I just cancelled Amazon Vine

Have you ever been on Amazon and read a review that said "Amazon Vine Customer Review of Free Product"?

Well, one of the customers was me. A couple years back, I picked up some really badly molded replacement styli for one of my Nintendo game systems, and wrote a scathing review, as you do. (There's a reason why so many products have around 5-10% one-star reviews, after all.)

And a little box popped up inviting me to Amazon Vine.

I'd seen these reviews myself over the years. I end up on Amazon more than I'd like to. If I can get something somewhere else, and it's not hideously additionally expensive, I will. It's not a great company, for a lot of reasons.

But because they've taken over basically everything, they're the only option for too much stuff. So I'm there with some frequency.

Once I was let in the door, I set out immediately searching for items like the quality, name-brand stuff I'd see Vine reviews for. I was ready to write detailed, useful reviews!

Oh, Mattie. You sweet summer child.

You know all that random crap that comes up whenever you search Amazon for literally anything? It was everywhere. It was easily the vast majority of all the stuff that was available to me.

But Amazon made me a promise. If I requested eighty things in a six-month period, and reviewed 90% of them, then I could be promoted to Gold! There, they'd unshackle me from the $100-value limit and I'd get all the wonderful items! Surely!

Well, I did get myself an OLED monitor (it's… okay, though it thinks it's a TV. And the contrast is weird. Friends don't let friends buy Samsung!) And a nice boombox once. Listening to it now, actually.

But would I have bought them had they not been put in front of my face with a "free" (as in kittens) price tag? Yeah. Probably not.

On top of that, to get those, I had to wade through so. much. stuff. Once I unlocked the over-$100 stuff, I found that was often junk too. And when it wasn't junk, it usually wasn't really something I needed taking space in my life.

Oh yeah. Amazon also throws out fun, contradictory requirements like the idea that the items they send you transfer to your ownership as soon as they're delivered, but also you're not allowed to sell them for six months.

Is that… legal? Hmm. Doesn't matter. We all did it to try to get the good shit and not get banned because we got caught on eBay trying to pawn off the crap.

I paid for this. More than the value of the things I actually got and even sometimes appreciated.

In the US, Amazon has decided that your items need to be reported to the IRS, so I have had some sizable additional income tax every year. They base this on an "estimated tax value" which is actually just the retail price of the item, most of the time. Even if the item is actually selling for 40% less because it's got a "coupon" on it.

I'd still be hitting that list of stuff. Constantly. Would I kinda like this thing maybe a little? Ordered! Do I think I could use this even slightly? Get that on my doorstep yesterday! Does this sound even a little neat? Send it!

(Oh man, sound. I did not intend this pun, I swear, but I ordered so many things with speakers, and most of them sounded. so. terrible.)

Through all this, I also entertained a delusion for a little bit that I was helping customers. That my detailed, truthful reviews would help people make good buying decisions.

Reader, I am quite sure I wasted an awful lot of my time.

Some twenty-or-so years ago, I wrote a bunch of stuff that probably nobody read on a Nintendo fan site. I have this passion for telling people about stuff I got in the hopes that they might share my excitement and find good things in their lives too.

I channeled that passion here, I think. And while nobody read what I wrote twenty years ago, I think I probably somehow did worse here.

Weird things happened to my reviews from time to time. In a recent incident, I reviewed an item that was a replacement for an OEM part for a thing I owned. Advertised as a replacement, not a fake. I noted, or tried to note, that it wasn't made well and probably was not suitable. And, twice. those reviews were removed because Amazon "investigated" my "concerns about product authenticity" and said they were bullshit. You know, concerns I never had.

In the interim, reviews that outright admitted they never even used the product cranked everything up to an average average of 4.5 stars. This was alongside people trying really hard to review things honestly, like me. But we were just speaking into the void, really.

All this time, my "estimated tax value" just kept creeping up.

I'd end up paying thousands for the privilege of putting time and not-inconsiderable effort into these reviews. I ended up swimming in junk nobody would buy off me if I was willing to put in the humongous effort to sell it all.

This was a bad deal. And I still hesitated for months to actually push the button that closed my Vine account.

Through the Vine Reddit, I found myself reading a blog post that used Michael Easter's book Scarcity Brain to call out what Vine is. Did I read the post… or the book? No. But that post made a compelling case for how Vine is basically engineered to addict you, like so much else from the big shots on the Internet these days

And I was addicted. All to feed Amazon's whimsical fiction about their reviews being meaningful, and countless shady sellers' attempts to push their crap up the charts.

I'd like to say that I had a triumphant moment where I gathered strength and threw that monkey off my back. In reality, I was talking to my tax guy and realizing that I was yet again gonna pay a bunch of money and any opportunity I had to reduce that amount was gonna suck a bunch more time out of my life. Time I could use much better elsewhere.

And I finally just closed my eyes and clicked the button.

So, I'm done with Vine. It feels kinda good. I've been actively mad at the program for months, and yet I couldn't bring myself to do anything about it.

Yeah, along the way I did pick up a number of fun little things. But even the stuff I decided was good enough to keep takes up so much space and complexity in my life. And the price I paid was not worth it.

I'm just glad I was finally able to click the "escape" button in the end.