People don't vote with their wallets with clear minds though. People vote with half-asleep notions of what's good based on an onslaught of direct and viral marketing combo that threatens to ostracize them from their various social/support groups if they don't consume said product. No one has the time and energy to fight that on every front, nor has the know-how in every conceivable field to understand what is a lie and what isn't.

Prime is subsidized by a million other things. Cancelling does not send a message, or rather, the message isn't nearly specific enough to be interpreted by Amazon as "we should make a better show and/or stop making this one."

The entire feedback loop for the media industry has been perverted by tech companies and Venture Capital vampires, and it wasn't in a great place before.

Huh? I'm sure Amazon has no trouble gathering data about exactly how many of its Prime members are watching various shows/movies on their service. They're not going to pour money into something if no one is watching it. It's not like the old days of regular TV where they needed Nielsen to try to guess how many people were watching something.

I agree in principle, but it can be difficult in practice to vote with your wallet.

In the case of movies, once you have a ticket or purchase it or even rent it, they've got your money and have learned the lesson that people will pay, regardless of how you felt about what you watched or whether you intend to boycott future productions.

In general, though, I do try to send the signal that I'm not personally a garbage dump for low effort content, by doing a few things:

- No "guilty pleasure" watching of things that I'd prefer didn't exist, i.e. junk reality TV

- Actively avoiding clicking on things that have clickbait titles, especially if they're part of an algo-feed

- Read reviews / get reviews from friends first

- If a streaming show is bad, stop watching ASAP. Stopping at episode 2/10 is a reliable signal for Netflix et al.

Yeah; I've come to the point where I don't really want to watch "fresh" content. There's so many great movies in the back catalog, I'll probably never run out of great stuff to watch.

And if there's something great that's come out, I'll check it out after a couple of years when the reviews have settled down and all of the parts (I'm looking at you, Dune) have come out.