And their catalog is actually super small now. My wife and I watch a bunch of horror movies, and I think there’s only like 20. They try to pad that number by pretending that foreign films are actually in English.
I’ve been spending the last 2 days downloading a bunch of horror, ramping up for when I finally get rid of the rest of our subcription services. I can’t even remember when Netflix’s horror selection was even remotely good. Like they have The Ritual and Apostle, but yeah it’s mostly crap.
And they change the pictures around all the time to make you think it’s something new, when in fact you’ve seen it before. And because it’s bland as all fuck, you notice this like 45 minutes in.
I got a picture of Matt Smith on one horror movie about a black couple. He was in it for like 2 minutes. It wasn’t terrible, but they’re algorithms are basic bitch enough to just go “you white? here’s a white man”
Yeah the foreign films coming up are the worst. I’m sure it’s great for the people who speak those languages but I don’t generally find it entertaining to watch with subtitles. It’s annoying when they keep coming up on recommended and even worse when it takes more clicks to see the language then to just start it.
Somehow Netflix thinks I speak Norwegian and I didn’t see a way to turn that off
Anyway -1 premium account, when they started down their path to enshittification
Eh, I’m personally completely fine watching content in other languages and so is pretty much everyone I know. I would never want to limit myself to content in languages I understand. Actually, I think the majority of stuff I watch is foreign content.
But to each their own of course and I guess it couldn’t hurt if they added the option, but I think expecting it as a “fundamental configuration” says more about you than about how bad Netflix is. There are much better arguments for that.
Netflix used to be famously good at suggesting films. Articles were written about it, and there was even a cash reward for anyone who could contribute to its performance. Then it just turned to shit.
And the funny thing is that it would have helped counteract the shrinking library. Sure, there would be fewer films on the platform, so you’d be less likely to find a specific title, but at least you could select a film Netflix recommended based on your past ratings and be fairly confident you’d enjoy it. Now? Absolutely not.
Well this can get quite complicated to implement I suppose. I heard letterboxd works nice for discovery if you are lazy, but I don’t know if they have a jellyfin plugin.
It’s not widely available and its only in Norwegian, sadly.
However, I will second @mkengine proposal for Letterboxd, I think it is the superior site to nerd out on. Discovery can be a challenge, depending on your own level of investment into the medium. I’m a big ol movie-nerd, and I’m currently grateful to have access to most streaming services through friends/family/partner so I get to browse them if desired.
Apart from that my twitter algorithm is quite skewed towards movies, and I have a “list” on there (curated users you can browse, kind of like a community on here. That’s been great.
Other than that, I listed to podcast, sometimes check out our national newspapers reviews (but most of those reviewers are already in the aforementioned twitter-list) etc.
As for reading on recommender systems and the algorithm for netflix. My work was based around bias and “trust” when it comes to the recommender systems and how much it recommended/pushed “its own agenda” to users despite having differential tastes.
Good keywords I enjoyed was: recommender system bias I also read some good articles on the spotify recommender systems. But those mostly centered around people growing attached to their algorhitms. It was a fun read.
Hell, I remember when they had ‘Max’ back when I watched on my PS3. I absolutely loved that it would ask me a bunch of questions and then give me a movie to watch. I’m surprised I haven’t seen that more around, that was an amazing feature.
I find the same thing with music streaming on Spotify. I used to discover lots of new music I liked on it but these days I can’t get it to generate an interesting playlist. It’s songs I already know interspersed with things that are boring. Seems like the recommendations got worse.
I quit Spotify when the “New Library Experience” completely fucked the music library side of the app. If you mostly use playlists, it was a lateral change. If you used it to collect some songs here, and album there, and keep them all sorted, it’s like it dumped your entire collection on the floor and expected a thank-you for the new organization system.
My guess, as others have mentioned, is that Spotify tries to squeeze more profits by pushing certain songs, whether because they get paid to promote them, or the royalties are lower. That’s easier to do with their playlists and recommendations, so they pushed people to that side of the app by making everything else dogshit. And now, apparently, the curated side took it too far and is awful, too.
I still use Apple Music, which is one of like two services that actually let you organize your music in a sensible way outside of playlists. That said, after I cut cords with video streaming services and set up my own library, I think I might do the same with music.
Discovery was always the thing that made streaming services better than buying recordings individually. If these services stop being good for finding new music, then there’s not much reason to keep using them.
What happened in those years and why were they omitted? It’s odd that they just leave it out with (as far as I could tell from the linked source) no explanation for that.
Nothing happened. There was no price increase those years. The chart isn’t misleading at all, OP just cut off the title, “Netflix Price Hikes 2011-2023.” 2018 and 2021 aren’t relevant because there was no change.
Then why are 2012 and 2016 included? It’s extremely confusing to have a line graph over time where intervals of time are missing, even if you clearly call attention to it, which they don’t here.
After seeing this post a couple times (which speaks to its relevance) it got me thinking that enshittification (of the world) will definitely continue until our morale improves, as in until we make them stop. Are there any online collectives that work together to stop this tomfoolery?
Long term, this is probably the consequence. But to delete a giant tree (or tumour, decide your own mental image) you have to cut it back, then cut it down, then rip out the roots, one after the other.
You can also rip it out at once but you need giant machines and will cause tons of damage to the environment and leave a giant crater.
I dont think capitalism is even the whole tree. Its actually greed and selfishness which needs to go.
People who miss the basic empathy to take from others just because they can need to be educated and - if needed - contained and pathologized as to keep them from winning against the fair and „gullible“. This will be insanely complex and long to eradicate that.
But step one is joining a collective to change things. All positive change came from collectives, never from individuals. Individuals are easy to beat, to intimidate, to silence. But groups are very hard to do this to.
Doing something to lift the dread off your heart and getting change going is the most sane approach imo.
I dont think capitalism is even the whole tree. Its actually greed and selfishness which needs to go.
This is because capitalism glorifies greed and selfishness and considers it the primary driver or human behaviour. Which it isn’t for everyone. Many of us leftists vote left despite it not being in our personal financial beat interests. Sharing is caring etc.
Unfortunately the system is so damn rigged in favour of the multi billionaires.
I think capitalism favors greed and selfishness because greedy, selfish people have corrupted an otherwise useful idea. I dont think the original iteration was bad. We just left the door to the machine room ajar and a bunch of trolls laid some cables to steal power from our generator. Actually a very fitting metaphor. The sad part is that we‘re still trying to agree on the fact that someone is stealing energy.
If you have seen lord of the rings, society is the ents, discussing endlessly if the hobbits are actually hobbits or orcs while their forest is being cut down en masse. Thats how I view humanity atm.
I don’t agree. Capitalism is and has always been about greed. It’s why people invest, to get maximum profits and externalise all the negative side-effects.
I think capitalism works if it’s balanced with socialism and strongly restricted by law as we used to do in the Netherlands and some EU countries still do. Unfortunately the Netherlands was lost to the neoliberals and now to the fascists :( But luckily I don’t live there anymore.
I can see how you arrive at this conclusion. Not sure I necessarily follow it since I invest (and always have) in things I believe in. Buying additional plates is an investment in having guests over for example.
But I‘m also neurologically different from most peeps. The folks that invest without empathy fall into two categories in my head: the ignorant and the evil. The ignorant need to be educated, by force if necessary. The evil need to be stopped.
Still, I can see that capitalism has become corrupted and needs to go. It’s too complicated for everyone to understand its side effects. Maybe even for me. But I still think its people born or raised without a conscience that will corrupt anything we build. Those need to be stopped as well.
Ending capitalism is not the /only/ way. Within a capitalistic system, you can boycott shit. Most consumers are pushovers but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m boycotting hundreds of shitty companies. Off the top of my head:
Amazon
Cloudflare
Microsoft
Facebook
Google
Apple
(surveillance advertisers in general)
(all closed-source s/w)
HP
Proctor & Gamble
Unilever
all ALEC members (American Express, Anheuser Busch, Boeing, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, Chevron, FedEx, Motorola, PNC bank, Sony, TimeWarner)
Are there any online collectives that work together to stop this tomfoolery?
Same as it has been for the last 100 years: Vote with your money. If you don’t like the product/service, don’t buy it. Stop thinking you can force them to change their offering.
Same as it has been for the last 100 years: Vote with your money. If you don’t like the product/service, don’t buy it. Stop thinking you can force them to change their offering.
The crackhead down the road wasting away in his own piss and shit isn’t equally “valuable” to me or anybody that contributes to society in a positive manner. I don’t care how you spin it
It basically is saying that if you have more money then you have more “votes”.
That’s simply true. It doesn’t do anyone any good to disregard the facts.
Or to put it in another way: If you have more money you matter more.
That abstraction doesn’t help much. And first of all, it’s more accurate to derive the statement “If you have more money then you have more influence”.
It’s still a shitty status quo, but it is what it is. The worse thing you can do is tell people not to boycott shit products on the basis of rejecting reality. It’d be like telling people not to vote in elections because their vote is a drop in the ocean.
Some people vote for democrats, then they cancel their own vote by getting their internet service from Spectrum, buying fuel from Chevron for their car, shipping their packages using FedEx, getting their phone service from AT&T, banking at PNC Bank, flying on Boeing planes, shopping on Amazon, doing their web searches on a Microsoft syndicate’s site (e.g. DDG), buying Sony devices… etc. They either have no clue that most of their voting is actually for the republicans, or they think that drop-in-the-ocean vote that comes once in 4 years somehow carries more weight than the daily votes they cast with reckless disregard.
Greg Abbott’s war chest is mostly fed by oil companies. If you buy fuel for a car, you help Greg Abbott and other republicans. And if you buy from Chevron, you give the greatest support to republicans (Chevron is an ALEC member).
Like the commenter below said, Streamio is the answer. We use Streamio with Torrentio plug in running on a cheap windows PC and its been very good so far.
Please do not normalize this rampant artificial inflation. There is no reason prices should be as high as they are. None. Corporate profits are higher than ever. This is pure and simple corporate greed. This should not be normal.
Ive honestly become more aware of this and I am doing my best to be better about it. I try to shop local. I’ve mostly moved to free and open source software. My last car and all future cars will be used cars from the 90s. I try to buy used mostly everything honestly.
I got serious about my data and digital foot print.
A surprising amount of people still ask questions about µTorrent and assume it’s still popular. Apparently there was a lot of value in that brand name. But yeah it’s an utter disaster.
qBittorrent is my choice as well. Deluge is also great, along with Transmission.
Yep. I used to share my account with my family before Netflix’s password sharing crackdown. When they did it, I deleted my account day 1.
My dad and my sister just resubscribed separately. Unfortunately, a net win for them. Efectively +1 user. Just one example, but I’m betting this worked for many more of their users.
Yep. If you judge how Netflix is doing by Lemmy/Reddit comments alone, you’d think they’d be hemorrhaging subscriptions. But nah. They’re pulling records of money with these policy changes and price hikes. Turns out people just pay up.
Which is good, they still produce a few good shows per year, so be glad that enough people are throwing their money away so that you can pick their fruits.
I understand wanting them to go bankrupt (or be punished some other way) for their business practices, but they still produce a handful of good shows per year, so is it so bad that someone pays them for it? Be glad that enough people are throwing their money away so that you can pick their fruits. Maybe some day it’s too expensive for your dad and sister and then you are there to show them a better way.
I went to get a new phone plan and one of the plans I looked at has Netflix included. Am I counted as a subscriber if it comes bundled with something else I need, but never use Netflix?
I got this same deal from T-Mobile a while back, it gave Netflix with two screens.
Eventually my Dad went and got an upgrade and they raised his price. He asked to join my plan so we split the bill.
Easy, two screens two accounts, we each had our own login through Netflix family.
I have since moved away for a job, and now he can’t use Netflix because we have different addresses. We can’t use a license we rightfully own as it was originally sold to us.
I wish they offered another video service instead. I’d rather swap to it and not even use it just to spite the hasty cash grab Netflix made.
You’re not gonna like this but that is voting with your wallet! They are voting yes since they are paying for it. The truth is, we are in the minority. The majority still finds Netflix affordable.
Ahaha, dang I got so excited before google pointed out I’m an idiot and meant season 4. (But on the other hand, did find out it was renewed for a 4th, so that’s groovy!)
What they don’t advertise is how many of those “new” subscribers are actually from their “emerging” markets such as India, where a subscription price is peanuts. Also, im fairly certain these numbers are intentionally skewed to paint a better picture as they lump in all the “free” accounts people get with their other subscriptions.
I get Paramount+ free with Walmart+. I get Hulu/Netflix/AppleTV with Tmobile Mobile. I get Max with ATT Fiber.
I’m sure that these streaming companies have more new subscribers when they literally give it away and simultaneously strangling their existing consumers. It’s more of a question of how long is it sustainable for them to raise prices every time they’re not going to have a record quarter.
Movies and TV are some peoples’ hobbies. I have a co-worker who used to spend $300/mo on a cable bill because she had all the movie channels and stuff. She watched tons of movies and shows. At first I thought she was weird for watching so much TV, but then I thought about how much gaming I do, and realized “Oh, that’s just her hobby like gaming is mine.” Granted, I’m not spending $300/mo on gaming, but people do tend to spend money on hobbies. Sometimes even more than $300/mo.
Anyway, I’ve been letting her use my Netflix account – surprisingly neither of us have seen anything from Netflix about it – for the last several years. She recently (finally) got a Smart TV so she cancelled her crazy-ass cable package and I think pays for YouTube TV now. I’m sure she’s watching just as much as TV and movies as ever, but at least she’s saving some money.
Uh that makes sense. I guess my original comment is more out of jealousy: I have so many movies that I want to watch, but I have never find the time and energy to do so. After work, dinner, chat, duolingo, and lunch prep for my wife, I barely find any time during my night, and it is kind of frustrating for me.
Last year, I have only finished like less than 5 from like 50 titles.
I am glad people are enjoying their hobby. I personally would not be on Netflix anymore as most of the movie I want to watch is not on there, but I can now kind of see it might be worth it for others.
It also surprises me that this large amount of the population takes movie and TV as a hobby.
Honestly, I was surprised too. I guess given how ubiquitous movies and television are, it never really occurred to me that it could be a hobby. And I bet most people don’t think of it as a hobby, either. When I think of a hobby related to TV/Movies, I think more like “film snobs” (for lack of a better term). Maybe people who watch the AFI 100 or whatever and know all about film and cinematography. But not people just watching TV like anyone else. But by definition, it’s a hobby. It’s “a pursuit outside one’s regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation.”
For my coworker, she’s single and childless. So she has tons of time to watch movies and shows outside of work. I’m the same, but I devote it mainly towards gaming. Though I could certainly stand to devote less time to my hobby. Or pick up some new ones at least!
Hope you’ll be able to find some more time to watch the movies and show you want!
You might let her know that she can borrow DVDs from the public library at no cost. Another little-known gratis option is freesat and terrestrial broadcast. I recently started using MythTV as a PVR to record broadcast TV and was pleasantly surprised to find no commercial interruptions (but if there are commercials in her region, MythTV can cut them out).
I get that “enshitification” is the hot new buzzword but cold we please give it a rest. Reading this community you start to think that people can’t express that the Internet is not to their liking in any other way.
“Enshitification” means a service getting worse in order to charge their customers extra for a service similar to their previously good one. If we’re using the word too much, it’s because it’s happening too much.
I’m fully aware of what the word means, but I’m sick of it being used so often. There are plenty of other words in the English language to describe the situation.
It’s a specific word for a specific situation. If you’re seeing it too often for your liking, I suggest the problem is that there’s too much enshitification.
“Enshitification” does not mean “I don’t like it”. It is specifically about platforms that start out looking too good to be true and turn to shit when the user base is locked in. The term is generally used for cases where the decline in quality was pre-planned and not due to external factors. Using the same term each time is, in my opinion, an appropriate way to point out just how common this pattern is.
I think Dr CD outlined a specific arc that companies follow, but the term has been co-opted to mean any process that drives out competition before turning the screws on their customers. Did Netflix follow the three steps?
Netflix was certainly good to its subscribers 15 years ago.
Were they then good to their business customers (studios) at the cost of the users? I don’t think they were ever good to studios.
Have they now clawed back surpluses for themselves? Abso-fuckin-lutely.
I think step 2 is the key to the original definition, and the one commenters often ignore. All companies burn cash to get started. All companies try to become a monopoly, and monetize everything once they do.
Step 2 is doubly true. Because not only did they steal the studios users, and dent their profit margins being competitive, they also went out and became their own studio.
Out of survival in a way, but their brand is so strong they keep most of users despite any conversion rate Netflix’s competitors have.
Aha I see what you’re saying. It’s possible that dr CD considered the second part to be crucial, but it doesn’t seem that people who listened to his message felt the same way, myself included. I probably speak for a lot of people when I say we hadn’t realized just how much these platforms are “subsidized” and how much damage that does to the entire market. So that part ended up being associated in our minds with the term enshittification.
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