Holly has a problem with Amazon’s new LLM:
Just in time for their Black Friday deals, Amazon has rolled out the most annoying, aggressively anti-customer thing I’ve ever seen. If you aren’t seeing it today, you will soon.
Every search results in Rufus, their AI, opening a chat window with you that’s part of the browser window, so your pop-up blocker is no help. You cannot turn Rufus off from within Amazon. If you beg it to stop, it’ll tell you that your browser settings are wrong.
If you check those and try again, it’ll tell you that only Customer Service can help you.
If you contact Customer Service, as I did, they will suggest that you stop shopping on the website and only shop on your phone.
Really think about that.
I wouldn’t know about that. I haven’t placed an order on Amazon since the end of August. Which is likely when they ended the “family” Amazon Prime thing, where I could order under my beautiful wife’s Amazon Prime account. It had been in place for many years, and it made Amazon a default for when I needed something, often trifling but sometimes more expensive.
But that all ended. And like most streaming providers, they’re throwing ads into things you watch unless, I guess, you pay even extraer. So never mind all that. I can order on other Web sites, and I can go to department stores for what I need. Amazon has lost but a couple thousand dollars annually in revenue from me, and perhaps they’ll make it up in raising prices and adding fees to everyone else.
I guess I am lucky enough to be a cranky old man who lived before the Internet became, pardon my French, merde (know that I mispronounced it in my head while typing this, and pardon me). I don’t need Amazon. I don’t need Spotify. I don’t need Kindle. I got along fine before them, and I’m getting along fine without them.
Although I still set Spotify to play a radio station based on an artist some nights, I’ve again come to recognize that the options are limited and they tend to put artists whose “radio” stations I’ve asked for onto other radio stations I ask for–Miles Davis, for example, will have Chuck Mangione and Herb Alpert, for example. I’ve also come to remember that the playlists that they come up with are rather limited in scope and duration–so if I listen to it more than once, I am heavy into repeats. I mean, I can stream actual radio stations for free, and I have a pretty extensive media library. The tradeoff of selection for convenience is starting to tip back away from the convenience of Spotify.
At any rate, I guess I’m coming up on three months Amazon-free. No reason to think that will change any time soon. Even with Christmas coming up.
The Amazon family thing still works. I still get Prime free shipping from being connected to wife’s account. I’m using it less and less though because it’s getting harder and harder to wade through the crap they promote to find what I’m actually seeking
Maybe I’m the B on the A/B testing, then. It no longer works for me.
I get the sense I am the guinea pig for more of big tech’s psych experiments than I think, and I already think I am the subject or the control group in an awful lot.
You have to have the Prime Family thing set up. They initially sent me an email saying that I was going to lose free shipping and all that, but then a couple weeks later sent me another saying “never mind! you’re in a Prime Family group!”
That may be so, but it’s now a Personal Crusade. Plus, it keeps me from impulse purchases. Granted, being underemployed for a year helped with that, but not going to Amazon ever helps more.