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Re:Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads by eganist on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @09:18AM (#17959449)
Apologies in advance for the self-referential commentary:

I've put down a long list of reasons for why I've cancelled prime after almost ten years of consistent use.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16937290

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17568320

If you-the-reader need good reasons to quit prime, I hope these help.

Re:Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads by jsight on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @10:01AM (#17959742)
I don't necessarily agree with the bits about 2-day shipping. TBH, I've had positive and negative experiences with that for years and don't really see a trend one way or the other. When it works well, it can be amazing (next day on a weekend!) and when it fails can seem really weird.

But I'll still mostly agree with your list and add another. A lot of clothing items now only have a reasonable return policy when bought as part of a Prime Wardrobe. What if I just want a pair of shoes and am worried about them not fitting? Some offer free returns for this and others don't. Ugh.

Re:Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads by 0x00000000 on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @06:31PM (#17963977)
> Prime shipping is no longer certain to be two days.

This is the most egregious thing. For items sold by a bunch of different 3rd parties it somehow picks one to buy from as the default. And sometimes that one isn't Prime eligible when another seller is. Sometimes it's not even the cheapest new option. Sometimes the default one is fucking backordered for two weeks but there are other sellers where it isn't AND they have Prime shipping.

I have never had a more infuriating online shopping experience than the last 3 times I tried to use Amazon. I don't want to search through 60 different sellers to find the best one. I don't want to gamble on if they will even send the right item. I don't want to be lied to about "Prime Shipping" which is 100% meaningless now.

Re:Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads by awaywopassd on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @01:01PM (#17961445)
I am also not about to renew my Prime membership. You list gave me a lot of confidence.

But one of important benefit I use Prime for is Amazon Photos. Unlimited backup of your photos. When I look at other solutions such as Backblaze, they will all cost at least $50 a year.

Then another benefit I like is Prime Music. Which again is going to cost money if I get music subscription from Spotify or somewhere else. So when I add cost of these two benefits on their own, Prime becomes pretty good deal.

What's your opinion on these benefits?

Re:Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads by jdeibele on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @02:00PM (#17961924)
You can substitute Google Photos for Amazon Photos. I have several Google accounts that have soccer photos, family photos, etc. I want to keep pictures of other people's kids from trying to be recognized as my own. And the family photos account can be be given to someone else to control without giving access to my email. You get 15G of storage with unaltered originals, unlimited if you let them compress.

If you set up a separate account, you probably don't have to worry about hitting the 15G limit unless you have many, many photos or are taking them at very, very high resolution.

We pay for family subscriptions to Google Play Music and Spotify. My wife and kids listen to music on our Google Home device and they do a lot of Youtube. I didn't want to do Spotify, too, but the older two asked for Spotify for Christmas because of the playlists only available there. $14.99/month x 2.

I was a devoted Google Reader user and I don't trust Google very much to keep things around. But it's easy to share the links with family and let them download the photos to their own storage.

I was also using Amazon storage to backup when they stopped doing the free backup storage, cutting it to 5GB (I think) for free. So I don't trust them, either.

Re:Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads by prostoalex on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @02:32PM (#17962164)
Amazon is free for uncompressed, though.
Re:Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads by rossjudson on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @05:07PM (#17963374)
Amazon Photos offers unlimited full-resolution online photo storage, and 5 GB free video storage, to Prime members

I hear video is pretty popular these days.

Re:Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads by zelos on Wednesday September 12, 2018 @03:22AM (#17966231)
I partially justified resubscribing to Prime through Amazon Photos. Then I actually used it. As it doesn't include video, it's not much use for backing up my Photos library.

What really killed it for me though is that the Amazon Drive client software is terrible. Slow and extremely buggy: it appears to do file operations on the UI thread, so the whole UI freezes for minutes at a time.

Re:Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads by chrisper on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @09:39AM (#17959581)
Did you ever end up installing the Helium10 extension?
Re:Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads by eganist on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @09:57AM (#17959718)
I don't recall this being on my list. Remind me?
Re:Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads by chrisper on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @10:23AM (#17959951)
It's the first response to your second link.
Re:Amazon is stuffing its search results pages with ads by eganist on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @11:42AM (#17960733)
Ah, sadly I'm not a seller, so that's not something I've explored. You should follow up with the original commenter.