Each day brings us closer to either Cyberpunk 2077 or Bladerunner
… or Terminator, or Mad Max. Dredd with Robocop are on the list too.
Or 1984, or Brave New World.
My money’s on Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, though.
It is intresting to see if we go that way, or if our future will be more Orwellian in its nature. Might go ine way or another.
Ads are ads, who cares if it’s AI generated?
at least with human made ads, people got paid for their work.
At least with hand weaving, people got paid for their work.
You realise your statement could have been made about literally any labour saving invention in human history?
They are substantially cheaper to make and therefore have a greater profit margin because they can charge more for the advertising space.
These types of comments from companies are for investors and not a warning to consumers of what is coming.
My point was, fuck Netflix for their shitty business practices anyway. Ads are bad, AI ads aren’t any better or worse.
Great point.
You gotta remember, this generation of idiots actually enjoys watching ads. Every year they gather around to watch the most egregiously expensive ads and debate which one is the ‘best’ while children starve.
Damn you fucking here hard boy
Amen!
deleted by creator
i just finished a single month here, first one in a couple years. ran out of stuff by week three. it’ll be at least another 2-3 years before another binge month, if i ever go back at all.
I’m all for services making a reasonable profit and being able to fund new shows and such endeavors…
But we’re rapidly getting into an environment of “soaking viewers for all we can get out of them” simply to feed the fucking shareholders ever larger payouts.
Thank you Milton Friedman. 🖕
🙄 🤡 🖕
they already make significantly more profits off of each ad-tier sub than they do the ad-free… yet it still isn’t enough. greedy fucking bastards.
How is showing me ads for things I will make a point not to buy because I implicitly hate the products of people showing me ads more profitable than the twenty fucking bucks a month I already give them?
Imagine if all that misallocated marketing budget got used to develop better products instead.
And imagine if products that couldn’t get by on their own merits without ads wouldn’t exist at all. How much more productive and happy our society would be if we got rid of useless products and the negative feelings ads induce when we don’t have those useless products at the same time.
Just imagine that your personal anecdote is not representative of human behaviour. The biggest lie and a myth is “I will pay more not to see ads”. No, you won’t.
I’m amazed that ads are so effective that they can make more cramming unwanted video in my face than just asking me for a couple bucks.
No one wants to pay money for the services they’re using. Ads is the way to go.
Nobody wants to pay for all the little individual piecemeal services and shit, because it’s wildly expensive and inconvenient, and because they keep adding ads to the paid stuff anyway because greed, so what benefit is there to paying?
Except that you’re completely wrong.
lol ok, sure.
In what way? Give examples plz.
Netflix user base grows by tens of millions each year and their ad supported plan is the most favourite. And their growth is slowly turning into exponential.
I don’t see how that refutes what I said about why people don’t want to pay for it…?
There’s a word for that: enshittification
There was a lot of pioneering in the 70’s. The first home computers, the first video games, the first mobile phones, all right there in the late 70’s. Most people ended the 70’s living like they did in the 60’s but now there’s cool shit like the Speak n’ Spell. The average American home in 1979 had no microwave oven, a landline telephone and a TV that might have even been color. There were some nerds who had TRS-80s, some of them even had a modem so they could 300 baud each other. Normies saw none of this.
There was a lot of invention in the 80’s. Home computer systems, video games etc. as we now commonly know them crystalized in the 80’s. We emerged from the 80’s with Nintendo as the dominant video game console platform, Motorola as basically the only name in cellular telephones and with x86 PCs running Microsoft operating systems as the dominant computing platform with Apple in a distant but solid second place. Video games were common, home computers weren’t that out there, people still had land lines, and maybe cable TV or especially if you were out in the sticks you might have one of those giant satellite dishes. If you were a bit of an enthusiast you might have a modem to dial BBSes and that kind of stuff, but basically no one has an email address.
There was a lot of evolution in the 90’s. With the possible exception of the world wide web which was switched on in August of '91, there weren’t a lot of changes to how computing worked throughout the decade. Compare an IBM PS/2 from 1989 with a Compaq Presario from 1999. 3 1/4" floppy disk, CRT monitor attached via VGA, serial and parallel ports, keyboard and mouse attached via PS2 ports, Intel architecture with Microsoft operating system…it’s the same machine 10 years later. The newer machine runs orders of magnitude faster, has orders of magnitude more RAM etc. but it still broadly speaking fills the same role in the user’s life. An N64 is exactly what you’d expect the NES to look like after a decade. Cell phones have gotten sleeker and more available but it’s still mostly a telephone that places telephone calls, it’s the same machine Michael Douglas had in that one movie but now no longer a 2 pound brick. Bring a tech savvy teen from 1989 to 1999 and it won’t take long to explain everything to him. The World Wide Web exists now, but a lot of retailers haven’t embraced the online marketplace, the dotcom bubble bursts, it’s not quite got the permanent grip on life yet.
There was a lot of revolution in the 2000’s. Higher speed internet that allow for audio and video streaming, mp3 players and the upheaval those caused, the proliferation of digital cameras, the rise of social media. When I graduated high school in 2005, there were no iPhones, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Youtube. Google was a search engine that was gaining ground against Yahoo. The world was a vastly different place by the time I was through college. Take that savvy teen from 1989 and his counterpart from 1999 and explain to them how things work in 2009. It’ll take a lot longer. In 2009 we had a lot of technology that had a lot of potential, and we were just starting to realize that potential. It was easy to see a bright future.
There was a lot of stagnation in the 2010’s. We started the decade with smart phones and social media, and we ended the decade with smart phones and social media. Performance numbers for machines kept going up but you kinda don’t notice; you buy a new phone and it’s so much faster and more responsive, 4 years later it barely loads web pages and takes forever to launch an app because mobile apps are gaseous, they expand to take up their system. A lot of handset manufacturers have given up so now there are fewer options, and they’ve converged to basically one form factor. Distinguishing features are gone, things we used to be able to do aren’t there anymore. The excitement wore off, this is how we do things now, and now everyone is here. Mobile app stores are full of phishing software, you’re probably better advised to just use the mobile browser if you can, mainstream video gaming is now just skinner boxes, and by the end of the decade social media is all about propaganda silos and/or attention draining engagement slop.
Now we arrive in the 2020’s where we find a lot of sinisterization. A lot of the tech world is becoming blatantly, nakedly evil. In truth this began in the 2010’s, it’s older than 4 years, but we’re days away from the halfway point of the decade and it’s becoming difficult to see the behavior of tech and media companies as driven only by greed, some of this can only come from a deep seated hatred of your fellow man. People have latched onto the term “enshittification” because it’s got the word shit in it and that’s hilarious, but…I see a spectrum with the stagnation of the teens represented with a green color and the sinisterization of the 20’s represented with red, and the part in the middle where red and green make brown is enshittification.
I agree with all of that except the end: it’s definitely still greed, it’s just become easier to other your fellow man so you don’t even have to hate him, you can at best briefly consider his existence as you pave over him on your way to whatever absolute moral certitude you’re pursuing. That’s the true banality of evil: greed makes dehumanization so commonplace that advocating for awful shit to be done to your fellow human being isn’t even widely seen as evil anymore.
the word is actually “capitalism.” it’s baked into its dna.
Capitalism - and I am the last person to defend it - didn’t used to be like this, or at least not as bad. shrug I could probably tolerate capitalism if, say, no company was allowed to employ more than say 15 people.
yeah it’s not like Smith predicted this but yeah … it’s certainly not human nature either.
i’d be happy if shareholders, all of them, were held criminally responsible for the criminal things corporations do - all the way down to wage theft and child labor.
That’d be a hell of a thing. I’m with you on that one. Too bad this country is by, for, and about the rich and we don’t really… do consequences for the rich.
we don’t really… do consequences for the rich.
We used to. That’s why it didn’t used to be like this.
Continued expansion or ever-increasing profits is a definitive characteristic of the system though. Enshittification is just the latest feature it found, for software-based companies.
One could also argue that enshittification is independent to software, like diluting juice or other “innovations” that products received…
Yeah, but compare even Henry Ford, who was not exactly a socialist icon, when he said:
There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.
…to the ‘fuck you I got mine’ attitude that is utterly pervasive today. Definitely feels like something other than just the evolution of a broken system. It has changed in character as well as in scope.
That’s like saying eating fatty food never got you obese when you started.
The end goal of capitalism was and forever will be monarchies. It’s the game of monopoly until one player owns all.
Capitalism didn’t used to be like this because it was still developing, but it was always going to become this. Enshitification is not a bug, it’s a feature. Capitalism is supposed to work like this. And when it wasn’t, it was just because it wasn’t there yet, mainly due to technical limitations.
I agree. It was always going to isolate, alienate, and dehumanize people to the point that keeping their own heads above water was all they could think about and there was just no room left for having some empathy and compassion for their fellow human beings.
Enshitification is a consequence of legalized dumping. Companies are allowed to dump loss-making profucts and services on the market until they achieve dominance, then they squeeze the users that now have nowhere else to go. In startup-lingo this is blitzscaling followed by monetization. Our competition laws are 30 years behind the curve on this stuff.
Sounds a lot like gig economy for everyone.
That it wasn’t always like this doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t always lead there though.
I think that is the point.
No, that’s fair, the isolation, alienation, and dehumanization was always going to just continue to get worse.
It’s an interesting debate, if what we are seeing now is the natural, inevitable progress of capitalism, or it could have gone a better way, but eg. Reagan fucked it up for all of us in the 70s.
Reagan was in the 80s, but yeah, 100% agree. But I mean someone was going to fuck it up sooner or later, cause this country has always been by, for, and about the rich, and it was pretty clear the rich weren’t very happy about how hard it was to get even richer back then.
you just need to keep a shit list of brands that are now dead to you.
I have a dwindling list of brands that are not yet dead to me.
A good rule of thumb is that if you have heard of a brand but don’t remember anything positive about them they should probably be dead to you.
The only brand I can think of that is truly not evil is valve, and that’s all cause of Gabe.
All of them.
exactly, if you want to be an ethical consumer you’d need to be a hermit.
🤮 Glad I deleted my account years ago and use kodi to host my own library
I wish Kodi could host the library from outside your home. So I could be at a friends house, and I just log in to my library from his house, and we watch season 6, episode 14 of the simpsons. Random episode, but whatever. You get my point.
Instead, I tried setting up JellyFin, and I couldn’t get it to work. So I said “Fuck it. I’ll delete this and try from scratch, and reinstall JellyFin.”
Instead, it deleted 32 terabytes of videos. It deleted the “media” folder, which I set as JellyFins home directory. Every dvd I ripped, every tv show, every movie, every wrestling show, every comedy special. All of it. Gone.
Luckily I have a backup, but that was 2 years ago, and I’m never even home enough to WATCH the stuff, let alone try to restore these files one by one which took literal decades to assemble.
Somewhere is a folder called “N-Gage videos”. Which is episodes of TV shows that in 2003 I formatted to fit on an N-gage screen size. Useless now, but it shows how old some of that collection is.
Hate to say it but deleting files when you mean to delete a program/docker container/whatever is definitely a skill issue…
It asked me “Would you like to remove this path?” I said yes, thinking it meant the program using that path within the program. No, it meant delete the whole damn folder.
There are ways to recover deleted files, at least partially. Especially if all you did was remove the directory and not the files themselves.
Re-downloading 32TB would take a while but you’ll probably download it faster than you can watch it. Usenet downloads are typically faster than torrenting.
Plex is much easier to setup than Jellyfin and much more user-friendly in general, though it’s not free for some of the more useful features like watching from outside your home.
Netflix will what now? Sorry, I was busy canceling my netflix account.
Kidding, I canceled it ages ago when the $10 version became SD-only with ads.}
Why do we keep paying people like this to enshittify everything?
Cause a lot of times it’s a family account and only one person actually realized how bad of a deal it is.
Why do we keep paying people like this to enshittify everything?
Because if you refuse to destroy yourself, your family, and the rest of the world, they’ll import 3rd worlders who will do it because they’re being threatened.
I mean, this is for the ad-supported tier. For $8/mo, it tells you right there it includes ads when you sign up.
They want the old cable tv days back, but worse
It’s quite something how they’re trying to force the Internet to work as an artificial version of things we already have, instead of using it for the unique purposes which it can actually fulfill.
Yeah, to this day all commercials are skippable on a DVR. It was stupid for anyone to think things with streaming would settle any differently.
Streaming was different for years and years. But then people got greedy.
Greed isn’t new, streaming companies aren’t more or less greedy than cable companies. But internet companies innovated surveillance capitalism which cable companies couldn’t do with their infrastructure. Streaming just waited to roll out unskippable ads so they could win customers early on with an artificially, temporarily better service.
No, but companies are made of individual people who get more or less greedy with time, like most other attributes of people. Which is why I said ‘people got greedy’.
Streaming just waited to roll out unskippable ads so they could win customers early on with an artificially, temporarily better service.
This is the exact same thing cable did when it came out.
No. Cable brought improved picture over broadcast signals, brought programming to underserved areas, and had a greater number and diversity of channels. Those fundamental improvements over the prior technology never went away.
You can complain that cable TV got more expensive over time, but you can say the same thing about cars and houses and health care.
No, cable was commercial-free when it first came out just like streaming was. They repeated the ota signals for the broadcast stations which of course contained commercials, but extremely similarly to streaming they started out with a quality and ad-free pitch for their own networks and then wound up pivoting to screwing over the customer any way possible.
(As they continue to do today, btw.)
Some cable channels are still commercial free, all of them are since the DVR was invented 25 years ago. Watermarks suck, a DVR can’t erase those. But nothing cable has done comes close to the fuckery we’ve gotten with surveillance and tracking, targeted ads, unskippable ads that is the present and future of streaming.
Way late to the party cuz im browsing top posts for the week, but you reminded me of how I refused to believe my father when he said cable TV used to be ad free. He said it was the whole point of paying for it back then cuz paying for TV didn’t exist yet.
Way late to the party cuz im browsing top posts for the week, but you reminded me of how I refused to believe my father when he said cable TV used to be ad free. He said it was the whole point of paying for it back then cuz paying for TV didn’t exist yet.
They want the old cable TV days, but worse, and filling their pockets instead.
Youtube is also trying to be more like TV. Apparently, TV wasn’t bad enough.
Don’t pirate, we’re awesome!
Here, watch these ads!
Hey, where are you going?
Jellyfin
Not to me, they fucking won’t
If I down vote this does it show my disappointment of netflix or the OP? 🤔
94 million people decided $10 a month savings was worth watching ads rather than doing without. Fuck em. They are the reason many things only have an ad supported tier. Pay for stuff or pirate it, but don’t use ad supported tiers when you have a choice.
This is straight up victim blaming.
By what leap of logic do you come to that conclusion. We are talking about entertainment here. Not housing or food. Doing without is an option, and there is plenty of competition to use instead.
People rail against the rich for caring only about money. But when they make thier own decisions, they do the same. Money first. You pay for ADs with your time first. Then you pay again when ever you buy anything, because advertising whether you saw it or not is part of the price of everything. Paying for your time back alone, would be worth the price. But people put money first. And we all lose. Well except the wealthy.So you’re angry that the poor are choosing the cheap option (🤔) because it helps the wealthy win? You’re righteously indignant because they ignored that “Doing without is an option” and decided to spend some entertainment dollars in a way of their own choosing?
Ok, but I don’t really find that very convincing.
Let’s be real. Do you really believe it’s the poor paying money for an ad supported tier? I don’t. And if you really do, fine. I’ll give the poor a pass if it will allow us to focus on the real problem. People who could afford to pay the full price, but are always chasing deals. It’s also why amazon day exists. Yeah that day. When they raise the price so they can take 30% off and still be charging more than they were before. And then sell out in an hour. It’s why airlines that don’t charge absurd fees can’t compete. A large block of people always chase the lowest price.
I just think it doesn’t matter. We live in an economy designed to suck every possible penny from every person and pay them the least amount it possibly can, to ensure the enrichment of the 1%
Someone wants to keep a few more bucks in their pocket rather than spend more in some principled stance that will change absolutely nothing anyhow, I’m not going to judge them for it. Life fucking sucks for just about everyone in the US right now, to varying degrees. On the list of things I might judge my fellow man for, that seems ludicrously privileged and self centered.
You don’t get to decide who is poor enough for it to be “OK” for them to buy the cheap tier. I mean, sure, you do get to have that opinion of course, but man I’m sorry I think you are really kind of a jerk to have this attitude.
Poor enough in this context is on the spender not me. If they are doing the ad tier because they feel they can’t afford it otherwise, fine. I have no qualms with them. It’s the hypocrites that rail against the rich for thier money grubbing actions and then turn around and support the ad tier so that they can build wealth themselves that are the problem. You seem to be working harder and harder to make me fit your initial opinion of me rather than letting it go and reform it on new information. If that makes you feel better in your day, glad I could help.
I paid for the ad tier of disneyplus and use an adblocker. Seems to work well so far.
I will call that a grey area. You still count on the roles as a sub of the ad tier. And probably in all the data it assumes you saw the ads. So it helps perpetuate the problem. But if enough people do it, it will reduce whar advertisers pay, which might reduce the problem.
Yeah idk. I don’t want to support this but I also don’t want to spend anymore than the minimum on streaming. I plan to unsubscribe after finishing Andor anyway.
I guess you could spend time to help make it easier for others to block ads, or straight up help them. That could tip the balance into doing more to fight it than to support it. Or just learn to straight up pirate. Then you are 100% on the fighting it side.
I recently setup my own Jellyfin server with qbittorent search plug-ins and its so easy. Netflix is really playing with fire here cause people will leave when pushed enough as it’s becoming so easy to switch. You can just hop on your friends server too
While I am in the same boat as you, you severely overestimate the tech-affinity of the average Netflix user.
Pirating content safely, setting up a media server for it, share it with other people… it is all possible, there is good documentation out there. But aside from having the drive to do this, you also need to invest time to keep it running and maintain it.
The average person out there is happy to pay Netflix money so they don’t need to do that.
Edit: add to that also the fact that it is technically illegal in many countries. This is probably also a deterrent for the average person.
The normies can’t do this argument never sat well with me when it comes to tech, as if their ignorance somehow diminishes the software or process for everyone else.
I also appreciate them. If more people pirated, we might have a tighter crackdown from world governments over it, luckily the streaming services get enough pleb bux to keep the peace.
But with Jellyfin you don’t necessarily need to do that yourself. You can have a friend with a server or pay some shady dude 5$/mo to use his server.
If you have a friend who is invested in this, sure. How many have one?
And paying some shady dude on the net versus paying a “reputable” company… I don’t think the average person will go for that either.
I think you underestimate people’s drive for a bargain.
This was a decade back, but the satellite paytv system here was not cheap. $50/m for base, up to $150/m for full. A technical crew worked out how to pirate it by hooking the verification card up to a dongle on a PC and sending the verification requests from each set-top box over a VPN back to their master device. They sold access to the system for about $100 (for the dongle & setup) and then $10-20/month for full access to the Fox-based service. Went on for years before loose lips sunk the ship, and their were thousands of users when it got busted. No marketing, no Internet presense, just word of mouth “I know a guy”.
The modern Internet-based streaming pirate services that people can buy cheap devices for on ebay preconfigured, and pay $5-10/m for access to all movies and TV? Cheaper and faster access, all online, nobody has to visit your home. Everything is easier and the barrier of entry is lower.
If Netflix and others don’t stop being so greedy, they’ll be reminded that people only play by the rules when the terms are reasonable.
Of course getting real data here is very difficult but I really do feel its becoming very easy to be a pirate.
I can only share my anecdotes that I see right now - if I type in “iptv” to the main e-commerce websites here in Thailand (Lazada, Shopee, tiktok) all have hundreds of listings and thousands of monthly sales. Iptv piracy tech UX is very similar to Plex or Jellyfin tho the latter is more expensive to run and more legally challenging but the UX from the customers pov is identical. Buy a subscription, get account details and app install instructions, connect and watch. So UX is not the barrier here imo.
There are also tools inspired by popcorn time like Stremio + Torrentio which is basically pirate netflix with no UX overhead at all - click and play - but the quality still isn’t great there due to lack of p2p supply and the install process is not accessible to grannies.
As an ancient pirate myself, this does worry me a bit as it’s becoming too easy and corporate services are really pushing the consumers which brings way too much attention to piracy and might result in more DRM shit being added everywhere.
For $5/m, I’m your friend!
i just subscribe to the netflix tier that serves all streams as torrents
Same here. Best part is that they even have non-Netflix media in that tier. Love it.
