People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

shmeeed wrote: post #4

zuhsetaqi wrote: post #3

I wonder what they expected when buying such a device from Amazon.

I never thought the leopard would eat MY face!

Yet people get leopards as pets.

I remind myself multiple times per week of the ways I compromise by letting questionable service companies into my life. “I really should self-serve this.” — I guess people who don’t fantasise of self-sufficiency to the nth degree, and don’t get angry at being force-fed straight uninterrupted ads, just think of the immediate upside.

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#7

Post by Animats » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 8:45 PM UTC

Do the "smart displays" monitor the behavior of people in the room say and do to determine what to pitch to them? They're already aware of whether someone is near the device. What else are they monitoring?

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#8

Post by more_corn » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 8:50 PM UTC

Advertising will expand to the point where we won’t take it anymore. And ultimately it comes down to power. If we can’t stop it ads will arrive. On the display on your fridge. (Unless you can stop it) on the display in your car (unless you can stop it) Where’s the line for you? And have you preserved your power so you’re in a position to stop it?

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#9

Post by gdulli » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 9:00 PM UTC

It's not conspiracy or hypothesis that the only point of these products is ads, it's the straight up business model. When are we going to hold people accountable for being surprised by the obvious actions of these companies? It wastes our time and it's boring to keep responding with, what did you think was going to happen? We've tried not shaming these people, will shame get them to stop buying this stuff and actually creating change in the world? What will work?

> “This is getting ridiculous and I'm about to just toss the whole thing and move back to Google,” one Redditor said of the “full-volume” ads for Alexa+ on their Echo Show.

Any article that quotes this and doesn't point out the crushing stupidity of it has failed. Do it politely, if you must, Scharon Harding. But if I wanted to be exposed to Reddit quality ideas I'd be on Reddit.

Re: People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

#10

Post by neilv » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 9:02 PM UTC

I recently bought a Kindle/Fire device pre-owned, to save money. But seeing full-screen shitty consumer products ads on the 'covers of my books', sitting around my home was so depressing, I paid the extra $10-$15, to retroactively turn it into an ad-free device.[1]

Though, even with Special Offers disabled, it still puts oversized icons for marketing promotions, bursting out of the search bar at the top of the home screen. This is one of the reasons I find the home screen a little bit unpleasant to look at, and avoid it as much as possible.

[1] If you want to remove Special Offers from your own Kindle/Fire (I don't know about Echo Show), go to https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/alldevices , click on the icon for your device, and scroll down, to find an option to disable Special Offers by paying some amount. IIRC, it said the amount was the difference between the original retail prices of with-ads and ads-free versions of the device. I've also heard some people can get Special Offers removed for free by customer service, but in my case it seemed like a fair deal, so I just paid the modest fee.