Pretty much every tech site yesterday and today is filled with “stories” about deals for Amazon’s Prime Day, which is actually two days. Why do I not like this? Let me list the ways:
- The sheer amount of space devoted to the “deals”. Engadget, not exactly a hardcore tech site admittedly, is almost nothing but a feed of Amazon deals today (check the image below). Want to read actual tech news? It’s there, you just have to find it sandwiched between Amazon deals now.
- Every single one of these sites is posting deals that are exclusively for Amazon.com (the U.S. site), so the deals aren’t even relevant to most of the planet. America is not the world, but you’d never know it by checking Ars Technica, say.
- It all feels a bit unseemly, this two-day mini-orgy of tech consumerism, with nothing to counter-balance it, and really, a lot of the deals are not even that good (as expected).
- Motivated self-interest (see the second screenshot below) means this ain’t gonna get better any time soon.
Unedited list of stories from today’s Engadget main page, with the Prime Day deals highlighted. This is just what I could easily capture without scrolling:
Why this is unlikely to go away at any point in the immediate, near or long term future:
I will give Ars Technica’s Jeff Dunn credit here–he’s compiled a single story for most of the deals, which is a) convenient for readers b) makes the rest of the site much more readable until this nonsense is over and c) the second paragraph links to 15 (!) previous stories Ars Technica have run that cast a critical eye at Amazon and its practices.