I’m sorry, did you say Netflix is going to be pirated aggressively for the few shows that aren’t complete slop?
Don’t pirate, we’re awesome!
Here, watch these ads!
Hey, where are you going?
Enshittification marches on
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.
plexjellyfin ftw!
Haven’t had Netflix since the password debacle. Never even missed it. 🏴☠️
Either they have great technology, or they have great entertainment,” she said. “Our superpower has always been the fact that we have both.
Please. Your software is an image carousel and a video player.
“[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.
The bad thing about those kind of shows, is that while most people see that as a warning, and something to avoid.
Some people immediately start charting a path to how to make it a reality, and sometimes those people are very very smart and can chart a path that might take decades.
I say this while on the toilet, writing on a device that has cameras both front and back, always on microphones and location sensors, and facial recognition and 3D scanning equipment.
When the personalized condom ads start popping up, I will only be slightly annoyed.
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.
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.
we don’t really… do consequences for the rich.
We used to. That’s why it didn’t used to be like this.
Indeed.
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.
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’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.
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 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.
Sounds a lot like gig economy for everyone.
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.
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…?
Very eloquent point
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.
The only brand I can think of that is truly not evil is valve, and that’s all cause of Gabe.
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.
All of them.
exactly, if you want to be an ethical consumer you’d need to be a hermit.
What’s wrong with being a hermit?
Hermit here, can confirm.
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 can’t tell from the article what the AI side of this is? Are Netflix offering to make adverts for customslrs using AI? Are they just showing adverts in general from customers, including AI generated ones?
I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, but I’ve read the article twice and still don’t know 😂
No they won’t 🏴☠️
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️ cmon people, stop making netflix relevant
YAHAR!!! HOIST THE MAIN SAILS!!!
ahoy!
Implying there’s anything worth pirating on Netflix these days.
Wednesday was pretty good
You mean today? Today is Wednesday.
…my dudes.
I send that to my students through Google Classroom literally every Wednesday. I teach high school juniors and seniors.
Love death and Robots
Black Mirror
No it wasn’t. The show made ZERO sense.
Wednesday running around trying to PREVENT murders? That makes no sense!
Plus, she’s being admitted into a school for people with special powers, but at the time of admittence, she has shown NO powers whatsoever. They do come later, but…when she’s admitted, she’s just a 16 year old girl.
Plus, that thing where she looks back on her ancestor with the last name “Adams”, but the ancestor is on her mothers side? Why would the ancestor have the last name Adams? That implies that if she’s both an Adams, AND the mothers ancestor, that the whole Adams family is built on incest.
And before you say the husband could have taken the mothers last name, first off, we know Morticia didn’t, and second, it would imply EVERY woman in the family timeline dating back to the 1700s also did this.
Simple solution to all this…first off, make it so Wednesday has some motivation or reason why she’s not the one committing the murders, but also make it a reluctant reason. She still enjoys the murders, but she’ll get kicked out of school if she’s involved. Then make it so without the degree she can’t get her liscense as an embalmer. Which without that, she’s forced to get a normal person job.
Then, keep her quirky room mate exactly the same. The only difference is, she’s not a warewolf. She’s just a preppy girl. Exactly as she was. She can turn into a warewolf later at the hands of Wednesday creating a potion or whatever, but it’s not naturally in her DNA.
Now onto the school. It’s not a school for monsters. It’s just a regular ol’ private school.
The preppy girl is the one solving the murders. Wednesday is reluctantly helping her. The rest of the school shits all over Wednesday, but this preppy girl is the one person who accepts Wednesday for who she is. So even though Wednesday LOVES the murders, she also sees the good in the preppy girl. She becomes protective of her. The rest of the town can fuck off, but the preppy girl is different.
So she goes around town with the preppy girl TRYING to stay out of actually solving the murders, while still supporting the preppy girl. The problem is the preppy girl is REALLY BAD at solving these murders. Remember, she’s just a regular 16 year old girl. Meanwhile Wednesday has her periodic visions that solve the murders.
And the bad guy makes no sense either. He hates the school because they have magic powers. So to defeat them he creates a cult of people with magic powers?
I say make him just hate the Adams Family, including Wednesday. And his plan isn’t to do magical spooky shit. He’s just going to straight up kill Wednesday, until the preppy girl drinks the warewolf potion.
See? Now it all makes sense, and doesn’t go against the core concept of the character. You can even keep in the viral dance.
Wednesday is for people who grew up on Harry Potter and want more of it but know that won’t happen because Rowling is a terf wacko
I think at least a few of those objections are addressed in the show.
The reason I didn’t like it is that all the previous incarnations of Wednesday had her as vengeful to those who deserved it, but basically decent, if a little sardonic, towards those who didn’t. Whereas this new one was a colossal B to everyone she met by default; made it kind of hard to root for her.
I think the new one coded her much more clearly as autistic, and ND people can come off as alienating to neurotypicals. I’m autistic myself and I didn’t consider her that way however.
This is an absolute testament that you can back-of-napkin a better story than 99% of the dirge slop swill that studios pump out because they’re all money obsessed banker finance fuckheads with a fetish for being seen as creative. There is a DESERT of dry dead writing rooms crushed in spirit by “what if they’re sisters??” meddling corpos who can’t be told to fuck off because of reprisals. We really are in the scumsuck bullies-in-control-of-the-school timeline where everything has an implicit fate to suck because of the ego and complacency of corporate media.
in my best Harrison Ford impersonation: — It’s not that kind of movie, kid.
Dunno if I agree with all that. I still liked it.
Season 2 available yet?
You want Season 2 of Wednesday? I’m still waiting for season 4 of G.L.O.W.
I’m still waiting for part two of the final season of stranger things.
That’s another thing I forgot about Netflix: all the shows cancelled without any decent conclusion or even a plan for one.
I know that’s common on TV too, but when a show fails they don’t usually continue advertising it.
I liked Kaos. Of course, it only got one season.
Too good for Netflix
The latest Black Mirror is excellent!
Really enjoyed One Piece live action
Ye that one was good too
The seas are truly splendid. I can only but pity the landlubbers.
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
99% of people won’t care besides passive complaining at the water cooler, unfortunately
