This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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
Anon got it backwards, networks noticed how profitable Netflix was and bumped the price for Netflix to stream their stuff. Netflix responded by producing their own content rather than leasing others’ at exorbitant rates. Then Netflix later got greedy and bumped their prices, lowered their quality, and cancelled all of their good shows.
I think it's a bit of both. Netflix knew that companies choosing to pull their content would be a threat, so they prematurely started producing content (famously starting with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black). Whether because they saw this as a threat or because of the perceived greater profitability of their own platforms (probably a bit of both), other studios started pulling their content from Netflix and setting up their own streaming sites.
And naturally, other companies pulling their content accelerated Netflix's desire to produce their own content to ensure they weren't left in the lurch.
Yall are overcomplicating things. Let me simplify.
Capitalist corporations + infinite greed = cannibalism
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Try the 70s.
That was when VHS and cassette tapes started to hit the market and there was no copy protection on those. Following that, people copied floppy disks enough that they had to make that "dont copy that floppy" jingle.
There was a brief period with the switch to digital and CDROMs where piracy stopped, but then CD burners hit the market and it started again.
It turns out in every era, copyright is a sham. Information in its natural state is free - our legal system tries to change that.
everyone is forced to pay for media
Anon never copy vhs, cassette tape, cd, and dvd. I lived in southeast asia and pirated cd/dvd is openly sold in night market and low foot traffic part of the mall throughout the late 90s till early 2010s, only occasionally they got raid. Before that we basically record show from cable and rental then copy for each others.
But yes, as GabeN proved again and again, piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. Almost.
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.
You pirate because prices are too high
I pirate because I have kleptomania
We are not the same
Literally the only thing missing is full migration to H265 or AV1 with a solid bitrate.
It's still a bit inconsistent due to hardware acceleration capabilities and final file size targets.
Most torrents are too compressed or too huge.
Luckily bandwidth and storage is cheaper than ever, so going for full size quality rips is viable for many.
I want to watch Dark Matter without a million popups, malware or shady "trust me bro" programs.