- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
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Don’t pirate, we’re awesome!
Here, watch these ads!
Hey, where are you going?
Netflix peaked when it was supporting shows like Dark and Mindhunter and drove off the cliff since. My wife will subscribe for a month to watch a new season of a show like You and then cancel it again. That’s versus back in 2017 when I just had the subscription all year.
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. 🖕
🙄 🤡 🖕
There’s a word for that: enshittification
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds a lot like gig economy for everyone.
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.
Oh I know, but it used to be at least - on the small scale - somewhat mitigated by the fact that most people were basically decent and not trying to fuck everyone else over. I remember as a young child in the 70s that my mother shopped at a grocery store that wasn’t much bigger than my house is today, a little mom and pop operation that had been open for 40 years and run by an old guy, his wife, and a couple of their kids. They knew every customer who came in, knew each others’ families, and were actual acquaintances or even friends instead of merely friendly with them. Nowadays I couldn’t even tell you how to go about finding a grocery store that isn’t the size of my neighborhood and owned by one of maybe 5 companies. Monopolies certainly existed before, but I dunno if it was people, regulations, or what, but there was a while, when I was a kid, that at least the ground-level experience of it wasn’t nearly as bad as it is now.
Late stage capitalism, then. 🤷♂️
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.
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.
Hermit here, can confirm.
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.
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.
YAHAR!!! HOIST THE MAIN SAILS!!!
ahoy!
The seas are truly splendid. I can only but pity the landlubbers.
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.
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.
This gem might need an update.
I’m kinda proud of myself, that I skipped Netflix and never took off my pirate hat.
I never took off my pirates hat but I have had a netflix account for about a year…
…
It wasn’t my account. One of my kids friends signed in to their profile on my TV so I used it every now and again until the password sharing option was taken away.
Stremio plus real debrid for the win…
“[Netflix] members pay as much attention to midroll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves,” Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix, said, per the publication.
Amy, I want you to be honest with me, are you an alien.
Because on planet Earth we do not, if fact, pay as much attention to the ads as to the things we’re actually interested in. Famously our brains even produce this fascinating effect to spare us from the bullshit you’re shoving into our eyeballs.
I’m just waiting for it to be like that Black Mirror episode where ads came on, the guy closed his eyes, and alarms went off until he opened them again.
i think in netflix’s case, they might actually be paying as much attention to the ads as they do the shows, which is to say none at all
This is exactly how I interpreted that statement. No one is paying attention, who cares if they slip some garbage ads in?
“People watch ads,” says the one selling ads.
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.
I mean we keep signing up for services because they’re convenient or fun or interesting and every single time they start cutting corners, worsening services, being more invasive with ads, and charging more and more for the ‘privilege’ of doing whatever it was you were doing there. Why do we keep falling for that and then being surprised when it ends up in the same place as the last 12 platforms or whatever?
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.
They show me an ad, and they are out. It is that simple. Luckily, my life does not depend on streaming.
Haha, already there. I canceled my Netflix a year ago or so after the amount of cheap self produced stuff got too much and they removed more and more older quality content.
Now, whenever I want to stream I sign up for a single streaming service for a month or two - but the time where I was just subscribed all the time is over.
Ah one reason also was the sharing crackdown, I had kept the subscription long term as my kids used it when they were at my place or my ex-wife’s. Nowadays it doesn’t work anymore as (for example) the TV my son has at the ex-wife’s place never is connected via my internet.
With added commercials, less quality etc streaming got less attractive. Hey, nowadays I regularly go to movie theaters, again.
And if things get worse, somewhere I still have my captain’s hat and the wooden leg for sailing the seven seas…
Between that, price hike, and some weirdly low quality content because you don’t use this or that browser, netflix really wants people to stop their subscriptions it seems.
High seas baby!
There is surely a recognisable pattern here in which people leave because of this shit and to keep the flow of money going up they then have to further reduce quality by increasing ads.
I deleted my facebook a few weeks ago and signing in for the first time in years gave a look at what it became and it was unrecognisable.
Yup, I’m finishing off a couple shows and it’s on the chopping block. Easy choice
Netflix is the worst of the streaming channels these days.
99% of people won’t care besides passive complaining at the water cooler, unfortunately
Yarrr
The only limitation on sailing the high seas is that the video and sound quality are not as great as legit streaming. You get descriptions that claim it is ripped full 4k or HD, but when actually looking at the encoding, it is not the case. But what can we do? If we are being made to stream in shit, it is better to sail in blue ocean high seas.
I hear a whisper in the wind about file size being a distinct though not foolproof hint of quality.
I definitely look at the file size first. Although, as you already alluded to, sometimes it gets cheated with the resolution being cropped to either the top or side. And a major issue with downloading large file sizes is if you are unlucky enough that there aren’t many seeders.
atmos and even dts x content are very findable and vlc has the codec information in the tool menu
have a 5.1.4 system hooked up by hdmi to the igpu and the video to the gpu and it sounds just like the theater but be sure to check what is available for the content you are searching because it might not exist
for example Harry Potter just got rereleased on dts x and the news was on the official dts site but also check blu-ray.com to see what formats exists
the green for atmos comes on and the amber for dts does too as well as the white for dolby digital but again vlc confirms this too in the codec information and atmos for home theater will do for dolby digital too
be prepared for enormous file sizes but so worth it and you will have to use the atmos for home theater or the dts x for home theater under the windows spatial sound settings per the content and yes switch back and forth
That’s why you do several magnets, to be sure, and discard the ones that are bullshit, if you’re worried about that. Haven’t had any problems myself, other than theater cam for the newest new movies.
I don’t give a fock about quality, I’m watching for the plot
If I pay for a service and get ads, that service is dead to me forever.
But you’re only getting ads if you choose to get them. What’s your problem exactly?
Always sad watching people complain about ads on free streaming sites which can be easily blocked with an adblocker while defending their subscription to netflix.
It really puts into perspective how ‘intelligent’ the average consumer is and how seriously their input should be taken, though.
Huh?? If a streaming site (or any product for that matter) is free, the user is the product - be it their time, personal info, whatever. It is known and accepted that a “free” service will have a catch that allows the provider to make money.
If a user PAYS for a service it is expected that the payment is enough remuneration for there to be no strings attached. Of course companies will look for shitty ways to do shitty things to make more money, and those companies ought to be punished, generally by a reduction in customers, for their shitty behaviour.
If a streaming site (or any product for that matter) is free, the user is the product
Not necessarily. This is rhetoric peddled by useful idiots to justify spending money on things they could be getting for free.
Companies have a way easier time harvesting and selling your data when you give them your credit card info.
But good job defending corporate abuse with a “saying.” You’re not a useful idiot.
They said if they PAY to use… and get ads. They are right, I ditched tv for streaming because less ads. Now they want to go full circle? I feel like I can’t even open up the fridge these days without having some agenda or ad start.
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.
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.
No they won’t 🏴☠️
Rejecting Netflix fixes things for you and me, but the article says Netflix has 93 million ad-supported subscribers. I’m really worried about the amount of influence advertisers have on our society, and it’s only getting worse. Even if you and I can be above the direct influence of these ads, many people are not, and those people are influencing you and me. This produces a dangerous secondary influence that can reach most of society, and just fills everyone’s mind with lies, for hardly any cost.
No different than the decades of ad supported broadcast television.
Terrible argument. You can’t ignore scale. Algorithmic timelines increase efficacy and precision of ads tremendously. These platforms know exactly who to target with what ad, at what time, with what frequency to get the desired result. It’s like comparing a horse and buggy to a sports car.
Generative ads will be even worse because they can be made specifically to each individual.
Yes, that bit is terrifying
Oh im not defending it. Just saying we’ve been well-fed geese for a very long time now. It has just changed from cramming us full of the Tootsie Pop Owl and the Doublemint Twins with a chaser of Sears Christmas Catalog to a succotash of targeted ads.
Except I didn’t pay a monthly fee for over the air TV. The Jeffersons didn’t cost 4.99 a month
Yeah this part is truly infuriating
YoHoHo Arrrrghhhhhh!!!
They will. We just won’t see them when we watch their shows.
