It had been a long time since I looked at Amazon Prime and it's no better now.
The interface is total garbage. It's a bizarre mix of Netflix and amazon's regular website. Search is useless. You can't get an A-Z list of everything. You're forced to sort by either "featured" (aka what they are advertising) or "new". Content they want more money for (in addition to what you already pay them for Prime) is mixed in with everything else. It's basically full of ads.
I keep prime for shipping but anything I can't get on Netflix I can find online without dealing with Amazon's terrible interface.
Is there a preference to hide that stuff everywhere or is it just a specific search term or check box when searching? An option you can set once that applies to the entire account would be a big plus!
I don't believe there's a global setting, but from the home screen there is a page that is content included with Prime Video only, and at least on most devices it is a single colour button to select the subscription content only on searches.
The website, maybe the apps are better (at least they shouldn't give you amazon's store interface) but I suspect the problem of content they want extra money for mixed in with what your prime subscription gets you is still an issue.
On FireTV it can be, but it fairly easy to avoid as well. For that matter is actually fairly easy to filter out non-prime content on the website as well, if you know how to use the basic filters
Prime Video + Prime Shipping + Prime Music is ~16 USD per year if you get the subscription from India.
I used to live in India but not anymore. So I was keen to only use Prime Video + Prime Music (since Prime Shipping doesn't work outside of India for that sub).
Both Prime Video and Music were rather unsatisfactory, and no Chromcast support was just the last straw for me to unsub.
In India, I don't know of anyone who actually pays for prime. Everyone gets it free bundled with their mobile or broadband plans.
All of these plans get Amazon Prime with free shipping, prime video and Amazon Music ad-free unlimited downloads:
Airtel:
- INR 299 (USD 4.37) per month plan includes unlimited call/text and 2.5GB data per day and includes Amazon Prime.
BSNL:
- INR 399 (USD 4.37) per month plan includes unlimited call/text and 30GB data per month.
Vodafone/IDEA:
- INR 399 (USD 5.83) per month plan includes unlimited call/text and 40GB data per month and includes Amazon Prime (full year) and Netflix (3-months trial).
Reliance Jio:
- INR 149 (USD 2.19) for unlimited voice/text and 1.5GB per day. Bundles HotStar (which streams cricket, tennis etc live) along with premium content from HBO, Starz etc.
IMO, all of the telcos in India have strong TV apps that give access to Movie/TV/News/Sports content (live+recorded) on mobile screens for free (bundled with really cheap mobile plans). Then there is Hotstar which is orders of magnitude better content than prime videos. So, unless someone is getting prime video for free I doubt anyone would be paying for it.
Even music is very much like that. Prime Music is good. But there is Airtel's Wynk, Jim has Saavn, then there is Youtube which has huge viewership for music videos.
But this only works if you are a new prime user and not an existing one :(. Though at least in Airtel you get INR 1500 worth of Netflix subscription which is pretty useful.
I have a laugh every time I see their "Recently Added Movies on Prime" section and find films from 2007. Or their "Popular|Trending Movies on on Prime" and see films with a <5 score on IMDB. There is no reason I would keep Prime for its movie offering! In the last six months they've added more and more sponsored offerings too, which is _really_ annoying -- I mean, I'm a subscriber, stop advertising to me.
I hate it when I miss the start (separate annoyance: seems often that audio takes a few seconds to start? Maybe that's the Shield's fault rather than Prime's) so I rewind, and then it hits me with the advert again...
This is probably why use one-time-password via SMS is so rampant in many many services. This kind of auth has mostly eliminated large scale hacks, however OTP over SMS still won't help targeted hacking. But in general the public at large are rather safe primarily because of this.
Having said that, subscription based startups struggle due to the the compulsory use of OTP and therefore resort to yearly subscriptions rather than monthly (ex: Amazon Prime).
Clearly this is well orchestrated and professional. I'm wondering what could be the motivation for such an attack. There is no monetary benefit whatsoever. Perhaps some AI company wanting to acquire solid data to train their models?
The explanation is solid, but that doesn't excuse Twitter. If you charge for clicks you should do your best to make sure that the clicks are genuine, not design a user interface where 95% of clicks are caused by bad interface design.
I spoke with a someone recently who uses gmail on his Android device. An ad at the top that resembles an email appears about a second after his real emails appear, timed perfectly to interrupt his attempt to tap and read his first email. Of course he immediately goes back if he makes the mistake, but google probably still charges the advertiser for a click.
(This doesn't happen on my phone but I am more likely to have configured it than your average user.)
I lived in Spain for a summer and my roommates there were definitively non-techy and had relatively slow internet.
I watched them every single night often multiple times accidentally click the ads that load above on youtube (about 1 second delayed, perfectly as they went to click). They would of course always click back once they noticed it, which with slow internet takes more time too and probably doesn't look as much like a bounce.
It's the perfect cover for Google. All the techies who would get outraged by something like this generally have fast internet and ad-blockers.
For me, that first "email" is not the ad itself, but the "promos" folder, tapping it only expands the promos folder, not any of the ads. It does appear a ~second after opening the app though. However, a ton of other things cause the same shifting-as-I-tap problem (not just ads) causing me to mistap on the wrong e-mail all the time. So it seems like garbage UI design more than anything else. UIs moving around while trying to interact with them is one of my biggest pet peeves.
Happens to me. Sometimes out of reflex I'll accidentally click it two or three more times before I have to resist muscle memory and wait for the page to completely finished jumping around.
AB testing is not an evil act by itself. It's an effective technique to understand the user needs. But what you do with the gathered data could make you evil.
No business will want to be out of sync with its users. And no business will want to be in charity mode any more than it should. But doing this without hampering the credibility is the key.
It would be great if they would AB test articles. AB testing headlines is basically looking for ways to draw people into articles. So while it’s responsible and even good to test your product, the headline is not the product.
For a large part of the traffic being driven to wapo, the headline, and possibly picture, is the only thing that drives people to the site. When someone shares an article to social media, you don't get much more. Look right here at HN; how many times has a thread languished in obscurity just for a slightly differently worded headline to drive it to the front page? Headline quality is incredibly vital in this age.
Agreed. Influential people buying influential media outlets can be a concern if used in a biased way. But unfortunately it's not illegal.
If one were to go ahead and make it illegal how exactly would one frame the law? There's no easy answer.
My experience has been that standing in a circle puffing on e-cigarettes is every bit as social if not more. Most cigarette smokers want to quit and they often get inspired by vapers standing around them.
As a vaper (ex-smoker), let me assert that vaping is like driving Tesla Model S P100D and smoking is akin to driving 2003 Ford Focus. I'd never gateway to Ford Focus 2003 from Tesla Model S P100D. Cheeky but true.
