lol 2007.
Gentle reminder that i2p exists where torrents can be downloaded anonymously.
Kinda inverts inverted the causality of Netflix starting their own production and other companies pulling their licences. Netflix started their own production to survive the licences getting pulled, which was inevitable as soon as Netflix looked profitable.
They didn’t get greedy, they probably started out greedy, ran a good service to grab market share, then had to make moves to defend against the predictable greed of the incumbents.
It’s greedy turtles all the way down
Anon: 2007
The music industry ca. 1981:
So we left side b blank so you can help!
Also the book piracy that existed in universities through photocopying and sharing pages.
This is making a comeback with scanning.
Amazon was the place to buy manuals(art,hobby, do it yourself etc.). Now authors have pulled their books from print and expecting people to sign a subscription on patreon. Now there are sharks overpricing any remaining physical print second hand by 2000%.
pirates have scanned these books and selling access to uploaded jpgs for a fraction of what the manual would have cost had it just stayed in print.
2007 ? Everybody around me was pirating every single piece of media in 2000 and we were late to the party
Napster was a household name and made mp3 piracy mainstream in 1999!
The golden days of the net 🥲
People were pirating games over bbs in the 80s. I have a shoebox of 5.25" floppies for the commodore 64 with hand written labels.
I really wish I was a consultant for these fucking jokers.
Back when Disney+ was just “Rumor has it Disney wants to launch their own Netflix-like streaming service.”, I called this shit. I said “Well that’s just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart, no one’s going to juggle 50 different streaming services just to be able to find something to watch.”
And I was fucking right.
The only ethical streaming service is Tubi as it doesn’t charge relying on ads alone, and it’s a neat little bonus that Tubi has actively aided in the restoration of lost media.
If it aint on Tubi, then I’m going to yo-ho-ho with a bottle of fuck you.
just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart
Disney Plus generated $8.4 billion revenue in 2023, an 13% increase year-on-year.
lol
Yes, but they also brought back piracy, eroded faith in the brand, and while Disney+ is making money…
Disney’s newer efforts are kinda showing it’s not the powerhouse it used to be. With the only thing they really have going for them are the legacy media that they’re holding hostage on a platform, they arbitrarily removes things from time to time for seemingly no reason (the Willow series for example, which makes very little sense since that was original to Disney+ to begin with and for some reason Buzz Lightyear of Star Command isn’t on the platform despite all the other Toy Story media being present… and there are several episodes of The Simpsons that are just straight up memory-holed; most infamously the Michael Jackson episode)
If this trend continues, Disney will be left with people pirating the legacy media that people at home have shaky access to at best (Monthly fee for content that may be removed with no notice and for no reason), especially as prices soar and wages stay the same, and interest in newer project dwindling.
Or to be blunt, one of the most classic blunders: High short term profits at the cost of being unsustainable in the long term.
Sure it’s easy to think of Disney as laughing its way to the bank, but… think of it this way.
Disney’s been king of the world, especially in animation (Which has been getting sidelined in favor of live-action. I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it’d be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind). They’re a luxury limousine running fast on a road that has no other cars (because Disney bought those cars), and the tank’s running out of gas. You won’t know it’s running on fumes until it comes to a complete stop, but at the speed it’s going it will take awhile…
And the second it stops, a simple fuel service isn’t going to get it running again. It will get running again, too many people need it to run. So they’ll call a mechanic, and it will take to the streets once more.
Is Disney cooked? of course not, but they will see a return of their darkest days. A decade or two of the Disney brand no longer being that shining seal of quality people take it for.
I see it comparable to Nintendo’s Wii-U days when the company was a joke with no 3rd Party support and consumers who weren’t even sure what the Wii-U was even supposed to be. (Too many passed on it, believing it to be an overpriced gimmicky tablet add-on for the Wii… The launch title being NSMBU instead of something fans hadn’t already seen before I think is a big part of the blame for that.)
Nintendo didn’t wind up in bankruptcy, but they’d need to reinvent the wheel via the Switch, win back 3rd Party Support, and rekindle the faith of the fans, to get back to being a power house.
I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it’d be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind).
But mufasa IS animated
It’s also shit. Animation only goes so far.
Say what you will about Sonic. No one involved in those films is having a bad time. There’s a lotta heart there and it shows.
Mufasa is shlok incarnate.
You know what I mean
And they somehow just became profitable… while also already legacy owning thr vast majority of content
🏴☠️🎶"Yo! Ho! All hands, hoist the colours high!"🎶🏴☠️
That’s a weird as heck christmas song.
The One Piece is real!.. and can be seen on [Streaming Site REDACTED]
Pluto is also free with ads
Netflix entered into the already existing sphere of greed based commodification / exploitation that legacy media created decades ago. these legacy media conglomerates (owned circularly by the same big players in wall street black rock, vangaurd, state street et all.) dominate and control multiple industries and now Netflix is just part of that same ecosystem amassing wealth for their own self centered agenda without much, if any oversight at all. Theres just few greedy old cigar smoking men or rather boardrooms lead by these same men controling a majority of the world. Blackrock, blackston, state street and vanguard circularly own about 20% of disney and they own around the same percentage of netflix as well. Nevermind all the other media outlets they own large shareholding positions of. Greed is not the accidental result its the primary objective
2007? I remember watching a DivX of The Matrix back in 99. Prior to that I remember watching south park episodes in the RealPlayer.
I watched the entirety of Blair witch project the week before it came out in a real player at 300 by 200 pixels. I kept rotating between watching it thumbnail sized and watching it regular player sized. Both were equally inferiorating
Those RealPlayer Southpark episodes were 15mb and had 8 pixels
South Park’s graphics were so bad back then that probably almost sufficed.
Yeah this was going on before that. Media Piracy really set-off in the late 90s when DSL, and cable, internet services became mainstream. Also Netflix started making their own content in response to a growing number of competing services, all fighting over the same pool of production companies’ work, and having exclusive rights to one IP, or another, rather than other services being the result of netflix making their own content.
Yes, but you are old as a rock.
Those times are lost in the unknowable pre-history of what we call “the internet” today.
Exactly this and more.
I’m not even pirating because it’s cheaper, or easier. I have near 100TB in storage, and it takes hours per week to search material, have it downloaded, checked, etc. I just am done with the marketing, the branding, the advertising, the bullshit rules. I just want to watch what I want to watch and media companies made this impossible so I’m forced to sail the high seas
Why not just… Automate that with an Arr stack? And use Jellyseer to find new and popular movies and shows.
Wow that’s a lot.
How do you not think too much about hard drive failures 😅
Serious question though, how much do you spend on drives, they’re getting cheaper but it’s still around like 25€/TB where I live?
He spends about 2500€
100TB? Why?
pr0n
Build your own Netflix gets expensive after a while.
I found I watched a lot more once I installed Jellyfin rather than faffing around with files and folders whenever I wanted to watch anything.
I know when you can get petabytes, why stop at 100TB.
Because that’s like 20,000 movies and I need two new movies to watch every night until the day I die, thanks.
Netflix didn’t get greedy (well not in that way). The movie companies wanted to make their own platform, which would have left Netflix with nothing. So they had to become their own production company. They said “we have to become a production company faster than production companies become streaming companies”.
I feel like people are ignoring that Netflix was bleeding money during their “golden age”. They only switched to being profitable a couple years back. A lot of times what people describe as enshittification is just unprofitable companies having to come up with an actual business model as venture capital dries up.
Also, merry Christmas:)
You can also argue that silicon valley has that particular business model of purposely making a product look great and cheap until enough people sign up.
It’s distinct from how most companies run in the red at their inception in that those traditional businesses would gladly be in the black but are waiting for economies of scale or building a reputation among consumers.
And that’s probably why people get so disappointed w/ tech companies.
It’s not that the prices they switch to are unreasonable, but that they hike prices after getting a user base, so it feels like a bait and switch instead of an early bird discount. If they made it an actual early bird discount, people would probably be fine with it.
Or maybe they keep prices the same, but drop content while keeping prices the same. If they instead structured it as a base tier and an “early bird” free access to a higher tier, which then starts costing money after some time period, I also think people would be okay with it. I have always thought Netflix should have packages, so you could opt-in to additional stuff like maybe Disney or HBO content. If Netflix did this early on, maybe Disney and HBO wouldn’t have bothered making their own streaming platforms and instead just raked in revenue from these higher tier customers, because they get most of the benefit of having their own streaming platform, with none of the costs.
In pretty much every case, I’ll point to Valve’s business model as an example. Gaming companies generally don’t feel the need to run their own platforms, and the ones that do often still distribute through other stores.
Valve was the first, their business model was basically removing retail (the actual reason for Steam was to make updates trivial, so a Counterstrike update didn’t break half the servers for 2 weeks), for everyone after Steam the business model was removing Steam by replacing it with a Steam clone.
That package thing they do on prime video
Yeah, but Prime sucks in other ways. I wish I could combine what I like about Prime and Netflix into one service.
Netflix has a market cap of 300bn. Public markets picked up right where venture capital left off no bother. The problem I think was the competitive forces as much as enshitified business model, though perhaps one cannot exist without the other. Certainly without doing their own content they could easily have become ludicrously profitable as a redistributer only, though I’m not convinced it would have stopped everyone and their dog moving in on the space.
Facebook is really the cleaner example of enshitification. They could have happily printed modest money for ever as the preeminent social network, but they took the greedy approach and morphed into a cesspool.
Merry Christmas to you!
If you take venture capital, you sacrifice your ability to not be greedy. Could Facebook have even existed without VC? Facebook didn’t have ads during its startup IIRC, which meant they had no revenue.
Theu saw the writing on the walls. They knew the big dogs would want a slice of the streaming game and they needed to pivot before the rug got pulled out from ubder them. Hulu was already being constructed when they were recalling shifting into making their own products IIRC. It wasn’t just VC that got them to their golden era, they also relied on the industry bot taking streaming seriously enough and giving them deals that they never would today.
This (though you need to fix your typos). Movie companies saw Netflix as a garbage rerun channel. They were chasing after opening weekends. It took a long time for them to finally launch their own service.
All I’m going to say is every computer I had was equipped with 2 disk drives until 2010. Elder Millennials and Gen X know why.
Don’t tell me you copied that floppy
I really don’t know why. I never had that.
For what - burning CD to CD? But u don’t need 2 drives for that, u would just create an iso and burn it using same drive.My first home computer was an Apple IIgs. It had no hard drive. You need to use a “boot disk” that loaded the operating system, and then once that was in RAM, you could swap out that disk for the one with your program on it. The OS looked a little like early MacOS; it was called ProDOS. You could technically use it to copy floppy disks (the program for that was “Copy II Plus”), but it took forever, because the copy program had to copy a chunk of the disk into RAM, then get you to swap to the target disk, write that chunk, get you to swap back to the first disk, load a new chunk, get you to swap disks again… It generally took about 40 swaps for a 3.5" high-density (by which they meant 800kb) floppy. It was incredibly tedious. If you had two disk drives, though, it could just work continuously without needing to wait for you to swap disks all the time.
It was more of a convenience thing. If you had 1 drive you had to babysit the read portion to then install the CD-R after. If you had two it was just load both and carry on for 20 minutes and come back to it.
That was just if you were burning a copy and not ripping. But you’re right it wasn’t necessary. I just remember more than once wanting a second drive so I didn’t have to sit and wait to put the CD-R in after.
It went marginally faster
So you can play videogames while burning disks? Idk.
I haven’t stopped sailing those seas. A pirate’s life for me. :)
I mean, yeah. More or less.
Compare with the music industry, where there are a good number of streaming services, and pretty much all of them offer the same selection of music, all of it.
I don’t think I know of anyone who pirates music at all.
The answer is greed. They make more being vertically integrated doing their own streaming than they would make taking a cut from a third party to host the same content.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Well Soulseek isn’t existing you’re saying 😊?
Not too many people know of it.
I live in a place where people don’t have money to pay for music streaming services, and even here, no one knows about soulseek or similars. What people do is listen to music via youtube. The only reasonably popular music piracy method around here is using telegram groups.
Except people aren’t necessarily going back to piracy en masse
Torrent sites are dwindling, even the big ones have sad membership numbers compared to 10yrs ago
A large amount of internet users access the internet via devices that are openly hostile to or outright disallow anything that would enable piracy. The devices are then connected to an internet that is further hostile and aims to steer you away from anything deemed unsavory
Phones and tablets are cumbersome and unintuitive to navigate. In the case of apple torrent clients are not allowed to be listed on their app store and sideloading is involved and kind of a pain. Chromebooks and windows 11 are better obviously but less utilized then you’d think
But that leads to the second point, which is kind of angry old man yells at cloud, but people are just less tech inclined now. It makes sense because modern tech is designed to oppress the user whereas tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was more to empower them. They don’t bother to figure out how to install applications, use the file explorer, change settings, etc. the very basic steps needed to pirate shit (you obviously don’t need to be a super hacker). They don’t need to. The command prompt or a terminal is something that makes them think you’re hacking shit
They download applications like steam and then their browser auto opens the installer, then steam handles installing games and mods from that point on. They are safeguarded against having to deal with the icky filesystem and their hand is held every step of the way. Or they just download stuff from the official MS app store and even more hand holding. It’s okay because they’re only gonna install 5 streaming apps anyway and then use the browser to visit the 6 approved websites that google or bing search sends you to for basically any query.
And that’s only if they actually have a proper computer. If they have a tablet or phone they either are pushed extremely heavily towards the above scenario, or in the case of apple they simply have no other option
10 years from now the internet will just be 2-3 social media sites, a few shopping conglomerates, wikis, and streaming sites. The devices used to access will no longer let you access the filesystem directly, apps will be unable to be installed if they aren’t code signed by apple or google or ms or whoever, sealed in epoxy, and draconian drm everywhere. 40 years from now your grandchildren will think you’re weird for complaining about how you used to have autonomy and authority over your devices once you owned them and they’ll remind you it’s time to pay another $400 bezobucks to rent the google chrome ar internet hub for another month because you’re not allowed to own it and it’s a federal crime to take it apart
Torrenting is less common but thats because most piracy is just streaming now. Its more profitable to host a streaming site, youre less likely to get a virus streaming compared to torrenting now, and its easier to access and find.
The less likely to get a virus point is arguable but I get what you’re saying
Really the thing is private trackers kind of put themselves out of the game. Like let’s look at a common path to get to some of the more well known coveted private trackers:
Do an irc interview about the rules and culture of a site with a staff member. You will have to study, sit in irc for god knows how long for someone to be available, and pass. Alternatively, know someone already in who trusts you and will burn an invite
Then you’re in. Now you have to upload music, which is much less commonly pirated bc music streaming isn’t fucking stupid and fragmented these days (though pricing keeps rising so maybe we’ll see a return). To get to the point where you can be invited to sites that would actually have movies and tv and games and shit you need 25 gigs uploaded and a 0.7 ratio minimum. Also the sites been around a while and the people on it are meticulous music collectors so finding something to upload is actually challenging, when you do you have to make sure you meet the strict guidelines, etc
That’s a lot! Like learning to use a torrent client is easy. Asking a 2024 tech dummy to learn irc? Come on. At the same time the filter is needed, the people who truly want to be there are what make the communities so great, and the vetting process is what keeps feds out (for the most part they go for low hanging fruit sites like rarbg)
While I agree with the trend for the average person, I think in pure numbers there are always going to be more tech savvy people in the foreseeable future.
Sure, 80% of people online in the 2000s and 90s were all tech savvy hobbyists, but their numbers was low (let’s say a million).
Now only 0.5% might be tech savvy, but that is 0.5% of a billion people, which would be 5 mil compared to 800k above.
I obviously picked convenient numbers but the point still stands, there are lots of tech savvy places today and it’s growing, just not as fast as the non tech savvy crowd unfortunately.
I am personally still friends with two people who even know how to navigate their filesystem beyond clicking the downloads or my documents link in the start menu. I hope you’re right, but all I see around me at work and personal life is ignorance. People can’t even figure out how to use their phones beyond the basics.
Yeah, on average you will find less and less tech savvy people in real life moving forward.
But if you were to ask a programming question on the most popular coding site, you would get more responses today than 20 years ago.
Yeah, but what’s the relative quality of responses? I feel like the bar for “tech savvy” or “competent at programming” has dropped precipitously. And unfortunately, the number of people confidently asserting a wrong answer online is high in my experience, including on programming forums.
Think about it this way,
Has the total number of C++ experts gone down since 20 years ago or has it gone up? The total market share has gone down, but total amount of systems running C++ has increased.
Today is more lucrative to be an expert than 20 years ago, and there are far more positions that offer good money.
It’s also easier to make money by knowing very little programming.
So the question is, would the people capable of being a true expert avoid that path today even though it’s more lucrative, I don’t think so.
The only difference is, 20 years ago, only the true experts were online, now they probably don’t enjoy being online as much and are probably big fans of old school hobbies (like wood working)
Direct download piracy and streaming is surprisingly popular.
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Basically you select the movie, a system finds the torrent or DDL, a service downloads it (or has it cached) and you stream it to your device.
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Something I learned back in the day: “Never pay for warez”. Pirate all you want, the moment you are paying, pay the creator of the product you’re interested in, not someone who pirated it and wants to profit from distributing it without a licence.
Except the value proposition still needs to make sense, so resigning to just pay the
creatorlicense holder exorbitant rates for ever-more-enshittified services is learning the wrong lesson.They have used their control over the system to grotesquely distort copyright from its original intent of getting more cultural works into the public domain for people to use and build on, to instead lock everything away for lifetimes. Don’t buy into their lies and propaganda that they have any moral high ground.
Stremio?
I think your doom and gloom scenario is a little dramatic considering we already have Linux. The free platform where you have full control over your technological experience already exists and has been well maintained for decades at this point. Sure, proprietary software not working on Linux sucks and will continue to be an issue, but there’s typically FOSS alternatives for the useful programs.
It’d be more accurate to say we’ll have two Internets, especially since that’s expressly what Google wants. The ignorant people will all flock to the corpo slopping trough, and people like us will be using Linux devices to access federated sites like this one.
Linux is not on mobile. And before anyone says “Android/LineageOS is Linux”, 1) Android is proprietary (and AOSP is not a real substitute for Android), and 2) LineageOS isn’t a substitute for Android without microg, and also isn’t Linux (last I checked, app development on LineageOS REQUIRED ANDROID STUDIO for the signing bullshit).
Now, if anyone says “Linux is on mobile, I daily-drive my PinePhone!” (and is actually being honest), then congratulations and I respect the hell out of you but you’re more of a masochist than Drew Devault and that makes you a unicorn.
This is true but is only applicable as long as manufacturers still allow alternative OS to exist. It sounds crazy now but the idea of not being able to use an alternative is something that manufacturers are clearly toying with (see the x elite laptops with locked boot loaders, hp secureboot, etc).
They’ve seen the control they can exert over users with mobile devices and they want that across the spectrum. Then it goes back to a point I made in another comment; Linux/foss users can and will still exist but they will be restricted to ancient hardware that prevents them from working on certain tasks. This already occurs: look at a true foss idealist that will only use hardware that can run coreboot/libreboot. You’re generally running hardware well over a decade old at this point. If you want to work on any computationally complex task (ml models, high poly 3d modeling, anything requiring a modern discrete gpu really), you’re out of luck unless you compromise your ideals
The thing is Linux users and other power users think “if manufacturers lock the bootloader there will be a huge outcry and people won’t buy it”. And there is truth to that, there will be a lot of noise online. But most users won’t care and they’ll still buy the stuff. And apple/google/hp/lenovo/etc will push/pay their buddies at facebook/reddit/etc to downplay the discussion/outrage so it will blow over quick and become a normal thing. Then all it takes is a new dmca extension or modification and now overriding a manufacturer lock on a bootloader is an illegal modification
Right but you can still build your own PC. I already don’t bother with a laptop or any of that other garbage because they are just worthless tech garbage. Sure, the new MacBook/Chromebook/etc will be locked down, but they’re already a bitch to get a different OS running on so I’d argue we’re already there.
Essentially what would be required is DRM from Intel or AMD on their CPUs to prevent you from ultimately installing whatever OS you want, and I don’t think that fits their business model. I think they just want to make a bunch of money selling overpriced silicone, and don’t need control of the platform. Sure, your software will be a few steps behind the cutting edge corpo stuff, but you make it sound like people will be trapped on their 2010 Thinkpad. You can still have a high powered computer, you just have to be part of a different ecosystem.
“Intel Boot Guard is an ME application introduced in Q2 2013 with ME firmware version 9.0 on 4th Generation Intel Core i3/i5/i7 (Haswell) CPUs. It allows a PC OEM to generate an asymmetric cryptographic keypair, install the public key in the CPU, and prevent the CPU from executing boot firmware that isn’t signed with their private key. This means that coreboot and libreboot are impossible to port to such PCs, without the OEM’s private signing key. Note that systems assembled from separately purchased mainboard and CPU parts are unaffected, since the vendor of the mainboard (on which the boot firmware is stored) can’t possibly affect the public key stored on the CPU.”
From libreboot faq. There is precedent for this and it just hasn’t been heavily exercised, yet
Unless you build the hardware you cannot prevent this from happening. It’s merely a question of how long until 99% of tech devices are basically iphones and you need a very restrictive “developers license” to buy the (likely extremely expensive) 1% that are not that puts legal repercussions on you if you do anything that they do not like
I hate you. Because you’re not really wrong in most parts. Ownership of devices pisses me off for what feels like an eternity now. I can’t imagine how sales would go for PCs if you would get not admin-access anymore. But I smell that future coming. At least if we had not all switched to Linux by then. But even if, then the war between corpos and community would be on the “you can’t access amazon from this insecure decice”-front.
Me, personally, currently live at the peak of piracy right now. The pinnacle I’ve dreamt of days back when selling wares on CDs for triple digits was a thing. Sonarr/radar/etc makes it so easy and awesome now. Enter a movie’s name, wait a minute, watch it.
As to your Netflix/streaming-point: add that only muricans had it THAT nice. Some countries had to pay full price yet only got access to like 30% (Romania, Italy,etc.). The rest got filled with local crap. You saw the shit when using search but then it was gone. I had Netflix for a year or so. When it was more comfy than wares. And then it gradually became worse but also more expensive. The usual enshittification
I think the end is where some people are moving but I think its a bit too pessimistic. While kids are becoming more tech illiterate there is always gonna be a certain amount of people that know a bit more than the masses and they are not gonna let themselves be pushed around.
What are they going to do? Manufacture their own silicon? The ability to make a computing device of reasonable power is fairly prohibitive and as things move forward manufacturers seem intent on doing things that are more and more hostile to consumers. You say people won’t let themselves be pushed around and that sounds nice but people have consistently done exactly that to date.
Our power as individuals is minimal here; we can vote politically and financially. These companies do amazing financially so voting with our wallets doesn’t work. Voting politically also hasn’t done in terms of enacting regulation aside from some small wins in a few states with right to repair (and big losses in many more states as well as federally). And given the fact that those wins are small and fragmented with only a very small handful of states having any policy (like less than 10) it’s likely that big tech will push back hard rather than simply comply. And we are heading into political times where regulations will likely continue to erode.
So as things worsen the people who “know a bit more” can have the choice of using cutting edge hardware that is more locked down, or being a stallman type that uses relatively ancient hardware full of compromises because it is compatible with an ideology. That is just but it also means they will be constantly hampered and the problem will only be compounded as technology becomes more advanced, which is inherent and constantly occurring
This is also not just a generational thing to be clear. People my age, younger, and older, who were into this stuff have become tech illiterate as time progressed because they’ve allowed themselves to move away from their computers and go to their phones which have become a reddit/youtube/tiktok/pintrest/amazon/twitter/instagram/etc box. The etc is whatever skinner box game they’re playing at the moment, because most of them who played actual games don’t even bother to play games anymore. They’re so caught up in the cycle of “engagement” that they don’t care about much else. they come home and doom scroll then complain about how they feel aimless and anxious all the time and never get stuff done
You’re right that there exceptions, but they seem to be dwindling
I’ve made a similar comment on r/austrian_economics and got called a communist for it lol
But yeah, well said.
This is spot on.
