And that’s why people started sailing the high seas again.

"Again"?

I've still been out here since Napster. Welcome back aboard, we kept the torrents warm for you.

if it was still just netflix, and everybody didn't have their own streaming service, that would be different.

but when you add up netflix, prime, disney, paramount, peacock, max, and whatever else, the wallet definitely says it's just like cable.

do one at a time and rotate, maybe have one you 'always' have. you can't watch 10 different services at once anyway.

Some of us never stopped sailing the high seas matey. Yarrrrr!

Yeah but Amazon’s decided you’re not paying enough.

then you’re the type of fool keeping monopolies in service

$2.99/mo. + $14.99/mo. Prime subscription = $17.98 totes.

🤮

Price gouging and corporate greed basically.

We have shrinkflation and now adflation.

this was the last straw? it wasn’t workers peeing in bottles, or businesses being displaced to build warehouses, or tax avoidance, or sweat shop wages for international workers?

to the trolls below, I’m a full time activist, you’re just keyboard warriors

“All Of My Awesome Pirated Media To Keep Being Great Quality, Ad-Free, and Forever Accessible”

Just do it.

Should I shop at the Target, Wal-Mart or the CVS instead?

There are no “local” stores near me. Just massive corporations who treat their employees like shit. Costco is the exception to the treating-their-employees-like-shit rule, but sometimes I don’t need a lifetime supply of an item.

I agree but I can’t really afford to. My local hardware store is great but their prices are higher than big box hardware stores or amazon on many items. For example I replaced an outdoor GFCI outlet that cost $25 local or $18 from big box hardware or amazon. The outlet cover was $10 local or $5 anazon.

The latter really wouldn't surprise me. A service could be making four times the investment in profit and many investors will still push to get a few more cents out of it at any cost.

It was awhile ago but I read that a lot of streaming services don’t make a profit and I can understand the logic. With ads, there is a direct link between a show and it’s profits. The more people watch a show, the more people see the ads, the more a company can charge for ads on that show. Without ads it becomes difficult. It doesn’t matter if 100 people watch or a million, the profits are the same.

I feel it’s inevitable that streaming services are going to go back to ads. It’s the better business model.

“Can’t get worse at this point, eh?” Amazon: hold my beer

Cable internet? I agree. Nowhere near using all its last-mile capacity, yet.

BitTorrents initial release was in July of 2001. You were not torrenting since the 90s. In the 90s we were still on Napster, soulseek, Usenet, and IRC. Limewire, DirectConnect, and The Pirate Bay wouldn’t come around until into the 2000s. I used BitTorrent mostly to get actual Linux ISOs at first because it was better than downloading for several days only to discover at the end that your md5sum checked bad. The pirating came later once the trackers got a better selection than the competing protocols.

Come sail the high seas.

Arrr me matey

They’re still happy to accept food-stamp revenue though, if you get Amazon Prime, of course…

Arrrrrr

When did they make the UPS change? I made a return last week, no charge.

But with no DVRs to fast forward through ads. (Yes, I know that was a “recent” cable thing, but still.)

☠️?

you don’t need a reason to cancel a sub, if you don’t like it, just do it.

Congratulations on waiting and paying them for a service you didn’t want?

Give me a prime membership that’s just for shipping. Cut the video out of the deal and stop including it in my charge kthx

Enshitification

Why, more money of course.

Oh no. Did Amazon treat you poorly? Damn. I bet you thought it was just their employees they treat like shit.

Well, at least you learnt something today.

I was thinking the same but will hold on until I see my first add. I suspect the more of us who do that, the better the odds they reverse course.

Then do it. You even get pro rated back for what you’ve already paid for the month. Literally go do it right now in like 90 seconds.

I have a free vpn, but maybe I should go for the paid plans that I can actually use it for torrenting

When it stops being viable. They have no commitment to the company. They’ll suck it dry and move on to the next project.

No, you don’t get it. Jeff Bezos needs another solid platinum super yacht. Won’t you please think of the poor billionaires.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but yes, mine is.

I’ve never had Prime though. The reason my life is boring and empty, is (I think) because I avoid participating in things I don’t wholeheartedly approve of.

Viewing media, is an insidiously passive form of participation, so I do intently watch plenty of TV\movies (recently figured out it’s about 6-8 things a week).

The rest of my life is just household chores, bicycling, & traveling when I get the chance.
Doing Things makes me feel like Ged.

hey now :(

america is collapsing because a company raised prices?

Because people are ready to spend money to see ads just for the convince of cheaper monthly subscription fee.

That’s the great part, you can’t cancel.

I ended up googling cancel prime membership, and that led me to a page with a cancel button.

I’d say we crossed the Rubicon on this front decades ago, when in-person, at the theater, movies started showing actual ads and not just trailers before the movie you just paid for (and it was at the same price, of course).

I remember the first time I experienced this in a theater. My GF was like “…the hell?” and people were fucking booing the ads. But it didn’t matter enough - the ads are still here.

And yeah, it still annoys me.

Covid kindness is over. Buckle up buckaroos.

the money is drying up, gotta find new ways to monetise

There’s a reason for it, people don’t push back enough. We all need to push back more than we have been.

They’re noticing the pushback so far, but they’re thinking they can break through it and come out victorious on the other side.

Do you really want to pay a monthly fee to be forced to watch commercials?

The whole point of commercials was that you didn’t have to pay otherwise to watch the show.

Yes, it’s /c/piracy! Using torrents. Open source, community ran, providing free and equal access to information for all.

Or Usenet which is direct network access to enormous private digital media libraries to download to your own computer.

http://www.slsknet.org/

https://www.eweka.nl/

I buy used DVDs off eBay, sometimes from pawn shops or thrift stores.

Seriously what is with amazon hardware and apps? They are all garbage, lack support, janky in every sense.

Their Fire TV stick one was decent before but has become meh

I agree but … why would they do that when the vast majority currently paying will keep paying and live with the ads. Those that won’t will either cancel (based on the Netflix account sharing experience, this will be small) or pay the higher fee. There’s no way they let people watch for free.

STUFF ALL THE ADS IN YOU WANT.

It all “ads” up. Right?

I’ll see myself out…

I think most of us pay for the shipping, the video is just a bonus. That said, their exclusives aren’t that great and they just end up in medusa.

Where do I find this stuff on telegram?

Tell me you just woke up from a 50 year coma without telling me you just woke up from a 50 year coma

It’s basically one massive Tragedy Of The Commons (if one is being nice, Ponzi Scheme if one is not being nice) were “somebody else” is supposed to pay people good salaries and “somebody else” is supposed to pay the taxes that support the whole damn structure in which these people are getting rich and get to keep their riches and “somebody else” is supposed to “buy my shares” at a higher price.

Everybody expects “somebody else” to take on the costs of keeping the system going all the while cashing in on all the things only possible thanks to that very same system they contribute into the minimum they can get away with.

It makes all sense for a single economic actor to act in a purelly extractive way when all others have a more balanced economic posture, but the problem is that over the last 4 decades ever more of the economic activity has passed into the hands of such people and now most of it is done like that (which is why “rent seeking” is so common) and the rest of the economic actors (the ones who produce rather than extract) can’t keep up anymore, hence why we’ve reached a point were the broadening of both financial empoverishment and fall in quality of life - i.e. the things that can be purchased with the dwindling money most people earn are themselves getting worse) has become very visible and even painful for many.

Indeed, but no one knows what that number is. Corporations are currently of the mindset of “that will happen in the distant future, so we can keep going.” Of course, eventually, that distant future will become the present and things will collapse, but they’ll keep saying it’s in the future until then.

Good point. Amazon is definitely trying to make COVID issues the new normal.

I still always try and make above 25£ or whatever the minium delivery amount is, despite a decade and a half of Prime.

So I don’t know what I’m getting for it either.

The one thing in life I cannot abide are adverts and I will not tolerate them.

Actual management strategy is “you don’t know what your boundaries are until you push against them”

This happens when you have to grow endlessly and hit a ceiling (in this case, number of users). Then you have to squeeze those users further so the numbers go up again. Of course you are killing the product in the long run because more and more users cancel but that’s not a big deal to the people making the decisions. (Well, the people doing actual work might object but nobody cares about them.) The shareholders that got obscenely rich will just leech onto the next big thing and the CEOs sail to their next product to ruin with a huge golden parachute. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, civilisation crumbles and decays, before it burns in the sadly inevitable climate catastrophe.

Yes and people are paying unfortunately Netflix succeeded and now everyone is trying ads 😔

Call it what is is: GREEDFLATION.

How do I pirate people?

Is yaps better than 1377x?

People were obviously pissed off at cable’s fragmented model, but what killed it was the existence of video on demand services over the internet. The fact that at a certain point Netflix had everything certainly helped in adoption, but the biggest factor was not having to view at a specific time.

There is no such killer improvement on the horizon. All there is is the fragmented streaming market, or piracy.

I keep saying, we already fought this war, we already won.

Fuck around and find out 🏴‍☠️

But it’s not enough to make a lot of money, you have to make ALL the money.

In the UK it was where they showed Mr Robot and a few other things on streaming services and channels not usually available here. It introduced me to Halt and Catch Fire and other good stuff. YMMV depending on location of course.

I actually realized I almost never take advantage of real prime perks anymore and the cost was ridiculous. Nearly $200 a year and all for maybe faster shipping?

I can get most the things on eBay or wherever anyways and it’s the same Chinese crap. Or free shipping anyway from Amazon.

Local is even better and maybe I can actually try shit on and not buy literal garbage. It’s hardly worth it.

What’s jellyfin?

yarg harg fiddilidee, bitches, bros and enby hoes