They probably need to show investors that the money spent developing it is worth it. “We’ve added X amount of users this quarter alone!”

Forced upgrades (or downgrades) really are the worst. Same for opt-out services instead of opt-in. Give choice back to the customer goddammit!

Its the same model as microsoft claiming that all Office users are "copilot" users.

I have the original Echo, and it still works. For some reason I had it running and it had an alert recently. So I asked what it was, and Alexa promoted being able to upgrade and told me how it’s so much better and stuff. And told me I just had to give it the go to upgrade.

So I did. And then AND THEN it told me my device is too old.

Fucking POS. I unplugged it again. I use it as a stand for my HomePod Mini.

Solution: cancel your Amazon Prime subscription. Remember that Bezos also funded Trump's inauguration and he ruined the Washington Post.

Yo, they charge the non-Prime people fucking $10 a month for it. Is that just the "ad-free tier" now?

I convinced my wife this was coming a few months ago and its what finally convinced her we needed to drop Prime and Alexa.

Gotta begin to question the utility of a device that exists to antagonize you, even after I've explicitly gone through the options menu and disabled all the "Would you like us to continue antagonizing you?" toggles.

This is not at all surprising. We got rid of prime about a year ago and generally have avoided buying through Amazon, but on a few occasions, it's been the only option so we bit the bullet. It was awful.

Prices and shipping listed were for prime members (autoselected of course) with small print nonprime member prices selectable. Their once famously easy purchase process was multiple screens full of "don't you want to rejoin prime??" pages with the option "join" already checked. Even after selecting the nonmember price and saying no to prime, going to the checkout page revealed an option auto checked for 'faster shipping' that was actually an option for rejoining prime. In buying multiple items this was autoselected on each of them separately, so you're agreeing to prime if you miss changing one.

Even if I have to order from them periodically (which I avoid like the plague), I have no intention of paying for prime again. The whole purchase process is an indicator that dropping prime is making an impact and I want that message to sink in.

For those who have Alexa, downgrading the plan, or even better-- finding an alternative home assistant, will send an equally powerful message, even if Amazon isn't ready to hear it.

Call me old, but save for my phone, I don't have any 'smart' anything. My desktop is running linux mint and my webcam is more than 12 or 13 years old and it is unplugged when not in use. I am doing just fine, thank you. My phone is probably listening to me, but all it hears is youtube political commentary videos against Trump.

The ads I get are super generic and talking about shit I REALLY don't care about or apply to me, so I think that I am doing fine when it comes to ad avoidance.

Speaking of which, is there a good open source alternative?

Don't they have lawsuits for similar tactics with prime?

Maybe I'm now in the minority, but I never bought a spy speaker, or bought spy cameras to attach to my house, inside or out.

My suggestion is, if you have them, get rid of them. But, I'm probably just an old man yelling at clouds, and am safe to ignore. Carry on.

I dumped Amazon ten years ago, when I got scammed by a third party seller and Amazon did fuck-all to help. Amazon doesn't extend the same protections to third party sellers, I suppose that's in the TOS, which I'm sure everyone has read carefully.

I could go into detail how the scam worked, and probably still does work. The jist is, shippers don't provide full addresses to Amazon, only the zip code. So, if the scammer shows that they have a shipping receipt for a zip code, Amazon just trusts that the box was shipped to the correct address. Turns out they shipped an empty box to a local restaurant--it took a lot of calls to find that out.

It's u believable for me, that users all around the world, just ignores the companies litterally forcing their "AI" down your throat. People just see AI as some sort of funny tool, like: "Who cares it's just ai." while the whole private ai wave is the easiest way ever, to cellect ALL of your data, since it is fucking hard for regulators, to actually figure out where this huge piles of data gets stored on the endless datacentres all around the globe. It's like, the whole selling of everybodys data is suddenly ok, as long as its just another ai who does it? We should fucking reject this shit, leave those platforms for good, once they start forcing Copilot and what not, into your lives, just to suck all of your data (including login info, etc).

Glad I dropped prime when I did then. The videos should be sectorized so as to be available on a non-prime account though

Not surprising. I had to remove my credit card information from Amazon because I kept getting automatically signed up for Prime without my consent.

Cancelling my Prime subscription has saved me so much money, especially since it's not like you even get the cheapest prices anyways. And of course, I feel more ease knowing I'm not giving my money to Amazon.

My Amazon Fire that I've had for ten years finally bricked itself. I'm positive they did it on purpose. I only paid $100 for it, so I guess I still got my money's worth out of it.

Wtf is alexa? Voice bot? Why do people need that

I let my Prime expire three days ago, yet they still upgraded me last night. I've already downgraded. We'll see if it continues to badger me to upgrade like it has the past couple months.