipping cost:
Just collect things to buy until you are over the treshold. Helped me with overbuying stuff I don’t even really need.
If you are moatly in it for the shipping: Just stop. You give them more money through that than paying for shipping.Tbh i just have prime and pirat the stuff i want anyway, even if i technically have access to ot the “legal” way, because its just way easier to find what i want on the piracy site of my choice than on prime…
(i need the one day shipping pretty regularly so the money isn’t wasted)
Same, I have a handful of streaming services (mostly split with other households) because it’s easier to watch something right now than in 10 mins at the absolute minimum, or tomorrow, depending on the current status of high seas shipping lanes. But I’m not fucking watching ads. I’m paying for the service, fuck your ads.
I just wish they’d split off streaming from shipping.
20 Europbux or 17 Freedollars gets you a Read Debrid subscription for a year.
Tie it into Stremio and you’ve got everything right now.
Tie that into rclone and you’ve got yourself a fancy ‘backup’ for all those things you’ve streamed.No VPN required.
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No one needs one day shipping. And the human toll that Amazon and their prime service takes on their workers should be enough for anyone to stop using their services wholesale.
When i say i need it than it is like that. And in my country its not that bad regarding their worker treatment, shure its not perfect but nothing compared to USA because there are laws here…
I don’t know where you live, but this year for Black Friday Amazon workers from over 30 different countries protested over inhuman working contditions. Countries included Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, South Africa, Turkey and the U.K.
And anyway, even if they were treated well, you are still supporting a horrible company that exploits people globally.
Yes black Friday. But that’s a shitshow in all imaginable ways anyway, besides that its not that bad.
And yes i “support” it until i can find some else that can supply me small quantities of very specific things for a reasonable price in short time.
I don’t like Amazon, but they aren’t the worst either. Also, you use their stuff as well, Amazon isn’t just the web-shop, its also server hosting and other IT solutions, most stuff you use has some Amazon In it.
Yes I’m forced to used Amazon because AWS hosts a lot of the internet. I literally have no choice. If I had a choice I would avoid it.
But I don’t contribute to their horrible work conditions in their warehouses. And it’s disingenuous to say the protest is only about Black Friday. The protests were on Black Friday because that’s when it would have the biggest impact on Amazon.
Too bad that people always let small personal inconveniences get in the way of human rights.
I canceled Prime in 2021. The expedited shipping is nice and all but it really just felt like paying rent to someone I don’t like nor want or have to pay rent to.
Scamazon
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
I’d already decided to cancel Prime when they cancelled The Peripheral after renewing it. Had I not, this decision would have made the choice for me.
They canceled that!?! Man, they really hyped it up. I planned on watching it. They cancel as soon as viewership drops. 🙄
Living in a major city where we have a Amazon warehouse, I cancelled prime because they failed their promise on two day shipping. 2021-2023, I started seeing packages take as long as 5 days. Now, half my orders take that long. What is the point of that’s the whole ad pitch?
Everything worth seeing can be torrented anyway. I canceled a year ago and haven’t noticed a loss of anything as long as any orders are over $35 for free shipping.
