I'm curious what our collective breaking point is. I, like many here on tildes, have stopped using plenty of services because of excessive ads and price rises (Amazon prime UK starting to add ads...
I'm curious what our collective breaking point is. I, like many here on tildes, have stopped using plenty of services because of excessive ads and price rises (Amazon prime UK starting to add ads for example), but the internet as a whole doesn't seem to be too concerned. I was certain Musk would kill twitter, and sure that the Reddit API protests would damage Reddit, but both are still kicking along.
How much more enshittification (platform decay) can the internet take? Is there a single breaking point? Will people gradually migrate away from the most awful areas of the internet? Because it seems to me at the moment the vast majority are very happy to sit and take whatever scraps they're offered without complaining.
I dread the day Gabe Newell dies. He's 61 right now, so hopefully he has many years left in him. But at least so far, Steam has seemed to stay true to the original founding concept that "piracy a...
Exemplary
I dread the day Gabe Newell dies. He's 61 right now, so hopefully he has many years left in him. But at least so far, Steam has seemed to stay true to the original founding concept that "piracy a customer service problem." Steam isn't perfect, but it has thus far avoided most of the worse aspects of enshittification and platform decay.
As far as where things go, I think we're going to be stuck in a continuous cycle of enshittification->platform abandonment->new platform creation->enshittification->platform abandonment. Where the cycle will end? I see a few possibilities:
First nonprofit platforms like tildes are established, grow, become more prominent, and eventually end up taking over all major social media niches. (They will never grow as fast as commercial offerings, but they'll be less prone to collapse. The classic turtle vs. hare.)
Second, open source distributed platforms like the fediverse become more popular and eventually take over. People figure out ways to package them in very user-friendly ways. Currently they seem intimidating and complicated, but so did the internet itself at first. It took years to go from "the only way to post on the net is to run your own hand-coded HTML page" to "the whole planet is on Twitter."
Third, governments may start operating their own platforms. There may be something to be said for having a true digital "public square," where people can post and have their posts protected by all the same constitutional protections that apply in a regular public setting. Nations, states, or cities could operate their own small social network sites.
On such state platforms, moderation would be both difficult and easy. It would be difficult in that everyone would want their views promoted and their opposition demoted. However, it could be easy in the fact that governments may simply not moderate such forums at all, beyond removing illegal content. But then, in turn, provide really good API access so people can run their own moderation software. Constitutionally, Nazis would be able to post on the platform. But if the platform is built to allow easy custom moderation, then they can be filtered out.
One thing that may aid this is time and the expiration of patents. The big tech companies constantly file all the patents they can for anything and everything they can think of. Often these patents are vague enough that they can be extremely broad. This can in some cases difficult for new start-ups to get going. But Myspace and Facebook were founded about 20 years ago at this point. Past a certain point, regardless of how vague a patent is, you don't have to worry about it. If in 2030 I decide to create a clone of 2005 Facebook, I'm golden as far as patents go. Even if some vague patent from the 2000s might still apply, it would be expired by then.
Finally, I think noncommercial and open-source platforms are the future largely because the private space is becoming stagnant. It's hard to get real innovation in sectors dominated by big platforms. The big platforms themselves aren't interested in real innovation, as they're already monopolies. More innovation would just cannibalize existing sales. New startups could innovate, but the companies have ways of quashing that. If you come out with some big new "YouTube killer" app, Google has two ways of dealing with you. First, you could be bought out. If bought out, they'll implement just enough of the features of your app into YouTube to keep another competitor from doing the same. Or, they'll just operate your app separately and slowly degrade it until its users abandon it for YouTube. If you want to remain independent and refuse to sell, Google can just implement your apps best features into YouTube, or create some sort of competitor app or feature (hello YouTube shorts!)
So for startups in monopolized spaces, often the best outcome for you is that you get bought out for a modest price or end up being driven under by the big boys copying your idea (patent protection is possible, but good luck fighting the big guys' legal teams.) So the best case scenario is that you'll put in a years of effort, work yourself and your friends to the bone putting in 80 hour weeks, and then sell out to the monopoly for a few million. Ultimately, a major will set their price to buy you out based on what they would expect it will cost to create a replacement. So realistically, in most cases, even if your competitor product succeeds, the best case scenario is you end up earning a bit more than if you had just gone to work for one of the big companies in the first place. If you and your startup team puts in 10k hours developing a YouTube competitor, and Google tries to buy you out, they're going to base that offer on what 10k hours of developer work would cost, plus some on top of that.
So really, in these monopolized sectors, what's the point of founding a new startup? The most likely scenario is you go bankrupt. The best case scenario is your startup is successful and it gets bought out. But even in that scenario, you're likely to only earn a bit more than what you would if you put those same kind of hours working for one of the big tech companies.
Big monopolies ultimately strangle innovation in any field they operate in. What real innovation has YouTube done recently? Maybe some higher resolutions? What real innovation has Facebook done recently? The Facebook user experienced peaked c. 2008 and has been downhill ever since.
And this is why I see noncommercial platforms gaining prominence over time. First, they can't be bought out, as they're not for sale. Second, the majors can't drive a nonprofit platform out of business by copying its features. If a platform isn't dependent on ad revenue to keep going, then copying its features, at most, only slows its growth. If a new social app or site is non-profit, then you can't copy its features, steal its users, and then start enshittification. The only way to keep competitive with a nonprofit app is to maintain a quality of service comparable to that app, and to do so indefinitely.
I see nonprofits platforms, whether centralized but run by a foundation (like tildes), distributed open-source platforms like the fediverse, or outright state-run "public squares" as the future of social media. I think this will be a very slow and gradual process. But it will be aided by technological growth. As the price of computing, storage, and transmission continues to fall, the scale of the nonprofit required to run a platform of a given type will fall. For every type of platform, eventually someone will set up a foundation for it, or a government will set one up, or some open-source option will arise. And it will have a ratchet-like effect. Once a space becomes dominated by a nonprofit, it will likely remain dominant, perhaps indefinitely, as the nonprofit will be able to offer a superior user experience.
I really like this explanation of the enshittification cycle we're starting to see. Would only add that the biggest question mark about nonprofits from my perspective is what happens when or if...
I really like this explanation of the enshittification cycle we're starting to see. Would only add that the biggest question mark about nonprofits from my perspective is what happens when or if the leaders/owners of said nonprofits decide to quit or give up? For example, here on Tildes - what happens if Deimos for any reason stops working on this or funding it? Tildes is at risk in that regard unless there's a contingency plan. There are plenty of open source projects that have died just because the person in control stopped working on it, even though other people still want to contribute, but they also didn't want to take it over either.
I don't know much about the finances of tildes, but ideally you run these platforms just like any foundation. Let's consider Deimos as an example. Again, I don't know how Deimos actually does it....
I don't know much about the finances of tildes, but ideally you run these platforms just like any foundation. Let's consider Deimos as an example. Again, I don't know how Deimos actually does it. But the idea way would not be for Deimos to simply pay the server bill out of his pocket indefinitely. Rather, a foundation is the best option. In such a foundation, you don't cover the bills directly from donations. Rather, you run them like university endowments; you collect money, invest it, and then only spend after-inflation gains.
A bigger problem however is culture. There are innumerable foundations like this out there, so finding people to create sustainable financing isn't a problem. However, maintaining that original vision through the decades is difficult. But that's where having a clear foundational mission, having a clear succession plan in place, etc is the best option. For example, back to Deimos, I hope he has started thinking through this. Anyone can have a heart attack tomorrow. And if you really care about something, you should have a succession plan in place. And the best way to do that is to start early.
Ideally these foundations shouldn't be run by one person. One person might start them, but they should have a team. The original founder can be the one to select all the initial team, and they can work hard to find people with the right personality and values. They can spend years working with them, while they're still in full control of the foundation, to really instill the foundational vision on these employees. You instill a culture that then hopefully keeps going long after you kick the bucket or decide to walk away from it. Sure, there are plenty of examples of foundations, over time, drifting away their founding vision. But there are also plenty of examples of those that haven't. There's still a pope in Rome after all.
And, if a foundation does drift from its vision, there's nothing stopping someone from just repeating the process. There's nothing particularly ground-breaking about the software of tildes. (Not a developer, maybe there is on the back-end, but from a user experience it's nothing I haven't seen for the last 20 years. And this is fine, that's not the point of the site.) If Deimos tomorrow has a stroke and bans all content except for hard-core Nazi erotica, there's nothing stopping someone else from rolling out a competitor. In fact, it would be easier than founding tildes. At least on the second go-around, the concept of tildes would have been already proven. The pitch would be, "I want to found a new tildes, but I want to have a better leadership structure in place from the beginning so we don't have another Nazi erotica incident."
I, and several other people, sponsor Deimos thtough Github. I think it might cover the cost of server and domain. It will never cover the time that Deimos put into it. But at the very least (I...
I, and several other people, sponsor Deimos thtough Github. I think it might cover the cost of server and domain. It will never cover the time that Deimos put into it. But at the very least (I hope) there is no bill to pay from own pocket.
Also there were some people who have looked into Tildes source code on Github and patched something or added new functionality. Hopefully this project got enough momentum to keep going.
It's not really new. Innovation, expansion, and SQUEEEZE probably has some proper economics or business name because it's sort of natural to markets. In modern business it's pretty obvious that...
I really like this explanation of the enshittification cycle we're starting to see
It's not really new.
Innovation, expansion, and SQUEEEZE probably has some proper economics or business name because it's sort of natural to markets. In modern business it's pretty obvious that first you innovate into something which catches on, you expand it as much as you can, and then you hit the wall of expansion (which was based on attractive loss leader/expensive features), and now it's time to dial all that back and see how long you can extract money from your customer base.
Really one of the major problems is just how monumental some very important barriers to entry are, which prevent realistic competition in markets to help keep quality, and a lack of reasonable government/market mandated standards on things like data and API's.
If you take a look at the fediverse, many of the largest or most active places are being run by small groups already. In some cases they are legal non-profit entities, but in many cases they are...
If you take a look at the fediverse, many of the largest or most active places are being run by small groups already. In some cases they are legal non-profit entities, but in many cases they are simply collectives. There's a growing sector of tech to help support this, such as opencollective which is how we run our little slice of social media on the fediverse.
I think it's important to note that for many people in the FOSS space, these things are primarily coded and ran by hobbyists and that there are huge growing pains. We had to scramble during the reddit exodus as our traffic went up nearly 20x and our userbase exploded. I can't even imagine operating at the scale of a small real website without a ton more volunteers or even real staff, and it's a big reason behind why places like mastodon took so long to take off and frankly are capped at how big they're going to grow in the short and medium terms.
I also think that your average user has pretty high standards for what they get out of social media on the internet and FOSS hasn't figured out how to get you new content (no discovery algorithms) that you aren't actively searching for. There's also a plethora of tech heavy users which are quick to chastise you for not being tech literate, a bunch of new terminology you need to learn in order to understand how the ecosystems exist, and wildly differing UI from site to site within the same general fediverse app (what the front end of mastodon looks like on each of the larger instances). There's also something to be said about talking in a perceived void, and when you can get twenty likes on instagram or facebook with very little investment or hundreds to thousands on reddit or twitter, it's hard to advocate for posting on social media sites where it's harder to see the direct interactions with your content.
There's a lot that needs to change before open source can reasonably start taking up space in a corporate world, and I think the bar of too much enshittification is way higher than most of us think for the average user.
I browsed beehaw a little and skimmed some docs pages. I'm considering trying to create an account, but I'm curious what it offers beyond Tildes (besides federation with Lemmy). The front page of...
I browsed beehaw a little and skimmed some docs pages. I'm considering trying to create an account, but I'm curious what it offers beyond Tildes (besides federation with Lemmy). The front page of posts seems very similar to the content here. Since you seem to be active both here and there, what keeps you going to both?
Both platforms are much more civil than that of Reddit and more mainstream websites. On Tildes the longer form posts and replies are encouraged, which can lead to some fascinating commentary and...
Both platforms are much more civil than that of Reddit and more mainstream websites. On Tildes the longer form posts and replies are encouraged, which can lead to some fascinating commentary and plenty of education. However, not everyone is great at centering the human at all times and there's a few kinds of problematic behavior that proliferate here. On Beehaw it's a little bit more laid back and shorter form, but the community is much more diverse and more bought into the ethos of being nice. There's a lot of really wholesome and cute moments I've seen happen there that really warm my heart. I find it rather fascinating to see the differing kinds of interaction with various articles/links that get posted on both websites and find myself floating between the two depending on the kind of content I'm looking for, but spend the majority of my time on Beehaw nowadays.
I checked out Beehaw for the first time and flipped through the comments on about half the posts on the front page. In almost all of them, some of the most upvoted comments were basically (or...
I checked out Beehaw for the first time and flipped through the comments on about half the posts on the front page. In almost all of them, some of the most upvoted comments were basically (or literally) "fuck this company", "fuck this CEO", "they can fuck off", etc. Most of the other comments were derisive, cynical, insults, and rarely more than one sentence. Most of them were highly upvoted. I've been on Tildes for years and have never seen any comment section here as awful as those. I don't understand how you can believe that's a "laid back, more bought into the ethos of being nice" community.
As I said in a previous comment, navigating the fediverse can be confusing. What you saw was federated content. A large portion of the lemmyverse has that kind of problem. Unfortunately many...
As I said in a previous comment, navigating the fediverse can be confusing. What you saw was federated content. A large portion of the lemmyverse has that kind of problem. Unfortunately many fediverse apps are still so new that a good UX/UI design so that you could understand what's federated and what's local just isn't present. Also, many are so new that fine grain control over federation isn't present at all - we've had to defederate from a few choice larger instances for having too much of a free speech mindset.
In short, this is precisely why these platforms are not due for prime time and will not be displacing even the most enshittified capitalistic platforms anytime soon.
Interesting to see a "throwaway" account on Tildes... Anyway, it's hard to look at Beehaw without seeing the rest of Lemmy, as well. If there were a Beehaw only community, that might give you a...
Interesting to see a "throwaway" account on Tildes...
Anyway, it's hard to look at Beehaw without seeing the rest of Lemmy, as well. If there were a Beehaw only community, that might give you a better look (though I'm not saying everyone on Beehaw is perfect and nice and all that). But with Beehaw federating with most of the Lemmyverse, that's not possible. So you're going to see a lot of people from other Lemmy instances being less nice. People from other instances can post on Beehaw and vice versa, provided they're federated. And the frontpage reflects that. So unless you're only looking at comments and post from Beehaw users, I don't think it's a fair shake.
Again, that's not saying that all Beehaw people practice "Be{e) Nice" to the maximum degree. But generally speaking, IMO and experience, the Beehaw users are better. Admittedly, I'm somewhat biased because I am a Beehaw user.
From my understanding Beehaw has already defederated with quite a lot of other servers due to exactly that problem. The good thing is that when users from other servers post on Beehaw and their...
From my understanding Beehaw has already defederated with quite a lot of other servers due to exactly that problem. The good thing is that when users from other servers post on Beehaw and their post isn't fully up to the standard of Beehaw, it can happen that someone will point on "please note which server you are on". Something like that could lead to an evolving online "etiquette" on the fediverse with users being more aware of the various community guidelines on the specific server they are posting on. Or at least one could dream that could happen, but it really requires a good userbase and moderation to keep that in check.
Off topic Is there any reason you felt the need to create a throwaway to make this comment? I'm just a bit confused by the juxtaposition of "I've been on Tildes for years" and using a throwaway.
Off topic
Is there any reason you felt the need to create a throwaway to make this comment? I'm just a bit confused by the juxtaposition of "I've been on Tildes for years" and using a throwaway.
I'm always laughed out of rooms with this idea but I think that libraries across countries should pool collect resources and start a social network. Bring a hub for accurate information, people to...
I'm always laughed out of rooms with this idea but I think that libraries across countries should pool collect resources and start a social network.
Bring a hub for accurate information, people to meet and civic events already mean that a digital only version of the library would be acting on its mandate in a new space. Plus, a common system could mean that libraries nationwide could commission software upkeep and development.
I would like to sign up for this platform that requires using real names, and makes it super easy to identify all the Nazis. Possibly with the added bonus of illegal content posters being...
On such state platforms, moderation would be both difficult and easy. It would be difficult in that everyone would want their views promoted and their opposition demoted. However, it could be easy in the fact that governments may simply not moderate such forums at all, beyond removing illegal content. But then, in turn, provide really good API access so people can run their own moderation software. Constitutionally, Nazis would be able to post on the platform. But if the platform is built to allow easy custom moderation, then they can be filtered out.
I would like to sign up for this platform that requires using real names, and makes it super easy to identify all the Nazis. Possibly with the added bonus of illegal content posters being arrested.
OTOH, I'm betting socialists would not be welcome in that space either. Last thing we need is an easy platform for launching off another McCarthy era.
I don't see why it would be much different than physical public square. If you want to go stand outside City Hall with a sign that says, "abolish private property," there's nothing stopping you...
I don't see why it would be much different than physical public square. If you want to go stand outside City Hall with a sign that says, "abolish private property," there's nothing stopping you from doing so. I imagine the level of censorship or persecution would be no different from what has occurred for IRL public forums.
Sure. But I'm not saying they would, and that's not the benchmark for assessing the validity of state-run online public commons. The benchmark should be whether people will have the same amount of...
Sure. But I'm not saying they would, and that's not the benchmark for assessing the validity of state-run online public commons. The benchmark should be whether people will have the same amount of free speech rights as they do in an IRL public space. And yes, they would have to. Any state-operated forum is subject to the same constitutional protections as a in-person forum. Is it possible that a neo-McCarthyist government would persecute people who make pro-socialist posts? Sure, that very well could happen. But the same could happen if that same socialist was handing out flyers on the street corner.
The problem with this reasoning is that we are talking about optimizing two different metrics. The first is, essentially, "How happy does this service make me?" The second is, essentially, "How...
The Facebook user experienced peaked c. 2008 and has been downhill ever since.
The problem with this reasoning is that we are talking about optimizing two different metrics.
The first is, essentially, "How happy does this service make me?"
The second is, essentially, "How much can this service monetize me?" This usually translates to "How much time+money will I spend on this service?"
These two metrics are generally not the same, because humans are not utility maximizers: we are urge satisfiers. And this means that, even on an even playing field, a "better" service can still lose.
XMPP/Jabber was the future of open source communication, easy to interact with people in other servers so you did not need to get an account everywhere. Then google, fb et al adopted it. It was...
And this is why I see noncommercial platforms gaining prominence over time. First, they can't be bought out, as they're not for sale. Second, the majors can't drive a nonprofit platform out of business by copying its features
XMPP/Jabber was the future of open source communication, easy to interact with people in other servers so you did not need to get an account everywhere. Then google, fb et al adopted it. It was great, you could talk to you google/fb contacts via your jabber account. Next thing everyone was using their google/fb account for jabber and google/fb eventually dropped support.
xmpp also had some design issues like every client / server supporting a different subset of features and not great support for phone connectivity (i think this got fixed), but it got a lot of flak from the community because "xml bad".
afaik mastodon / fediverse also has design issues that at some point people will find unbearable. Maybe the devs / owners will become "evil" like it happened to freenode.
If anything open communications are more fragile since they rely on good will and do not have the means to fight these waves of bad public opinion.
As someone working in the web startup space for years - I can't think of a single time "patents" have even been mentioned at work. And I've never once heard of a web startup having issues because...
As someone working in the web startup space for years - I can't think of a single time "patents" have even been mentioned at work. And I've never once heard of a web startup having issues because something they want to do is already patented.
I think the growing proliferation of news on enshittification and it's amplification on social media is a sign that people are in general growing less tolerant. However, Rudism's comment on...
I think the growing proliferation of news on enshittification and it's amplification on social media is a sign that people are in general growing less tolerant. However, Rudism's comment on another thread captures why that may not even matter - ultimately all that matters is whether they get more paying customers one way than another. There's a balancing act somewhere, depending on how large/pre-eminent you want your company to be, but that bar shifts ever lower every year, with people only competing to be the best and then resting on their laurels rather than striving to be ever better.
In this case I would say this likely falls more in the latter category, because gaming on Netflix isn't exactly a big source of revenue. You aren't seeing this proposed on say steam or epic or another digital platform which has a larger share. You're also not (currently) seeing this on streaming services like microsoft game pass, because they already have enough of a market share to not want to risk losing too many customers in the current environment.
I cancelled Netflix in September, and will probably cancel Prime instead of renewing it in June, due to the upcoming ads, as well as the fact that I really haven't watched that much in the past...
In my case, how long I maintain a streaming subscription is the measure of my laziness.
I cancelled Netflix in September, and will probably cancel Prime instead of renewing it in June, due to the upcoming ads, as well as the fact that I really haven't watched that much in the past several months. I'll keep up my CBC Gem subscription, because I think they're doing a good service for the community, and the ad-supported version is still free for everyone.
As I've cancelled services, I've found that the amount of TV/movies I watch has been going down as well. This is probably a good thing. I still maintain my Plex setup, and go through other routes to watch shows that I don't get on the services I pay for, but the manual step of simply downloading files gives me a moment to reflect and decide whether this is something worth watching. It also makes it harder to discover new shows, though I suspect anything actually worth watching will make its way to me through the grapevine, even if I am a few months late to the party. I much prefer binge-watching to waiting week after week (though for me, binge-watching is never really more than 2 episodes in an evening), so I tend to wait until the season is done anyway.
Maybe when I have kids I'll have to sign up for Disney+ or some other child-friendly service, just to keep up with whatever it is kids are watching these days, but until then, I don't mind finding alternative sources for TV watching.
A few things come to mind: pivoting into free content distribution and serving ads the recent rollout of "discovery" features (article) I know LTT recently decided to drop them as a sponsor after...
A few things come to mind:
pivoting into free content distribution and serving ads
the recent rollout of "discovery" features (article)
I know LTT recently decided to drop them as a sponsor after Plex said they wouldn't fix multiple long-standing issues; I haven't watched it but maybe this video talks about it
This seems to have been a common topic for at least a year or two (article) and they had layoffs in June.
Jellyfin as an alternative seems pretty good for the use case of "home user streaming to devices in my house." The issues in my experience are all on the client side, where the "remote control"...
Jellyfin as an alternative seems pretty good for the use case of "home user streaming to devices in my house." The issues in my experience are all on the client side, where the "remote control" functionality kind of sucks. I'll take wonky controls over Plex's current state any day though.
I wouldn’t describe it as trivial. Trivial is going to the App Store and clicking. Jellyfin for my Samsung TV meant enabling developer mode, installing tizen studio and certificate manager,...
I wouldn’t describe it as trivial. Trivial is going to the App Store and clicking.
Jellyfin for my Samsung TV meant enabling developer mode, installing tizen studio and certificate manager, building a package from source, and manually deploying from the command line.
That’s fine for me — I’ve been a software developer for over 30 years. For random non tech person? Decidedly non-trivial.
Easy in my case was grabbing the application from the play store and clicking the server that it found on the local network. I genuinely didn't mean "easy for a computer science graduate" when...
Easy in my case was grabbing the application from the play store and clicking the server that it found on the local network. I genuinely didn't mean "easy for a computer science graduate" when advocating for it.
Setting up a local server is maybe non-trivial but it is the same as Plex (run installer on server, point at media files) so I don't think that is any better or worse.
In general I would agree. In this specific scenario, Jellyfin was a drop in replacement with no additional fiddling needed. My wife is absolutely non-technical and I just told her to download the...
In general I would agree. In this specific scenario, Jellyfin was a drop in replacement with no additional fiddling needed.
My wife is absolutely non-technical and I just told her to download the app and told her the password and she switched over between episodes of her show and had no issues.
Jellyfin server is trivial to setup. You install it, you run it, it asks for which folder contains content and there you go. If you want, you can add users etc. But the basic setup is trivial. The...
Jellyfin server is trivial to setup. You install it, you run it, it asks for which folder contains content and there you go. If you want, you can add users etc. But the basic setup is trivial.
The clients are where troubles arise. I use it on Kodi and while the setup there was also kinda trivial - it finds the server by itself, asks which library/-ies you want to sync and then does that, it can be a pain in the ass sometimes. Android client is just a wrap aroind the web interface - the same as you know from PC.
The biggest.problem people will facewith Jellyfin is migrating their library, as the Jellyfin is not that good at scraping and will mess something up, that is for sure. I have over 300 movies and if I let it scrap automatically, maybe 10% will be messed up and will need correction by me (amd then it will get the right data and images to go with the movie).
If you have Pkex and you have hundreds of movies or series, this will be the real pain in the ass for you. Other problems with Jellyfin will seem non-existent. Believe me.
Have a look at Jellyfin. Plex may eventually end up unusable too by adding things that will get them money yet are not actually useful to many of the users. As I don't use it, I don't remember...
Have a look at Jellyfin. Plex may eventually end up unusable too by adding things that will get them money yet are not actually useful to many of the users. As I don't use it, I don't remember them specifically. You need the user account to run your own Plex at home, which by itself points out that you still depend on actual site/service to have your local software running.
I don't have subscriptions on Netflix, Disney+ or aything like that. I keep buying DVDs and Blu rays and just rip them to my Jellyfin server. I'm also very lucky and have a server at 1Gbit public IP, so I can stream the content anywhere from there.
I feel like for the less technologically literate there's not much they can do to respond to these policy changes. The whole point of these companies burning money for the sake of growth was to...
I feel like for the less technologically literate there's not much they can do to respond to these policy changes. The whole point of these companies burning money for the sake of growth was to eliminate the competition and capture their consumer.
Now that these products are integrated into peoples their only option is to either pay for these degrading services or stop using them all together, and these companies know that breaking a habit is hard. Until there's a popular and convenient alternative to a service most people are going to be trapped using the products they've already learned about.
I've personally hit my breaking point. I'm a sports nut and, until recently, I was absolutely fine paying $70 a month to get the sports I want (I watch something nearly every day). With price...
I've personally hit my breaking point. I'm a sports nut and, until recently, I was absolutely fine paying $70 a month to get the sports I want (I watch something nearly every day).
With price increases on services like YouTube TV and Fubo as well as sports teams' video rights going to third party platforms, I'm just done. To watch Timberwolves games in Minnesota, your ONLY legal options are to pay Bally sports $20 a month (yep, $20 a month for JUST the wolves, wild, lynx, and twins when NBA TV is $15 a month to watch ALL non-wolves games) or to pay Fubo $100 a month, which includes a Bally channel.
It's just ridiculous at this point and I'm done. I bought a Fire Cube and I use the web browser to watch restreams of all sports now and that works perfectly fine and paid for itself after 1 month.
To add my thoughts on others: it's almost depressing how little my friends seem to care about the enshittification of nearly all streaming services. I think the average person just wants to do so little work to watch their show or movie that price increases don't bother the majority of people... Yet... While $20 a month for something like HBO seems ridiculous to me, I do see how that's definitely still worth it to someone who watches a few shows a month or a handful of movies, so I think even with prices being raised on every streaming service, many are still worth the cost to many people. I'm wondering what the breaking point is, because you can be sure these corporations will find it and price their services right under it. Will we see an exodus from Netflix when it costs $25? $30? $40?
I think the reality is most people are just going to pay the price. To be clear, I'm not calling people dumb, I think it's just most people value convenience more than I do, for example. Most people don't know what a torrent is, so for many, having to pay for streaming is the only option they think they have, besides just not watching something.
I really hope there is mass push back on streaming services though. Almost all of them have increased prices, cut content, split off to form their own (such as Paramount and Discovery), it's just bonkers. Right now, I'm back to torrenting and restreams, but I would pay for streaming if streaming companies stopped being greedy fucks.
The only things I'm paying for anymore are Crunchyroll (insane value), YouTube Premium (I don't like paying $15 for basically just an ad blocker, but I use YouTube every day, so it's worth it), and Amazon Prime, which I might cancel now with the price increase, though the other benefits are nice, it's not just streaming.
Lots of people don’t care or at least aren’t bothered/informed enough to do anything about it. Honestly I bet it can take a lot more. The good news is there’s a large userbase who does care, and...
Lots of people don’t care or at least aren’t bothered/informed enough to do anything about it. Honestly I bet it can take a lot more.
The good news is there’s a large userbase who does care, and is even willing to pay extra, so there will always be alternatives if not workarounds.
Example: gaming. Everyone knows the rise of freemium mobile games and micro-transactions but there are still AAA-quality games produced with one-time purchases “the old way” like Elden Ring, TOTK, and Baldur’s Gate 3. And they are making plenty of revenue, in fact Baldur’s Gate is the #1 revenue-producing game on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topselling/US.
My guess a large group of users will just sit through the ads because it is the cheapest options and others will just pay the premium tier without ads. I am not defending these enshittification...
My guess a large group of users will just sit through the ads because it is the cheapest options and others will just pay the premium tier without ads.
I am not defending these enshittification business decisions, though I am sure it is going to sound a bit like it now. But we also got to realize that the last decade of streaming wars with low prices was unsustainable. Many of these services have gigantic investments to recoup and have been running at a loss trying to grab enough marketshare. Good for the consumers, but less so for artists working in the industry that have been pushed into less favorable deals over the years. Same goes for musicians and the small amounts they get paid from Spotify and the like. Journalists can't keep giving away news for free and so forth. And as a consumer, with a streaming service we still get a ton of more stuff for the same price pr month as renting a couple of DVDs a couple of decades ago. Compared to 15-20 years ago, access to music, film, tv shows etc. have never been cheaper for the consumers. Probably too cheap for it to be sustainable in the long run.
The only certain thing is that the platforms will attempt to find out as they have been doing. But the point is that it is easier to just accept the current normal and that most people do not have...
I'm curious what our collective breaking point is.
The only certain thing is that the platforms will attempt to find out as they have been doing.
But the point is that it is easier to just accept the current normal and that most people do not have the inclination to take the harder path outside of their interests. That there could be massive and quick(relatively) improvement if more(relatively) people were ready to consider something other than default and willing to forgo even a scrap of convenience for long term improvement is another thing.
I've not been able to play about half the Netflix games as there's something about our family account that causes them to hang or crash whilst loading. Poinpy is the game that I'd really love to...
I've not been able to play about half the Netflix games as there's something about our family account that causes them to hang or crash whilst loading.
Poinpy is the game that I'd really love to play but neither Netflix nor the publisher seem to want to fix it even though there are aware of the problem. The developer says it's sadly out of their hands as the problem is in Netflix login code.
This sucks. Netflix made deals for games that were originally paid or at least had one time IAP to remove ads.. Like World of Goo, Townsmen, GTA remastered, Terra Nil, etc. Now we have to pay a...
This sucks. Netflix made deals for games that were originally paid or at least had one time IAP to remove ads.. Like World of Goo, Townsmen, GTA remastered, Terra Nil, etc. Now we have to pay a subscription to play them with ads. No thanks .🙃
I read the article, and perhaps I missed something, but it’s not clear to me how ads would be inserted to the gaming service. Are they just in the launcher? During startup? Or could you just be...
I read the article, and perhaps I missed something, but it’s not clear to me how ads would be inserted to the gaming service. Are they just in the launcher? During startup? Or could you just be going about your business playing a game and suddenly everything pauses for a 30 second ad?
I'm curious what our collective breaking point is. I, like many here on tildes, have stopped using plenty of services because of excessive ads and price rises (Amazon prime UK starting to add ads for example), but the internet as a whole doesn't seem to be too concerned. I was certain Musk would kill twitter, and sure that the Reddit API protests would damage Reddit, but both are still kicking along.
How much more enshittification (platform decay) can the internet take? Is there a single breaking point? Will people gradually migrate away from the most awful areas of the internet? Because it seems to me at the moment the vast majority are very happy to sit and take whatever scraps they're offered without complaining.
I dread the day Gabe Newell dies. He's 61 right now, so hopefully he has many years left in him. But at least so far, Steam has seemed to stay true to the original founding concept that "piracy a customer service problem." Steam isn't perfect, but it has thus far avoided most of the worse aspects of enshittification and platform decay.
As far as where things go, I think we're going to be stuck in a continuous cycle of enshittification->platform abandonment->new platform creation->enshittification->platform abandonment. Where the cycle will end? I see a few possibilities:
First nonprofit platforms like tildes are established, grow, become more prominent, and eventually end up taking over all major social media niches. (They will never grow as fast as commercial offerings, but they'll be less prone to collapse. The classic turtle vs. hare.)
Second, open source distributed platforms like the fediverse become more popular and eventually take over. People figure out ways to package them in very user-friendly ways. Currently they seem intimidating and complicated, but so did the internet itself at first. It took years to go from "the only way to post on the net is to run your own hand-coded HTML page" to "the whole planet is on Twitter."
Third, governments may start operating their own platforms. There may be something to be said for having a true digital "public square," where people can post and have their posts protected by all the same constitutional protections that apply in a regular public setting. Nations, states, or cities could operate their own small social network sites.
On such state platforms, moderation would be both difficult and easy. It would be difficult in that everyone would want their views promoted and their opposition demoted. However, it could be easy in the fact that governments may simply not moderate such forums at all, beyond removing illegal content. But then, in turn, provide really good API access so people can run their own moderation software. Constitutionally, Nazis would be able to post on the platform. But if the platform is built to allow easy custom moderation, then they can be filtered out.
One thing that may aid this is time and the expiration of patents. The big tech companies constantly file all the patents they can for anything and everything they can think of. Often these patents are vague enough that they can be extremely broad. This can in some cases difficult for new start-ups to get going. But Myspace and Facebook were founded about 20 years ago at this point. Past a certain point, regardless of how vague a patent is, you don't have to worry about it. If in 2030 I decide to create a clone of 2005 Facebook, I'm golden as far as patents go. Even if some vague patent from the 2000s might still apply, it would be expired by then.
Finally, I think noncommercial and open-source platforms are the future largely because the private space is becoming stagnant. It's hard to get real innovation in sectors dominated by big platforms. The big platforms themselves aren't interested in real innovation, as they're already monopolies. More innovation would just cannibalize existing sales. New startups could innovate, but the companies have ways of quashing that. If you come out with some big new "YouTube killer" app, Google has two ways of dealing with you. First, you could be bought out. If bought out, they'll implement just enough of the features of your app into YouTube to keep another competitor from doing the same. Or, they'll just operate your app separately and slowly degrade it until its users abandon it for YouTube. If you want to remain independent and refuse to sell, Google can just implement your apps best features into YouTube, or create some sort of competitor app or feature (hello YouTube shorts!)
So for startups in monopolized spaces, often the best outcome for you is that you get bought out for a modest price or end up being driven under by the big boys copying your idea (patent protection is possible, but good luck fighting the big guys' legal teams.) So the best case scenario is that you'll put in a years of effort, work yourself and your friends to the bone putting in 80 hour weeks, and then sell out to the monopoly for a few million. Ultimately, a major will set their price to buy you out based on what they would expect it will cost to create a replacement. So realistically, in most cases, even if your competitor product succeeds, the best case scenario is you end up earning a bit more than if you had just gone to work for one of the big companies in the first place. If you and your startup team puts in 10k hours developing a YouTube competitor, and Google tries to buy you out, they're going to base that offer on what 10k hours of developer work would cost, plus some on top of that.
So really, in these monopolized sectors, what's the point of founding a new startup? The most likely scenario is you go bankrupt. The best case scenario is your startup is successful and it gets bought out. But even in that scenario, you're likely to only earn a bit more than what you would if you put those same kind of hours working for one of the big tech companies.
Big monopolies ultimately strangle innovation in any field they operate in. What real innovation has YouTube done recently? Maybe some higher resolutions? What real innovation has Facebook done recently? The Facebook user experienced peaked c. 2008 and has been downhill ever since.
And this is why I see noncommercial platforms gaining prominence over time. First, they can't be bought out, as they're not for sale. Second, the majors can't drive a nonprofit platform out of business by copying its features. If a platform isn't dependent on ad revenue to keep going, then copying its features, at most, only slows its growth. If a new social app or site is non-profit, then you can't copy its features, steal its users, and then start enshittification. The only way to keep competitive with a nonprofit app is to maintain a quality of service comparable to that app, and to do so indefinitely.
I see nonprofits platforms, whether centralized but run by a foundation (like tildes), distributed open-source platforms like the fediverse, or outright state-run "public squares" as the future of social media. I think this will be a very slow and gradual process. But it will be aided by technological growth. As the price of computing, storage, and transmission continues to fall, the scale of the nonprofit required to run a platform of a given type will fall. For every type of platform, eventually someone will set up a foundation for it, or a government will set one up, or some open-source option will arise. And it will have a ratchet-like effect. Once a space becomes dominated by a nonprofit, it will likely remain dominant, perhaps indefinitely, as the nonprofit will be able to offer a superior user experience.
I really like this explanation of the enshittification cycle we're starting to see. Would only add that the biggest question mark about nonprofits from my perspective is what happens when or if the leaders/owners of said nonprofits decide to quit or give up? For example, here on Tildes - what happens if Deimos for any reason stops working on this or funding it? Tildes is at risk in that regard unless there's a contingency plan. There are plenty of open source projects that have died just because the person in control stopped working on it, even though other people still want to contribute, but they also didn't want to take it over either.
I don't know much about the finances of tildes, but ideally you run these platforms just like any foundation. Let's consider Deimos as an example. Again, I don't know how Deimos actually does it. But the idea way would not be for Deimos to simply pay the server bill out of his pocket indefinitely. Rather, a foundation is the best option. In such a foundation, you don't cover the bills directly from donations. Rather, you run them like university endowments; you collect money, invest it, and then only spend after-inflation gains.
A bigger problem however is culture. There are innumerable foundations like this out there, so finding people to create sustainable financing isn't a problem. However, maintaining that original vision through the decades is difficult. But that's where having a clear foundational mission, having a clear succession plan in place, etc is the best option. For example, back to Deimos, I hope he has started thinking through this. Anyone can have a heart attack tomorrow. And if you really care about something, you should have a succession plan in place. And the best way to do that is to start early.
Ideally these foundations shouldn't be run by one person. One person might start them, but they should have a team. The original founder can be the one to select all the initial team, and they can work hard to find people with the right personality and values. They can spend years working with them, while they're still in full control of the foundation, to really instill the foundational vision on these employees. You instill a culture that then hopefully keeps going long after you kick the bucket or decide to walk away from it. Sure, there are plenty of examples of foundations, over time, drifting away their founding vision. But there are also plenty of examples of those that haven't. There's still a pope in Rome after all.
And, if a foundation does drift from its vision, there's nothing stopping someone from just repeating the process. There's nothing particularly ground-breaking about the software of tildes. (Not a developer, maybe there is on the back-end, but from a user experience it's nothing I haven't seen for the last 20 years. And this is fine, that's not the point of the site.) If Deimos tomorrow has a stroke and bans all content except for hard-core Nazi erotica, there's nothing stopping someone else from rolling out a competitor. In fact, it would be easier than founding tildes. At least on the second go-around, the concept of tildes would have been already proven. The pitch would be, "I want to found a new tildes, but I want to have a better leadership structure in place from the beginning so we don't have another Nazi erotica incident."
I, and several other people, sponsor Deimos thtough Github. I think it might cover the cost of server and domain. It will never cover the time that Deimos put into it. But at the very least (I hope) there is no bill to pay from own pocket.
Also there were some people who have looked into Tildes source code on Github and patched something or added new functionality. Hopefully this project got enough momentum to keep going.
It's not really new.
Innovation, expansion, and SQUEEEZE probably has some proper economics or business name because it's sort of natural to markets. In modern business it's pretty obvious that first you innovate into something which catches on, you expand it as much as you can, and then you hit the wall of expansion (which was based on attractive loss leader/expensive features), and now it's time to dial all that back and see how long you can extract money from your customer base.
Really one of the major problems is just how monumental some very important barriers to entry are, which prevent realistic competition in markets to help keep quality, and a lack of reasonable government/market mandated standards on things like data and API's.
If you take a look at the fediverse, many of the largest or most active places are being run by small groups already. In some cases they are legal non-profit entities, but in many cases they are simply collectives. There's a growing sector of tech to help support this, such as opencollective which is how we run our little slice of social media on the fediverse.
I think it's important to note that for many people in the FOSS space, these things are primarily coded and ran by hobbyists and that there are huge growing pains. We had to scramble during the reddit exodus as our traffic went up nearly 20x and our userbase exploded. I can't even imagine operating at the scale of a small real website without a ton more volunteers or even real staff, and it's a big reason behind why places like mastodon took so long to take off and frankly are capped at how big they're going to grow in the short and medium terms.
I also think that your average user has pretty high standards for what they get out of social media on the internet and FOSS hasn't figured out how to get you new content (no discovery algorithms) that you aren't actively searching for. There's also a plethora of tech heavy users which are quick to chastise you for not being tech literate, a bunch of new terminology you need to learn in order to understand how the ecosystems exist, and wildly differing UI from site to site within the same general fediverse app (what the front end of mastodon looks like on each of the larger instances). There's also something to be said about talking in a perceived void, and when you can get twenty likes on instagram or facebook with very little investment or hundreds to thousands on reddit or twitter, it's hard to advocate for posting on social media sites where it's harder to see the direct interactions with your content.
There's a lot that needs to change before open source can reasonably start taking up space in a corporate world, and I think the bar of too much enshittification is way higher than most of us think for the average user.
I browsed beehaw a little and skimmed some docs pages. I'm considering trying to create an account, but I'm curious what it offers beyond Tildes (besides federation with Lemmy). The front page of posts seems very similar to the content here. Since you seem to be active both here and there, what keeps you going to both?
Both platforms are much more civil than that of Reddit and more mainstream websites. On Tildes the longer form posts and replies are encouraged, which can lead to some fascinating commentary and plenty of education. However, not everyone is great at centering the human at all times and there's a few kinds of problematic behavior that proliferate here. On Beehaw it's a little bit more laid back and shorter form, but the community is much more diverse and more bought into the ethos of being nice. There's a lot of really wholesome and cute moments I've seen happen there that really warm my heart. I find it rather fascinating to see the differing kinds of interaction with various articles/links that get posted on both websites and find myself floating between the two depending on the kind of content I'm looking for, but spend the majority of my time on Beehaw nowadays.
I checked out Beehaw for the first time and flipped through the comments on about half the posts on the front page. In almost all of them, some of the most upvoted comments were basically (or literally) "fuck this company", "fuck this CEO", "they can fuck off", etc. Most of the other comments were derisive, cynical, insults, and rarely more than one sentence. Most of them were highly upvoted. I've been on Tildes for years and have never seen any comment section here as awful as those. I don't understand how you can believe that's a "laid back, more bought into the ethos of being nice" community.
As I said in a previous comment, navigating the fediverse can be confusing. What you saw was federated content. A large portion of the lemmyverse has that kind of problem. Unfortunately many fediverse apps are still so new that a good UX/UI design so that you could understand what's federated and what's local just isn't present. Also, many are so new that fine grain control over federation isn't present at all - we've had to defederate from a few choice larger instances for having too much of a free speech mindset.
In short, this is precisely why these platforms are not due for prime time and will not be displacing even the most enshittified capitalistic platforms anytime soon.
Interesting to see a "throwaway" account on Tildes...
Anyway, it's hard to look at Beehaw without seeing the rest of Lemmy, as well. If there were a Beehaw only community, that might give you a better look (though I'm not saying everyone on Beehaw is perfect and nice and all that). But with Beehaw federating with most of the Lemmyverse, that's not possible. So you're going to see a lot of people from other Lemmy instances being less nice. People from other instances can post on Beehaw and vice versa, provided they're federated. And the frontpage reflects that. So unless you're only looking at comments and post from Beehaw users, I don't think it's a fair shake.
Again, that's not saying that all Beehaw people practice "Be{e) Nice" to the maximum degree. But generally speaking, IMO and experience, the Beehaw users are better. Admittedly, I'm somewhat biased because I am a Beehaw user.
From my understanding Beehaw has already defederated with quite a lot of other servers due to exactly that problem. The good thing is that when users from other servers post on Beehaw and their post isn't fully up to the standard of Beehaw, it can happen that someone will point on "please note which server you are on". Something like that could lead to an evolving online "etiquette" on the fediverse with users being more aware of the various community guidelines on the specific server they are posting on. Or at least one could dream that could happen, but it really requires a good userbase and moderation to keep that in check.
Off topic
Is there any reason you felt the need to create a throwaway to make this comment? I'm just a bit confused by the juxtaposition of "I've been on Tildes for years" and using a throwaway.
I'm always laughed out of rooms with this idea but I think that libraries across countries should pool collect resources and start a social network.
Bring a hub for accurate information, people to meet and civic events already mean that a digital only version of the library would be acting on its mandate in a new space. Plus, a common system could mean that libraries nationwide could commission software upkeep and development.
I would like to sign up for this platform that requires using real names, and makes it super easy to identify all the Nazis. Possibly with the added bonus of illegal content posters being arrested.
OTOH, I'm betting socialists would not be welcome in that space either. Last thing we need is an easy platform for launching off another McCarthy era.
I don't see why it would be much different than physical public square. If you want to go stand outside City Hall with a sign that says, "abolish private property," there's nothing stopping you from doing so. I imagine the level of censorship or persecution would be no different from what has occurred for IRL public forums.
The USA does not, despite its free speech protections, have a good track record for respecting the rights of peaceful dissidents.
Sure. But I'm not saying they would, and that's not the benchmark for assessing the validity of state-run online public commons. The benchmark should be whether people will have the same amount of free speech rights as they do in an IRL public space. And yes, they would have to. Any state-operated forum is subject to the same constitutional protections as a in-person forum. Is it possible that a neo-McCarthyist government would persecute people who make pro-socialist posts? Sure, that very well could happen. But the same could happen if that same socialist was handing out flyers on the street corner.
The problem with this reasoning is that we are talking about optimizing two different metrics.
The first is, essentially, "How happy does this service make me?"
The second is, essentially, "How much can this service monetize me?" This usually translates to "How much time+money will I spend on this service?"
These two metrics are generally not the same, because humans are not utility maximizers: we are urge satisfiers. And this means that, even on an even playing field, a "better" service can still lose.
XMPP/Jabber was the future of open source communication, easy to interact with people in other servers so you did not need to get an account everywhere. Then google, fb et al adopted it. It was great, you could talk to you google/fb contacts via your jabber account. Next thing everyone was using their google/fb account for jabber and google/fb eventually dropped support.
xmpp also had some design issues like every client / server supporting a different subset of features and not great support for phone connectivity (i think this got fixed), but it got a lot of flak from the community because "xml bad".
afaik mastodon / fediverse also has design issues that at some point people will find unbearable. Maybe the devs / owners will become "evil" like it happened to freenode.
If anything open communications are more fragile since they rely on good will and do not have the means to fight these waves of bad public opinion.
As someone working in the web startup space for years - I can't think of a single time "patents" have even been mentioned at work. And I've never once heard of a web startup having issues because something they want to do is already patented.
I think the growing proliferation of news on enshittification and it's amplification on social media is a sign that people are in general growing less tolerant. However, Rudism's comment on another thread captures why that may not even matter - ultimately all that matters is whether they get more paying customers one way than another. There's a balancing act somewhere, depending on how large/pre-eminent you want your company to be, but that bar shifts ever lower every year, with people only competing to be the best and then resting on their laurels rather than striving to be ever better.
In this case I would say this likely falls more in the latter category, because gaming on Netflix isn't exactly a big source of revenue. You aren't seeing this proposed on say steam or epic or another digital platform which has a larger share. You're also not (currently) seeing this on streaming services like microsoft game pass, because they already have enough of a market share to not want to risk losing too many customers in the current environment.
I cancelled Netflix in September, and will probably cancel Prime instead of renewing it in June, due to the upcoming ads, as well as the fact that I really haven't watched that much in the past several months. I'll keep up my CBC Gem subscription, because I think they're doing a good service for the community, and the ad-supported version is still free for everyone.
As I've cancelled services, I've found that the amount of TV/movies I watch has been going down as well. This is probably a good thing. I still maintain my Plex setup, and go through other routes to watch shows that I don't get on the services I pay for, but the manual step of simply downloading files gives me a moment to reflect and decide whether this is something worth watching. It also makes it harder to discover new shows, though I suspect anything actually worth watching will make its way to me through the grapevine, even if I am a few months late to the party. I much prefer binge-watching to waiting week after week (though for me, binge-watching is never really more than 2 episodes in an evening), so I tend to wait until the season is done anyway.
Maybe when I have kids I'll have to sign up for Disney+ or some other child-friendly service, just to keep up with whatever it is kids are watching these days, but until then, I don't mind finding alternative sources for TV watching.
Plex has its own issues despite the maintenance. Seems to be mismanaged and going downhill for the past few years
How so?
A few things come to mind:
This seems to have been a common topic for at least a year or two (article) and they had layoffs in June.
Jellyfin as an alternative seems pretty good for the use case of "home user streaming to devices in my house." The issues in my experience are all on the client side, where the "remote control" functionality kind of sucks. I'll take wonky controls over Plex's current state any day though.
Huh? It's trivial to setup. It works on every device I own, including a WebOS TV. There also appears to exist a Tizen build. Where doesn't it work?
I wouldn’t describe it as trivial. Trivial is going to the App Store and clicking.
Jellyfin for my Samsung TV meant enabling developer mode, installing tizen studio and certificate manager, building a package from source, and manually deploying from the command line.
That’s fine for me — I’ve been a software developer for over 30 years. For random non tech person? Decidedly non-trivial.
Easy in my case was grabbing the application from the play store and clicking the server that it found on the local network. I genuinely didn't mean "easy for a computer science graduate" when advocating for it.
Setting up a local server is maybe non-trivial but it is the same as Plex (run installer on server, point at media files) so I don't think that is any better or worse.
In general I would agree. In this specific scenario, Jellyfin was a drop in replacement with no additional fiddling needed.
My wife is absolutely non-technical and I just told her to download the app and told her the password and she switched over between episodes of her show and had no issues.
It was trivial to me because I don't use garbo Tizen (: For others I listed, it is just a matter of installation from Google Play / LG Content store.
Jellyfin server is trivial to setup. You install it, you run it, it asks for which folder contains content and there you go. If you want, you can add users etc. But the basic setup is trivial.
The clients are where troubles arise. I use it on Kodi and while the setup there was also kinda trivial - it finds the server by itself, asks which library/-ies you want to sync and then does that, it can be a pain in the ass sometimes. Android client is just a wrap aroind the web interface - the same as you know from PC.
The biggest.problem people will facewith Jellyfin is migrating their library, as the Jellyfin is not that good at scraping and will mess something up, that is for sure. I have over 300 movies and if I let it scrap automatically, maybe 10% will be messed up and will need correction by me (amd then it will get the right data and images to go with the movie).
If you have Pkex and you have hundreds of movies or series, this will be the real pain in the ass for you. Other problems with Jellyfin will seem non-existent. Believe me.
Have you tried Universal Media Server?
Have a look at Jellyfin. Plex may eventually end up unusable too by adding things that will get them money yet are not actually useful to many of the users. As I don't use it, I don't remember them specifically. You need the user account to run your own Plex at home, which by itself points out that you still depend on actual site/service to have your local software running.
I don't have subscriptions on Netflix, Disney+ or aything like that. I keep buying DVDs and Blu rays and just rip them to my Jellyfin server. I'm also very lucky and have a server at 1Gbit public IP, so I can stream the content anywhere from there.
I feel like for the less technologically literate there's not much they can do to respond to these policy changes. The whole point of these companies burning money for the sake of growth was to eliminate the competition and capture their consumer.
Now that these products are integrated into peoples their only option is to either pay for these degrading services or stop using them all together, and these companies know that breaking a habit is hard. Until there's a popular and convenient alternative to a service most people are going to be trapped using the products they've already learned about.
I've personally hit my breaking point. I'm a sports nut and, until recently, I was absolutely fine paying $70 a month to get the sports I want (I watch something nearly every day).
With price increases on services like YouTube TV and Fubo as well as sports teams' video rights going to third party platforms, I'm just done. To watch Timberwolves games in Minnesota, your ONLY legal options are to pay Bally sports $20 a month (yep, $20 a month for JUST the wolves, wild, lynx, and twins when NBA TV is $15 a month to watch ALL non-wolves games) or to pay Fubo $100 a month, which includes a Bally channel.
It's just ridiculous at this point and I'm done. I bought a Fire Cube and I use the web browser to watch restreams of all sports now and that works perfectly fine and paid for itself after 1 month.
To add my thoughts on others: it's almost depressing how little my friends seem to care about the enshittification of nearly all streaming services. I think the average person just wants to do so little work to watch their show or movie that price increases don't bother the majority of people... Yet... While $20 a month for something like HBO seems ridiculous to me, I do see how that's definitely still worth it to someone who watches a few shows a month or a handful of movies, so I think even with prices being raised on every streaming service, many are still worth the cost to many people. I'm wondering what the breaking point is, because you can be sure these corporations will find it and price their services right under it. Will we see an exodus from Netflix when it costs $25? $30? $40?
I think the reality is most people are just going to pay the price. To be clear, I'm not calling people dumb, I think it's just most people value convenience more than I do, for example. Most people don't know what a torrent is, so for many, having to pay for streaming is the only option they think they have, besides just not watching something.
I really hope there is mass push back on streaming services though. Almost all of them have increased prices, cut content, split off to form their own (such as Paramount and Discovery), it's just bonkers. Right now, I'm back to torrenting and restreams, but I would pay for streaming if streaming companies stopped being greedy fucks.
The only things I'm paying for anymore are Crunchyroll (insane value), YouTube Premium (I don't like paying $15 for basically just an ad blocker, but I use YouTube every day, so it's worth it), and Amazon Prime, which I might cancel now with the price increase, though the other benefits are nice, it's not just streaming.
Lots of people don’t care or at least aren’t bothered/informed enough to do anything about it. Honestly I bet it can take a lot more.
The good news is there’s a large userbase who does care, and is even willing to pay extra, so there will always be alternatives if not workarounds.
Example: gaming. Everyone knows the rise of freemium mobile games and micro-transactions but there are still AAA-quality games produced with one-time purchases “the old way” like Elden Ring, TOTK, and Baldur’s Gate 3. And they are making plenty of revenue, in fact Baldur’s Gate is the #1 revenue-producing game on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topselling/US.
There is none and they know it from decades of cable.
My guess a large group of users will just sit through the ads because it is the cheapest options and others will just pay the premium tier without ads.
I am not defending these enshittification business decisions, though I am sure it is going to sound a bit like it now. But we also got to realize that the last decade of streaming wars with low prices was unsustainable. Many of these services have gigantic investments to recoup and have been running at a loss trying to grab enough marketshare. Good for the consumers, but less so for artists working in the industry that have been pushed into less favorable deals over the years. Same goes for musicians and the small amounts they get paid from Spotify and the like. Journalists can't keep giving away news for free and so forth. And as a consumer, with a streaming service we still get a ton of more stuff for the same price pr month as renting a couple of DVDs a couple of decades ago. Compared to 15-20 years ago, access to music, film, tv shows etc. have never been cheaper for the consumers. Probably too cheap for it to be sustainable in the long run.
The only certain thing is that the platforms will attempt to find out as they have been doing.
But the point is that it is easier to just accept the current normal and that most people do not have the inclination to take the harder path outside of their interests. That there could be massive and quick(relatively) improvement if more(relatively) people were ready to consider something other than default and willing to forgo even a scrap of convenience for long term improvement is another thing.
I've not been able to play about half the Netflix games as there's something about our family account that causes them to hang or crash whilst loading.
Poinpy is the game that I'd really love to play but neither Netflix nor the publisher seem to want to fix it even though there are aware of the problem. The developer says it's sadly out of their hands as the problem is in Netflix login code.
This sucks. Netflix made deals for games that were originally paid or at least had one time IAP to remove ads.. Like World of Goo, Townsmen, GTA remastered, Terra Nil, etc. Now we have to pay a subscription to play them with ads. No thanks .🙃
I read the article, and perhaps I missed something, but it’s not clear to me how ads would be inserted to the gaming service. Are they just in the launcher? During startup? Or could you just be going about your business playing a game and suddenly everything pauses for a 30 second ad?