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
Get bent. You moralizing keyboard pseudo-activitist.
Why aren't you out right now on a picket line? Why are you wasting time on a forum, instead of helping the homeless? Why aren't you...
How far are you willing to take your arbitrary purity tests? Instead of supporting someone who is intending to support an action you clearly also support e.g. cancelling Prime, you're lecturing them why they should have done it sooner. Or why their choice is less moral then yours.
I bet that if Ted Cruz came out tomorrow to be the deciding vote on Medicare For All, and publicly stating his intent to do so, you'd scream about how Dems shouldn't support any bill that has the support of such a scumbag. Because to you, the purity test is more important than the actual result and impact.
And if you're not American, then insert whatever relevant politician and issue would be comparable to your county. The point still stands.
This is the best reply to some smug fart-sniffing “oh THAT’s why you etc etc but WHY NOT OTHER THINGS?!” bullshit I’ve ever read.
I'm a full time activist actually lol, ive been protesting with picket signs for years around the country , how about you?
I travel the country doing woke anti-racist training in blue states, and based anti-reverse racism training in red states.
Their points are still valid, being smug doesn't erase that. And your being an aggressive cunt about it doesn't further the conversation, it just entrenches people.
So being a smug self-important douche doesn't entrench people, but calling out their smugness in a manner that you deem too aggressive does?
Got it.
Pretty sure I recognized their smugness, but sure i f you want you're both divisive.
Learn from it or don't.
You’re an internet poet. I want you there whenever I read these bullshit grandstanding keyboard activist posts.
Just shut the fuck up and keep giving shitty corporations your money.
Glancing at your comment history makes it pretty obvious that typing out angry comments is the only respite you have from a life where you feel worthless and lack the ability to take control enough to get out of your pit of despair.
Normally, I'd take pity, but I genuinely think the world will get slightly better when you finally stroke out while hammering out yet another mean spirited and pointless comment that adds nothing of value, just like you.
Have fun purchasing ethical power, food, textiles and electronics unless you're already rich working at a non fortune-500 company lol.
Fortune 500 employees are some of the worst paid and most exploited. See Amazon, Walmart, etc. Even at the white collar level they get paid shit. The old "work for a Fortune 100" bit hasn't been relevant since the dot-com boom.
Top level Devs at Amazon get paid 1m a year, plus stock options
Top level devs at Amazon would get paid that anywhere. They aren't competing for a spot at Amazon, Amazon is competing for them.
That kind of undermines your original comment...?
How? People used to dream of working for a Fortune 100 company because landing one of those coveted jobs was a way to secure a well paying job with a nice pension. Those days are gone. Now you either make yourself priceless so that everyone is competing for your skills, or you work for a small firm that values your existence and sees you as part of the team. In a large company, with very few exceptions, you are just a disposable cog in the machine.
For context, I know a lot of developers that worked for Amazon. They all left. The mythological $1M devs are paid that to make sure the competition doesn't have them. They aren't employees, they are IP.
I think it's very role dependent. I've worked for all sizes of companies and there are shit jobs and shit managers in all of them just as much as good ones.
It's a little facile to say all those people are disposable cogs, promotions are achievable, new business units, stock options, health insurance etc etc
Landing a job in a top company still does your CV some good.
If you want security and a good pension, then the public sector is probably a better fit.
Did you just tell him to learn2code? 😆
i already do actually, been vegan for years, how about you?
Very nice! I try to be as green as possible. Being poor contributes to that more than anything else lol.
Can't even remember the last time I've had a classic slab of red meat that wasn't ground already lol. Chicken is so much cheaper. I'm happy to report that dairy will be carbon neutral in the USA by 2050 too. Not separating calves from mom is becoming more and more popular too!
Those all impact others. Nobody gives a shit about others. This impacts them, which is the only thing that matters to pretty much everyone. Look out for #1.
It was those things for me, I cancelled Prime years ago and never buy from Amazon (I will browse however and reach out to the seller via their own website)
Yeah, not sure how it took this to get people to finally cancel.
With Netflix already having ads we are now 75% of the way to "cutting the cord" going back to reinventing cable again.
And that's why people started sailing the high seas again.
My NAS is my best friend.
I had to upgrade mine probably 2 years ago now. I had nearly maxed out the 12TB I had. Now I have almost 30TB and some breathing room. Granted a lot of that is non-movies/TV but a good chunk of it is.
I’d be interested in building one… what do you recommend ?
I have an Asustor Drivestor 2 and a 4tb Seagate NAS HDD. IIRC, it was around $300 total. I've only been using it for a few months, but it's an easily expandable setup if you want to add more storage later!
Honestly everytime I have to feel proud for sailing I dance like an idiot while the magnet links are being being pasted on the real debrid
Indeed.
Ad-blocking (before anything online)
DHT crawler, or index sites if DHT has too many results
right-click/long-press on magnet URL
copy link
paste magnet link
remove tracker URLs (not needed)
go
enjoy
Hm, 8 steps, is one more than the 7 stages of grief; but I'll take this over yet-another subscription service that continually degrades in quality for the dollar.
What is a DHT crawler?
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.
Or just download what you want and say “fuck ‘em”
"Again"?
I've still been out here since Napster. Welcome back aboard, we kept the torrents warm for you.
I like something I saw on here awhile ago that was something like " streaming services where only successful because they where slightly more convenient that pirating " for a while I mostly used a couple of streaming services despite most of the apps having really bad interfaces . But my Plex server has been growing in size lately while the streaming services are being cancelled.
My breaking point for paying for something that I could otherwise get for free is convenience. Doesn't even need to be a lot, I just refuse to pay for a product that artificially more of a hassle than the identical product that I can obtain for free.
It's not so much that I want a superior product, it's that I refuse to pay money for an inferior alternative.
My line is ads if I'm paying for something I'm not watching ads . I actually pay for YouTube premium because it's worth it in my opinion for the amount I use for it and I use YouTube music alot too .
As someone who doesn't sail the high seas, I thank you. Sometimes it looks like there won't be any classic media left without your efforts.
What are the cool kids using these days?
Seedboxes. Download the torrent on someone else's computer, and then directly download it to yours through an encrypted connection. Sorta like a "money-laundering" for pirated content.
Honestly still just using Qbittorrent with a VPN; it's a dream now that fibre is pretty ubiquitous. Mine hit 100MB/S yesterday, a 1.4Gb file takes about 10 seconds
Qbit+VPN to grab, radarr/sonarr to catalogue, overseerr to request, and plex/jellyfin to watch.
I was using torrents for years before I started messing with Usenet. Now I've got it set up it's easy to grab pretty much anything and at higher quality than before.
Some of us never stopped sailing the high seas matey. Yarrrrr!
@OldWoodFrame@ZeroCool yeah I will never, Comcast/Xfinity are total scum bags and I would pay extra to never give them money ever again. Unfortunately I am forced to use them for Internet, there’s no way I’m paying for their cable TV programming.
The internet has gotten 3x shittier in the last 12 months.
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.
I've cancelled everything in my life that requires a monthly payment (asides vehicle and rent).
It's not that I can't afford it, it's that I'm fucking sick of it.
^This. 💯
It’s not that I can’t afford it, it’s that I’m fucking sick of it.
And that's how they win, it's what they count on. It's a death by a thousand cuts for us and more profits for them.
Don't give up now, you won't just fail yourself, you'll fail everyone, if you do.
Apparently this is how cable started, and then they did the same thing lol
That was in back before the Internet though.
The internet was invented in the 60s
I know, I was there. But I'm talking about when it was used by the larger general public, which was in the 90's. Before that, it was people dialing up on modems to BBS'.
Partly, this is because "the free market will solve it" is just a neoliberal lie. Sometimes, there's simply no other choice as corporations race each other to the bottom.
So this streaming service might have gotten shitty, espensive or unethical, but you can move to another right? Oh no, looks like they're shitty and unethical too, just slightly differently.
Then in six months time, they've each absorbed one another's shitty, greedy practises anyway, ensuring consumers are fully exploited with nowhere else to go.
But the true power of neoliberalism lies in its giant book of premade excuses, so neoliberals (or neoliberals in disguise) will of course read from the next page:
"Oh that's just because there isn't enough competition. We just need to deregulate heavily and allow companies to do whatever the streaming equivalent of dumping toxic by-products in the river is!"
But of course, that won't ever come true either. The companies that already exist will grow more profitable polluting the river and new entries into the market will be either stamped out, bought and stripped for parts or enshittified by the same greed over time.
Following the flowchart taught at exclusive, expensive schools the world over, the next excuse is to blame the consumers.
"Oh if people really cared, they'd simply stop buying things entirely. But they don't, because these companies continue to bring in record profits. So secretly, consumers actually love their chocolate being picked by child slaves".
While they do fight back with boycotts, public outcry and (in this case) things like password sharing and piracy, it's nothing companies can't crush if it looks like it might actually dent their profits.
At some point, consumers need to pick their misery and the choices are bleak but obvious.
They can accept the minor misery of advertising, even as they pay a subscription, just like the corporation knew they would.
They can escalate their own misery further by boycotting the entire platform or industry.
But the moral high ground doesn't make spending your few hours of personal time each day staring at the wall suddenly as entertaining as whatever content you're no longer watching.
Also, the company doesn't care. That was part of their calculations and they're still making even more money.
Or finally, they could maximise their misery and actually do something, like busting out the guillotines or becoming a politician that opposes neoliberalism yet is somehow allowed power.
So anyway, people are tired. The fight never ends and some people have fought it for 50 years already. Encourage them to take the third option by all means, but don't shame them for taking the first option.
They might already be miserable enough.
And the thing is, the product everyone's got their butts in a bunch over is garbage television. Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Max, Maytag Plus, there's nothing good on any of them.
[very verbose initial response]
Honestly don't mean this as an insult, but you might want to consider being more concise, so that your point comes across better.
So anyway, people are tired. The fight never ends and some people have fought it for 50 years already. Encourage them to take the third option by all means, but don’t shame them for taking the first option.
I'm not purposely trying to shame people, but I'll definitely get on their cases if they don't push back and let this crap continue.
It's called consumer advocacy, and it shouldn't be shamed away and not done. Those who are causing the problems in society would benefit the most if this happened.
If we all work together, it's been proven that it does turn things around.
They might already be miserable enough.
It's not my fault they're that way, it's the fault of the people making society horrible so they can selfishly make more money for themselves, which must be fought against.
The ones making Society horrible definitely win when no one pushes back.
Honestly don't mean this as an insult, but you might want to consider being more concise, so that your point comes across better.
I'm cool with ranting. I enjoy the act of writing, blogs are long dead and it's important to articulate why so many things in the world are fucking shit.
If we all work together, it's been proven that it does turn things around
When?
The ones making Society horrible definitely win when no one pushes back.
They also win when people do push back, because thats how the game has been rigged. The extent of the public's power is making them win slightly less.
The only way to stop companies doing unethical things is strict regulations, ruthlessly enforced. The only times "consumer advocacy" ever works is when the government steps in, which is why the ultra wealthy go to so much effort to ensure they never do.
One good person in politics, with power, is worth a million people boycotting.
If we all work together, it’s been proven that it does turn things around
When?
Unions.
They also win when people do push back, because thats how the game has been rigged.
Strawman.
The only way to stop companies doing unethical things is strict regulations, ruthlessly enforced.
Its the most important way, but not the only way.
One good person in politics, with power, is worth a million people boycotting.
Definately agree with this. But its not a zero sum gain, an either/or. Both can happen, and increase the odds of success.
the money is drying up, gotta find new ways to monetise
All these services turning into shit, are the services without a viable business model to begin with. What I find interesting is that it is obviously possible to become leading in a field, just by burning investors money.
It wouldn't matter if they were drowning in money, if you told them they could have a few pennies more from each customer, they'll do it. It's how greed works.
Covid kindness is over. Buckle up buckaroos.
Ahoy 🏴☠️
Arrr me matey
The pendulum is swinging back towards the monopoly model that destroyed cable. Time to dust off the old Jolly Roger and teach streaming an old lesson of what happens when you price gouge people.
I keep saying, we already fought this war, we already won.
Fuck around and find out 🏴☠️
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.
Those on demand services arose to plug the hole of piracy.
Yarr, the killer improvement was here all along!
I'm baffled by the unrealistic demand for constant infinite growth from corporate shareholders and management. Those days are numbered.
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.
Tell me you just woke up from a 50 year coma without telling me you just woke up from a 50 year coma
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.
The corporate enshittification of once decent products and services continues unabated. Amazons decision to charge for UPS store returns even if the products they delivered were defective was almost enough for me to cancel Prime, but this seals the deal. When Amazon Prime commercials begin my Prime membership and most of my Amazon purchases end.
When did they make the UPS change? I made a return last week, no charge.
I had to return a DOA item last week and they imposed the charge for the first time. It depends on your specific situation though. In my case a Staples is physically closer than a UPS store, but I'm never near the Staples while I'm in the UPS store parking lot twice a week.
It wouldn't bother me if I were returning items because I changed my mind, but when I'm already inconvenienced because of crappy product quality I don't expect to be further inconvenienced so Amazon can save a buck.
I think it depends on the cost/reason of return, and where you’re returning it. Sometimes I have to pay a $1 fee to take to a UPS store but taking it to Kohl’s drop off is free.
Finally! I’ve been waiting for a good enough reason to cancel Prime
you don't need a reason to cancel a sub, if you don't like it, just do it.
Was already going to cancel when my renewal was up, now i'll cancel even harder.
Come sail the high seas.
Eh, I only use prime video because it doesn't cost extra, I don't really need it. Back to piracy it will be, I guess.
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
They’re doing that, except it’s getting more expensive for video instead of cheaper for shipping.
Seems like a lot of companies are testing how much they can get away with lately.
Yes and people are paying unfortunately
Netflix succeeded and now everyone is trying ads 😔
So I'm really confused about the whole Netflix thing. It hasn't asked me to set a household location and the whole no password sharing thing was supposed to have taken effect back in May, right? Since May, my family has continued to use Netflix as if nothing has changed and we said if they try to charge us extra, we will cancel. Our Netflix is regularly used at 4 different "households" and they have yet to charge a fee and have not automatically set a household like they claimed they would.
I was talking about advertisement in Netflix
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.
You are incorrect though. Netflix and Uber (or any ride sharing app) have shown once people are hooked they will pay the increased rate to consume the product.
But Amazon crumbling isn't civilisation crumbling... In fact, it opens doors for more small business owners.
Call it what is is: GREEDFLATION.
Or maybe capitalism?
Nah, at this point anything subscription related is technofeudalism
This is bad for everyone. I'm still a Prime Member for shopping etc., but thats really got to be reconsidered now too.
I am not paying to watch commercials. Fuck that.
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.
I think most of us pay for the shipping, the video is just a bonus.
You're not wrong, but the point though is to not reward them for bad behavior.
It's a death by "1,000 cuts" if you do.
More I see stuff like this the more I believe that these services really aren't making any money and its all smokescreen.
Though this could also just be investors trying to drive up profits instead.
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.
So basically we're pretty much back to paying for a TV package.
Don't worry, it will be presented like this:
"To continue offering you high quality original programming like X and Y, we have to raise our price for Amazon Prime. But don't worry, we're now adding a lower cost ad-based alternative called Amazon Subprime."
So, as usual, most people will be fine with it and put the plastic bag back over their head.
Streaming has essentially become TV packages again. The golden age of streaming is dead, long live Davy Jones!
how are you just allowed to drastically lower the quality of a subscription like this. yeah i'm selling my new streaming service, it has 7 channels, $1 a month. no actually sorry it's $7, 3 channels, and 2 of those channels just run ads on a loop. thanks for keeping autorenew on.
These streaming companies are giving people more of a reason to use Jellyfin every day
What's jellyfin?
One of several systems for self-hosting video files. I've lost track if Jellyfin is a fork of Plex or what. I personally use Kodi.
I'm using Kodi + Real Debrid for over a year now. Works really great but I have to admit that it's a bit tedious to setup if you want an experience similar to Netflix for example.
Have you tried Stremio + Real Debrid? It's a game changer.
I’ve lost track if Jellyfin is a fork of Plex or what
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby. Plex is proprietary software.
The Jellyfin project was started in early December 2018 primarily as a result of Emby's decision to take their next release (4.x) closed-source.
I pay for Prime for the next day postage, prime video is just an extra i occasionally use. I'll just pirate their stuff in future and ignore their clunky TV app
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
And... we are back to cable again.
But with no DVRs to fast forward through ads. (Yes, I know that was a "recent" cable thing, but still.)
☠️?
We should have canceled when Prime got rid of UPS pick up for free. Only reason I used it. Now there is zero benefit to Prime with this new stupid ad tier. You don't even get free grocery delivery.
They're still happy to accept food-stamp revenue though, if you get Amazon Prime, of course...
Having ads in fucking movies makes a service feel cheap / lower value. But the price is staying the same, so where's that button to 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.
That's the great part, you can't cancel.
You can cancel. Source: cancelled recently.
Only ever had the 30 day trial. Pirate people. Pirate. Yaps.cc is a new one to try.
Is yaps better than 1377x?
Asking the important questions.
How do I pirate people?
Pirating people is generally considered immoral.
You wouldn't download a person.
No but people are weirdly okay with making them from scratch.
The making was okay, but now there's a small dude living in our home. He keeps us up at night, too!
Same here. And she smells really foul on occasion! Maybe some uncured resin?
You can't go wrong with a VPN (PIA, Cyber ghost, Atlas), and just use QTorrent (open source torrent Software) and look up what you like on Pirate Bay.
Easiest basic option.
You can use a website like Showrss to get an RSS feed of all your favorite TV shows, and have them ready to download with Q Torrent.
For most people this would be sufficient.
If you want to an be clever and set up up your torrent Software so that it never staffs without your VPN.
Dear every single streaming service:
MAKE. THE. AD. TIER. FREE. FOR. EVERYONE. STUFF ALL THE ADS IN YOU WANT.
MAKE. THE. AD-FREE. TIER. PAID.
This way people can watch everything without having an elitist "I'M PAYING FOR ENTERTAINMENT" section of the world who are the only ones that can talk about all these new shows unless they sail the high seas with an eye patch on, which is yet another argument for MAKE THE AD TIER FREE FOR EVERYONE.
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.
Because it's the right thing to do and those greedy shits make a fortune off of ads and don't need our money and okay I know, I know, MORE MONEY. Greedy shits. I mean.. wouldn't the ads be more valuable if they knew more people were watching? Or something?
Look, I'm just trying to get us all free Disney+ here, okay? Help me out here. :)
STUFF ALL THE ADS IN YOU WANT.
It all "ads" up. Right?
I'll see myself out....
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, matey.
Yup, I will be cancelling too. Greedy bastards.
What is ironic about this is that Bezos could probably make all of their video streaming free and have no ads and still be making gobs of money. Their AWS ecosystem is practically a license to print money. Oh and that little store he runs on the side, too...
But it's not enough to make a lot of money, you have to make ALL the money.
So with the media industry strikes the content is already going to be crap next year. Why not also include ads with it? WTF Amazon.
"Can't get worse at this point, eh?"
Amazon: hold my beer
Maybe it's time to cancel Amazon prime. I don't feel like they even met their commitments any longer for delivery... So what's it all for?
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.
need to finish off my backlog of shows there, or sail the seas!
Well, it seems Amazon doesn't want my money. Don't worry, you won't see it anymore.
That s my cue for cancelling i guess
That will be the end of my prime subscription. I should probably just get rid of it now, the streams are better quality on the high seas anyways.
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.
Done. Thank you.
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.
I have a free vpn, but maybe I should go for the paid plans that I can actually use it for torrenting
Piracy it is then. Lol.
I've been paying Amazon for more than 25 years just for the free deliveries. I don't watch anything on Prime, it's so hard to navigate between the free and rent videos. Been torrenting since the 90s, yeah I'm old, so my advice stands -get a good VPN, and sail the seven seas-
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.
P2P filesharing has been around since the '90s.
His point was that bittorrent wasn't around in the 90s
Not really. "Torrenting" has become synonymous with "P2P filesharing," so it's clear what OP meant.
Meh, I'd consider Emule and Napster type things torrenting.
I don't recall if they used peering though. I thought they did (twas a long time ago).
The Kademlia network (eMule, Kazaalite, etc), did indeed use a global P2P Distributed Hash Table, to resolve which IPs hosted which content, which the torrent protocol also does ... some of:
Unlike the mainline torrent protocol, Kademlia's DHT (like the modern-day Tribler DHT), also resolved filenames to content, allowing in-app search.
With torrents, one needs to consult a DHT crawler, or an index site (which sucks; centrally operated sites are fragile, compared to DHTs), whereas eMule & more contemporarily Tribler, have two layers of DHT, enabling decentralized search without relyiance on someone having created a listing at some particular site & that site being online to search its index.
Thanks for the background.
Been a while since I used emule (surprised I remember it!), and I honestly didn't know the details even then (I was lazy and it worked).
eMule was introduced in 2002, which is again NOT THE 90s. Napster also uses a very different protocol, without any of the distributed file sharing. With P2P like Napster, soulseek, and DirectConnect you downloaded a complete file from one person only. Once you had it and could share it, someone could get it from you. But downloading bits of the same file from multiple peers at once was not a thing until after BitTorrent's release in 2001.
Thanks.
It's been a while (was working in a call center back then, plenty of bandwidth), but my memory sucks. Lol
Yeah but Amazon's decided you're not paying enough.
Time to raise the black flag again I guess
Come on in the water’s fine!
Yargh
jokes on them, we shop there infrequently enough (2-3 times a year) that they give us prime for free every time we do. there was one short stretch (few months) about 10 years ago where we paid for it because we had a need for the shipping perk, but we haven't 'paid' for prime in a good 5-6 years and that was for a discounted 'trial'.
recently started another free month, so excuse me, while i go cue-up another movie. gotta use and abuse this one if the next one is gonna be polluted with ads--won't help that 'trial' experience and the conversion chance any next time, either.
then you're the type of fool keeping monopolies in service
When do you guys think they (companies/rich people/shareholders(?)) will realize that growth for the sake of growth is not viable and there will be a point of stagnation? Like... What are they gonna do, keep raising prices until nobody can b uy anything anymore?
When it stops being viable. They have no commitment to the company. They'll suck it dry and move on to the next project.
Yohoho my dudes and dudettes and dudex. And a bottle of rum.
yarg harg fiddilidee, bitches, bros and enby hoes
I already have the ad free tier. It's what I've been paying for!!!
No, you don’t get it. Jeff Bezos needs another solid platinum super yacht. Won’t you please think of the poor billionaires.
I'm fine with that. At the expense of other people besides me! Jeesh the audacity. :/ haha. (jk obviously)
Disney hotstar and other OTTs are going to follow the suite, IG. Fuck them all.
All hand hoy!
There's been a lot of discussion recently about how companies have been making shitty decisions, which prompt people to move to the open-source alternatives, like what happened with Reddit, Twitter and Unity etc. However, is there a viable alternative for film-related media, beyond simply piracy?
While Lemmy, Godot etc obviously have many costs, primarily servers and development, they don't have to deal with licensing in the same way to get content. Is there an existing alternative, or do you see a way for there to ever be an existing alternative without some rich company already backing it?
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.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this:
Dear bot,
Please let your masters know that they need a more intuitive way, of doing what you've described.
Otherwise you're going to be very busy and polluting many conversations with your repeated instructions.
Thanks,
A human user of your wonderful service
I buy used DVDs off eBay, sometimes from pawn shops or thrift stores.
Cancelled Prime a couple of years ago so that Amazon wasn't the default for ordering things anymore and wouldn't watch anything even via the free 30-day trial that they offer from time to time if commercials are shown. I'm still subscribed to Netflix as the family uses it extensively, but if something is not on there, Kodi has proven to be a good matey.
This is fine with me, since clearly they'll pass their increased profit onto their underpaid employees.
Wait...
Laughs in boycotting Amazon since 2011.
Why don't you just make a free version that plays ads? You know that reason why every sane person uses Tubi?
You know that one site which is the only that I don't use my ad blocker on, because I actually respect them enough to let the ads play
Because people are ready to spend money to see ads just for the convince of cheaper monthly subscription fee.
There is no cheaper subscription. The current prime sub gets adds added. Ad-free will cost more then the current ad-free subscription. "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
There goes that.
This is why I refused to ever buy cable: I am not going to pay for a service that forces ads on me. One or the other fuckers.
Yarrr!
Scamazon
They should also make people watch add bofore they are handed their Amazon Prime order. Unless they pay for the higher tier subscription.
Anyway, good to know that Amazon is finally doing something to fix its fledgling revenue from Prime.
Got prime when Grand Tour came out. Now that we get two episodes a year if lucky not worth it anymore. Get better service with Instacart for delivery anyway.
Arrrrrr
i stopped using amazøn years ago. shop local & stop killing the economy. it's just gonna get worse the more money you give them
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.
Yeah, those behemoths all share responsibility for killing the mom and pop stores. It's not impossible to shop around to local variants. But probably the best solution is to learn how to kick the habit that American culture has foisted upon us all of buying endless piles of useless crap.
I cancelled my prime subscription years ago. I occassionally restart it for a month at a time if I need some esoteric hobby thing and I would be forced into paying for shipping or for prime. Then I'll watch some stuff on their streaming service. Last time I used it, it was awful. Half of the shows were gatekept behind some ad system. And the "Amazon Originals" are all just extraordinarily expensive shows with terrible writing. Uhg. I am making it a point to not have an active prime subscription when Christmas rolls around. We (the collective we, as in, humanity) don't need more garbage.
Thats a lot of words to ignore the comment you're replying to.
All those stores sell neccessities as well as junk, so distilling it down to simply not buying junk is reductive and dismissive. If someone needs clothes and Walmart and Target are the only places available, are they supposed to go nude? Additionally, you're literally ignoring that they said that there are not local options available to them.
Nome of what you said is particularly untrue, it's just completely ignoring the comment you replied to.
Yeah, where my Mom lives, the food options are:
Walmart
An erratically pricey local grocery, that rents its building (which has a leaky roof, requiring them to move product when it rains)
Dollar General
A farmer's market that's open once a week for a few hours before the afternoon heat, a few months a year, if no events have pre-empted it, having an inventory of which about 30% is bulk-bought supermarket produce with the labels (sometimes) removed
A 90 minute drive; no trains, no buses (literally, no buses) to the next largest town
And she lives in a town people drive to, to get food, clothes, medicine, etc.
She gets as much as she can from the local grocer, for whatever that's worth; the inventory is frequently poor, & about on-par with Dollar General so far as brand-representation, goes. When tourists ask if the store has something, they get pointed to Walmart.
yes actually, you answered your own question
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.
It's the same where I live. Do I shop local and spend 2-5 times more for the item or buy it from lowes or Walmart? The kicker is that it is sometimes even the exact same brand and model item.
Cable is starting to look reasonable with all the subscription services and ads out there now
Cable internet? I agree. Nowhere near using all its last-mile capacity, yet.
I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner.
A year of prime costs about the same, or less, than every other ad free streaming service and prime video is only one of its benefits.
This is one of the reasons I say no to DRM
"Commercials in movies and series will be introduced in the U.S., UK, Germany, and Canada in early 2024, followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia later in the year."
So rest of the world is safe from this at least until 2025?
I'd like to cancel my Amazon subscription but unfortunately, my entire family is using it to buy stuff off Amazon.
Just cancelled my prime membership. The movie offer was rather boring tbh, and I get more interesting series elsewhere.
I wonder what their reason for cable-cutting will be now.
I think a downloader will be neccessaire, it will cost too much money if we bought them all.
The combination of all these streaming services won't be cheap. I've just used a video downloader to optimise my subscription before I cancel my prime. (As long as I don't share it with others.)
Time to telegram.
Where do I find this stuff on telegram?
There are some telegram bots and channels. But those can't be shared here because of piracy reasons. Try searching in search engines, you may get few.
If you want a free version with ads they have Freevee. I mean, they don't have the same shows but it's free.
Looks like it's time to cancel prime
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
Get bent. You moralizing keyboard pseudo-activitist.
Why aren't you out right now on a picket line? Why are you wasting time on a forum, instead of helping the homeless? Why aren't you...
How far are you willing to take your arbitrary purity tests? Instead of supporting someone who is intending to support an action you clearly also support e.g. cancelling Prime, you're lecturing them why they should have done it sooner. Or why their choice is less moral then yours.
I bet that if Ted Cruz came out tomorrow to be the deciding vote on Medicare For All, and publicly stating his intent to do so, you'd scream about how Dems shouldn't support any bill that has the support of such a scumbag. Because to you, the purity test is more important than the actual result and impact.
And if you're not American, then insert whatever relevant politician and issue would be comparable to your county. The point still stands.
This is the best reply to some smug fart-sniffing “oh THAT’s why you etc etc but WHY NOT OTHER THINGS?!” bullshit I’ve ever read.
I'm a full time activist actually lol, ive been protesting with picket signs for years around the country , how about you?
I travel the country doing woke anti-racist training in blue states, and based anti-reverse racism training in red states.
Their points are still valid, being smug doesn't erase that. And your being an aggressive cunt about it doesn't further the conversation, it just entrenches people.
So being a smug self-important douche doesn't entrench people, but calling out their smugness in a manner that you deem too aggressive does?
Got it.
Pretty sure I recognized their smugness, but sure i f you want you're both divisive.
Learn from it or don't.
You’re an internet poet. I want you there whenever I read these bullshit grandstanding keyboard activist posts.
Just shut the fuck up and keep giving shitty corporations your money.
Glancing at your comment history makes it pretty obvious that typing out angry comments is the only respite you have from a life where you feel worthless and lack the ability to take control enough to get out of your pit of despair.
Normally, I'd take pity, but I genuinely think the world will get slightly better when you finally stroke out while hammering out yet another mean spirited and pointless comment that adds nothing of value, just like you.
Damn. Delicious.
Have fun purchasing ethical power, food, textiles and electronics unless you're already rich working at a non fortune-500 company lol.
Fortune 500 employees are some of the worst paid and most exploited. See Amazon, Walmart, etc. Even at the white collar level they get paid shit. The old "work for a Fortune 100" bit hasn't been relevant since the dot-com boom.
Top level Devs at Amazon get paid 1m a year, plus stock options
Top level devs at Amazon would get paid that anywhere. They aren't competing for a spot at Amazon, Amazon is competing for them.
That kind of undermines your original comment...?
How? People used to dream of working for a Fortune 100 company because landing one of those coveted jobs was a way to secure a well paying job with a nice pension. Those days are gone. Now you either make yourself priceless so that everyone is competing for your skills, or you work for a small firm that values your existence and sees you as part of the team. In a large company, with very few exceptions, you are just a disposable cog in the machine.
For context, I know a lot of developers that worked for Amazon. They all left. The mythological $1M devs are paid that to make sure the competition doesn't have them. They aren't employees, they are IP.
I think it's very role dependent. I've worked for all sizes of companies and there are shit jobs and shit managers in all of them just as much as good ones.
It's a little facile to say all those people are disposable cogs, promotions are achievable, new business units, stock options, health insurance etc etc
Landing a job in a top company still does your CV some good.
If you want security and a good pension, then the public sector is probably a better fit.
Did you just tell him to learn2code? 😆
i already do actually, been vegan for years, how about you?
Very nice! I try to be as green as possible. Being poor contributes to that more than anything else lol.
Can't even remember the last time I've had a classic slab of red meat that wasn't ground already lol. Chicken is so much cheaper. I'm happy to report that dairy will be carbon neutral in the USA by 2050 too. Not separating calves from mom is becoming more and more popular too!
Those all impact others. Nobody gives a shit about others. This impacts them, which is the only thing that matters to pretty much everyone. Look out for #1.
It was those things for me, I cancelled Prime years ago and never buy from Amazon (I will browse however and reach out to the seller via their own website)
Yeah, not sure how it took this to get people to finally cancel.
“All Of My Awesome Pirated Media To Keep Being Great Quality, Ad-Free, and Forever Accessible”
Just do it.
With Netflix already having ads we are now 75% of the way to "cutting the cord" going back to reinventing cable again.
And that's why people started sailing the high seas again.
My NAS is my best friend.
I had to upgrade mine probably 2 years ago now. I had nearly maxed out the 12TB I had. Now I have almost 30TB and some breathing room. Granted a lot of that is non-movies/TV but a good chunk of it is.
I’d be interested in building one… what do you recommend ?
I have an Asustor Drivestor 2 and a 4tb Seagate NAS HDD. IIRC, it was around $300 total. I've only been using it for a few months, but it's an easily expandable setup if you want to add more storage later!
Arrrrrr! RD be the GOAT.
Fr. Stremio is everything.
Ha, I never stopped.
https://youtu.be/Th6PW5VwDFI?si=EvzuXbkiQGoeTW3C
Honestly everytime I have to feel proud for sailing I dance like an idiot while the magnet links are being being pasted on the real debrid
Indeed.
Hm, 8 steps, is one more than the 7 stages of grief; but I'll take this over yet-another subscription service that continually degrades in quality for the dollar.
What is a DHT crawler?
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.
Or just download what you want and say “fuck ‘em”
"Again"?
I've still been out here since Napster. Welcome back aboard, we kept the torrents warm for you.
I like something I saw on here awhile ago that was something like " streaming services where only successful because they where slightly more convenient that pirating " for a while I mostly used a couple of streaming services despite most of the apps having really bad interfaces . But my Plex server has been growing in size lately while the streaming services are being cancelled.
My breaking point for paying for something that I could otherwise get for free is convenience. Doesn't even need to be a lot, I just refuse to pay for a product that artificially more of a hassle than the identical product that I can obtain for free.
It's not so much that I want a superior product, it's that I refuse to pay money for an inferior alternative.
My line is ads if I'm paying for something I'm not watching ads . I actually pay for YouTube premium because it's worth it in my opinion for the amount I use for it and I use YouTube music alot too .
As someone who doesn't sail the high seas, I thank you. Sometimes it looks like there won't be any classic media left without your efforts.
What are the cool kids using these days?
Seedboxes. Download the torrent on someone else's computer, and then directly download it to yours through an encrypted connection. Sorta like a "money-laundering" for pirated content.
Honestly still just using Qbittorrent with a VPN; it's a dream now that fibre is pretty ubiquitous. Mine hit 100MB/S yesterday, a 1.4Gb file takes about 10 seconds
Qbit+VPN to grab, radarr/sonarr to catalogue, overseerr to request, and plex/jellyfin to watch.
I was using torrents for years before I started messing with Usenet. Now I've got it set up it's easy to grab pretty much anything and at higher quality than before.
Some of us never stopped sailing the high seas matey. Yarrrrr!
@OldWoodFrame @ZeroCool yeah I will never, Comcast/Xfinity are total scum bags and I would pay extra to never give them money ever again. Unfortunately I am forced to use them for Internet, there’s no way I’m paying for their cable TV programming.
The internet has gotten 3x shittier in the last 12 months.
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.
I've cancelled everything in my life that requires a monthly payment (asides vehicle and rent).
It's not that I can't afford it, it's that I'm fucking sick of it.
^ This. 💯
And that's how they win, it's what they count on. It's a death by a thousand cuts for us and more profits for them.
Don't give up now, you won't just fail yourself, you'll fail everyone, if you do.
Apparently this is how cable started, and then they did the same thing lol
That was in back before the Internet though.
The internet was invented in the 60s
I know, I was there. But I'm talking about when it was used by the larger general public, which was in the 90's. Before that, it was people dialing up on modems to BBS'.
Eternal September is real. It's sad
In case someone doesn't get the reference.
Partly, this is because "the free market will solve it" is just a neoliberal lie. Sometimes, there's simply no other choice as corporations race each other to the bottom.
So this streaming service might have gotten shitty, espensive or unethical, but you can move to another right? Oh no, looks like they're shitty and unethical too, just slightly differently.
Then in six months time, they've each absorbed one another's shitty, greedy practises anyway, ensuring consumers are fully exploited with nowhere else to go.
But the true power of neoliberalism lies in its giant book of premade excuses, so neoliberals (or neoliberals in disguise) will of course read from the next page:
"Oh that's just because there isn't enough competition. We just need to deregulate heavily and allow companies to do whatever the streaming equivalent of dumping toxic by-products in the river is!"
But of course, that won't ever come true either. The companies that already exist will grow more profitable polluting the river and new entries into the market will be either stamped out, bought and stripped for parts or enshittified by the same greed over time.
Following the flowchart taught at exclusive, expensive schools the world over, the next excuse is to blame the consumers.
"Oh if people really cared, they'd simply stop buying things entirely. But they don't, because these companies continue to bring in record profits. So secretly, consumers actually love their chocolate being picked by child slaves".
While they do fight back with boycotts, public outcry and (in this case) things like password sharing and piracy, it's nothing companies can't crush if it looks like it might actually dent their profits.
At some point, consumers need to pick their misery and the choices are bleak but obvious.
They can accept the minor misery of advertising, even as they pay a subscription, just like the corporation knew they would.
They can escalate their own misery further by boycotting the entire platform or industry.
But the moral high ground doesn't make spending your few hours of personal time each day staring at the wall suddenly as entertaining as whatever content you're no longer watching.
Also, the company doesn't care. That was part of their calculations and they're still making even more money.
Or finally, they could maximise their misery and actually do something, like busting out the guillotines or becoming a politician that opposes neoliberalism yet is somehow allowed power.
So anyway, people are tired. The fight never ends and some people have fought it for 50 years already. Encourage them to take the third option by all means, but don't shame them for taking the first option.
They might already be miserable enough.
And the thing is, the product everyone's got their butts in a bunch over is garbage television. Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Max, Maytag Plus, there's nothing good on any of them.
Honestly don't mean this as an insult, but you might want to consider being more concise, so that your point comes across better.
I'm not purposely trying to shame people, but I'll definitely get on their cases if they don't push back and let this crap continue.
It's called consumer advocacy, and it shouldn't be shamed away and not done. Those who are causing the problems in society would benefit the most if this happened.
If we all work together, it's been proven that it does turn things around.
It's not my fault they're that way, it's the fault of the people making society horrible so they can selfishly make more money for themselves, which must be fought against.
The ones making Society horrible definitely win when no one pushes back.
I'm cool with ranting. I enjoy the act of writing, blogs are long dead and it's important to articulate why so many things in the world are fucking shit.
When?
They also win when people do push back, because thats how the game has been rigged. The extent of the public's power is making them win slightly less.
The only way to stop companies doing unethical things is strict regulations, ruthlessly enforced. The only times "consumer advocacy" ever works is when the government steps in, which is why the ultra wealthy go to so much effort to ensure they never do.
One good person in politics, with power, is worth a million people boycotting.
Unions.
Strawman.
Its the most important way, but not the only way.
Definately agree with this. But its not a zero sum gain, an either/or. Both can happen, and increase the odds of success.
the money is drying up, gotta find new ways to monetise
All these services turning into shit, are the services without a viable business model to begin with. What I find interesting is that it is obviously possible to become leading in a field, just by burning investors money.
It wouldn't matter if they were drowning in money, if you told them they could have a few pennies more from each customer, they'll do it. It's how greed works.
Covid kindness is over. Buckle up buckaroos.
Ahoy 🏴☠️
Arrr me matey
The pendulum is swinging back towards the monopoly model that destroyed cable. Time to dust off the old Jolly Roger and teach streaming an old lesson of what happens when you price gouge people.
I keep saying, we already fought this war, we already won.
Fuck around and find out 🏴☠️
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.
Those on demand services arose to plug the hole of piracy.
Yarr, the killer improvement was here all along!
I'm baffled by the unrealistic demand for constant infinite growth from corporate shareholders and management. Those days are numbered.
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.
Tell me you just woke up from a 50 year coma without telling me you just woke up from a 50 year coma
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.
The corporate enshittification of once decent products and services continues unabated. Amazons decision to charge for UPS store returns even if the products they delivered were defective was almost enough for me to cancel Prime, but this seals the deal. When Amazon Prime commercials begin my Prime membership and most of my Amazon purchases end.
When did they make the UPS change? I made a return last week, no charge.
I had to return a DOA item last week and they imposed the charge for the first time. It depends on your specific situation though. In my case a Staples is physically closer than a UPS store, but I'm never near the Staples while I'm in the UPS store parking lot twice a week.
It wouldn't bother me if I were returning items because I changed my mind, but when I'm already inconvenienced because of crappy product quality I don't expect to be further inconvenienced so Amazon can save a buck.
I think it depends on the cost/reason of return, and where you’re returning it. Sometimes I have to pay a $1 fee to take to a UPS store but taking it to Kohl’s drop off is free.
Finally! I’ve been waiting for a good enough reason to cancel Prime
you don't need a reason to cancel a sub, if you don't like it, just do it.
I’m addicted to the shipping
American. Right?
Congratulations on waiting and paying them for a service you didn't want?
Was already going to cancel when my renewal was up, now i'll cancel even harder.
Come sail the high seas.
Eh, I only use prime video because it doesn't cost extra, I don't really need it. Back to piracy it will be, I guess.
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
They’re doing that, except it’s getting more expensive for video instead of cheaper for shipping.
Seems like a lot of companies are testing how much they can get away with lately.
Yes and people are paying unfortunately Netflix succeeded and now everyone is trying ads 😔
So I'm really confused about the whole Netflix thing. It hasn't asked me to set a household location and the whole no password sharing thing was supposed to have taken effect back in May, right? Since May, my family has continued to use Netflix as if nothing has changed and we said if they try to charge us extra, we will cancel. Our Netflix is regularly used at 4 different "households" and they have yet to charge a fee and have not automatically set a household like they claimed they would.
I was talking about advertisement in Netflix
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.
You are incorrect though. Netflix and Uber (or any ride sharing app) have shown once people are hooked they will pay the increased rate to consume the product.
But Amazon crumbling isn't civilisation crumbling... In fact, it opens doors for more small business owners.
Call it what is is: GREEDFLATION.
Or maybe capitalism?
Nah, at this point anything subscription related is technofeudalism
This is bad for everyone. I'm still a Prime Member for shopping etc., but thats really got to be reconsidered now too.
I am not paying to watch commercials. Fuck that.
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.
You're not wrong, but the point though is to not reward them for bad behavior.
It's a death by "1,000 cuts" if you do.
More I see stuff like this the more I believe that these services really aren't making any money and its all smokescreen.
Though this could also just be investors trying to drive up profits instead.
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.
So basically we're pretty much back to paying for a TV package.
Don't worry, it will be presented like this:
"To continue offering you high quality original programming like X and Y, we have to raise our price for Amazon Prime. But don't worry, we're now adding a lower cost ad-based alternative called Amazon Subprime."
So, as usual, most people will be fine with it and put the plastic bag back over their head.
Streaming has essentially become TV packages again. The golden age of streaming is dead, long live Davy Jones!
how are you just allowed to drastically lower the quality of a subscription like this. yeah i'm selling my new streaming service, it has 7 channels, $1 a month. no actually sorry it's $7, 3 channels, and 2 of those channels just run ads on a loop. thanks for keeping autorenew on.
These streaming companies are giving people more of a reason to use Jellyfin every day
What's jellyfin?
One of several systems for self-hosting video files. I've lost track if Jellyfin is a fork of Plex or what. I personally use Kodi.
I'm using Kodi + Real Debrid for over a year now. Works really great but I have to admit that it's a bit tedious to setup if you want an experience similar to Netflix for example.
Have you tried Stremio + Real Debrid? It's a game changer.
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby. Plex is proprietary software.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/about
I use Emby and have had no issues.
I pay for Prime for the next day postage, prime video is just an extra i occasionally use. I'll just pirate their stuff in future and ignore their clunky TV app
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
And... we are back to cable again.
But with no DVRs to fast forward through ads. (Yes, I know that was a "recent" cable thing, but still.)
☠️?
We should have canceled when Prime got rid of UPS pick up for free. Only reason I used it. Now there is zero benefit to Prime with this new stupid ad tier. You don't even get free grocery delivery.
They're still happy to accept food-stamp revenue though, if you get Amazon Prime, of course...
Having ads in fucking movies makes a service feel cheap / lower value. But the price is staying the same, so where's that button to 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.
That's the great part, you can't cancel.
You can cancel. Source: cancelled recently.
Only ever had the 30 day trial. Pirate people. Pirate. Yaps.cc is a new one to try.
Is yaps better than 1377x?
Asking the important questions.
How do I pirate people?
Pirating people is generally considered immoral.
You wouldn't download a person.
No but people are weirdly okay with making them from scratch.
The making was okay, but now there's a small dude living in our home. He keeps us up at night, too!
Same here. And she smells really foul on occasion! Maybe some uncured resin?
You can't go wrong with a VPN (PIA, Cyber ghost, Atlas), and just use QTorrent (open source torrent Software) and look up what you like on Pirate Bay.
Easiest basic option.
You can use a website like Showrss to get an RSS feed of all your favorite TV shows, and have them ready to download with Q Torrent.
For most people this would be sufficient.
If you want to an be clever and set up up your torrent Software so that it never staffs without your VPN.
Dear every single streaming service:
MAKE. THE. AD. TIER. FREE. FOR. EVERYONE. STUFF ALL THE ADS IN YOU WANT.
MAKE. THE. AD-FREE. TIER. PAID.
This way people can watch everything without having an elitist "I'M PAYING FOR ENTERTAINMENT" section of the world who are the only ones that can talk about all these new shows unless they sail the high seas with an eye patch on, which is yet another argument for MAKE THE AD TIER FREE FOR EVERYONE.
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.
Because it's the right thing to do and those greedy shits make a fortune off of ads and don't need our money and okay I know, I know, MORE MONEY. Greedy shits. I mean.. wouldn't the ads be more valuable if they knew more people were watching? Or something?
Look, I'm just trying to get us all free Disney+ here, okay? Help me out here. :)
It all "ads" up. Right?
I'll see myself out....
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, matey.
Yup, I will be cancelling too. Greedy bastards.
What is ironic about this is that Bezos could probably make all of their video streaming free and have no ads and still be making gobs of money. Their AWS ecosystem is practically a license to print money. Oh and that little store he runs on the side, too...
But it's not enough to make a lot of money, you have to make ALL the money.
So with the media industry strikes the content is already going to be crap next year. Why not also include ads with it? WTF Amazon.
"Can't get worse at this point, eh?" Amazon: hold my beer
Maybe it's time to cancel Amazon prime. I don't feel like they even met their commitments any longer for delivery... So what's it all for?
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.
Join !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
and that will be when i unsubscribe.
need to finish off my backlog of shows there, or sail the seas!
Well, it seems Amazon doesn't want my money. Don't worry, you won't see it anymore.
That s my cue for cancelling i guess
That will be the end of my prime subscription. I should probably just get rid of it now, the streams are better quality on the high seas anyways.
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.
Done. Thank you.
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.
I have a free vpn, but maybe I should go for the paid plans that I can actually use it for torrenting
Piracy it is then. Lol.
I've been paying Amazon for more than 25 years just for the free deliveries. I don't watch anything on Prime, it's so hard to navigate between the free and rent videos. Been torrenting since the 90s, yeah I'm old, so my advice stands -get a good VPN, and sail the seven seas-
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.
P2P filesharing has been around since the '90s.
His point was that bittorrent wasn't around in the 90s
Not really. "Torrenting" has become synonymous with "P2P filesharing," so it's clear what OP meant.
Meh, I'd consider Emule and Napster type things torrenting.
I don't recall if they used peering though. I thought they did (twas a long time ago).
The Kademlia network (eMule, Kazaalite, etc), did indeed use a global P2P Distributed Hash Table, to resolve which IPs hosted which content, which the torrent protocol also does ... some of:
Unlike the mainline torrent protocol, Kademlia's DHT (like the modern-day Tribler DHT), also resolved filenames to content, allowing in-app search.
With torrents, one needs to consult a DHT crawler, or an index site (which sucks; centrally operated sites are fragile, compared to DHTs), whereas eMule & more contemporarily Tribler, have two layers of DHT, enabling decentralized search without relyiance on someone having created a listing at some particular site & that site being online to search its index.
Thanks for the background.
Been a while since I used emule (surprised I remember it!), and I honestly didn't know the details even then (I was lazy and it worked).
eMule was introduced in 2002, which is again NOT THE 90s. Napster also uses a very different protocol, without any of the distributed file sharing. With P2P like Napster, soulseek, and DirectConnect you downloaded a complete file from one person only. Once you had it and could share it, someone could get it from you. But downloading bits of the same file from multiple peers at once was not a thing until after BitTorrent's release in 2001.
Thanks.
It's been a while (was working in a call center back then, plenty of bandwidth), but my memory sucks. Lol
I already pay for it
Yeah but Amazon's decided you're not paying enough.
Time to raise the black flag again I guess
Come on in the water’s fine!
Yargh
jokes on them, we shop there infrequently enough (2-3 times a year) that they give us prime for free every time we do. there was one short stretch (few months) about 10 years ago where we paid for it because we had a need for the shipping perk, but we haven't 'paid' for prime in a good 5-6 years and that was for a discounted 'trial'.
recently started another free month, so excuse me, while i go cue-up another movie. gotta use and abuse this one if the next one is gonna be polluted with ads--won't help that 'trial' experience and the conversion chance any next time, either.
then you're the type of fool keeping monopolies in service
When do you guys think they (companies/rich people/shareholders(?)) will realize that growth for the sake of growth is not viable and there will be a point of stagnation? Like... What are they gonna do, keep raising prices until nobody can b uy anything anymore?
When it stops being viable. They have no commitment to the company. They'll suck it dry and move on to the next project.
Yohoho my dudes and dudettes and dudex. And a bottle of rum.
yarg harg fiddilidee, bitches, bros and enby hoes
I already have the ad free tier. It's what I've been paying for!!!
No, you don’t get it. Jeff Bezos needs another solid platinum super yacht. Won’t you please think of the poor billionaires.
I'm fine with that. At the expense of other people besides me! Jeesh the audacity. :/ haha. (jk obviously)
Disney hotstar and other OTTs are going to follow the suite, IG. Fuck them all.
All hand hoy!
There's been a lot of discussion recently about how companies have been making shitty decisions, which prompt people to move to the open-source alternatives, like what happened with Reddit, Twitter and Unity etc. However, is there a viable alternative for film-related media, beyond simply piracy?
While Lemmy, Godot etc obviously have many costs, primarily servers and development, they don't have to deal with licensing in the same way to get content. Is there an existing alternative, or do you see a way for there to ever be an existing alternative without some rich company already backing it?
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/
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Dear bot,
Please let your masters know that they need a more intuitive way, of doing what you've described.
Otherwise you're going to be very busy and polluting many conversations with your repeated instructions.
Thanks,
A human user of your wonderful service
I buy used DVDs off eBay, sometimes from pawn shops or thrift stores.
Cancelled Prime a couple of years ago so that Amazon wasn't the default for ordering things anymore and wouldn't watch anything even via the free 30-day trial that they offer from time to time if commercials are shown. I'm still subscribed to Netflix as the family uses it extensively, but if something is not on there, Kodi has proven to be a good matey.
This is fine with me, since clearly they'll pass their increased profit onto their underpaid employees.
Wait...
Laughs in boycotting Amazon since 2011.
Why don't you just make a free version that plays ads? You know that reason why every sane person uses Tubi?
You know that one site which is the only that I don't use my ad blocker on, because I actually respect them enough to let the ads play
Because people are ready to spend money to see ads just for the convince of cheaper monthly subscription fee.
There is no cheaper subscription. The current prime sub gets adds added. Ad-free will cost more then the current ad-free subscription. "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
There goes that.
This is why I refused to ever buy cable: I am not going to pay for a service that forces ads on me. One or the other fuckers.
Yarrr!
Scamazon
They should also make people watch add bofore they are handed their Amazon Prime order. Unless they pay for the higher tier subscription.
Anyway, good to know that Amazon is finally doing something to fix its fledgling revenue from Prime.
Got prime when Grand Tour came out. Now that we get two episodes a year if lucky not worth it anymore. Get better service with Instacart for delivery anyway.
Arrrrrr
i stopped using amazøn years ago. shop local & stop killing the economy. it's just gonna get worse the more money you give them
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.
Yeah, those behemoths all share responsibility for killing the mom and pop stores. It's not impossible to shop around to local variants. But probably the best solution is to learn how to kick the habit that American culture has foisted upon us all of buying endless piles of useless crap.
I cancelled my prime subscription years ago. I occassionally restart it for a month at a time if I need some esoteric hobby thing and I would be forced into paying for shipping or for prime. Then I'll watch some stuff on their streaming service. Last time I used it, it was awful. Half of the shows were gatekept behind some ad system. And the "Amazon Originals" are all just extraordinarily expensive shows with terrible writing. Uhg. I am making it a point to not have an active prime subscription when Christmas rolls around. We (the collective we, as in, humanity) don't need more garbage.
Thats a lot of words to ignore the comment you're replying to.
All those stores sell neccessities as well as junk, so distilling it down to simply not buying junk is reductive and dismissive. If someone needs clothes and Walmart and Target are the only places available, are they supposed to go nude? Additionally, you're literally ignoring that they said that there are not local options available to them.
Nome of what you said is particularly untrue, it's just completely ignoring the comment you replied to.
Yeah, where my Mom lives, the food options are:
And she lives in a town people drive to, to get food, clothes, medicine, etc.
She gets as much as she can from the local grocer, for whatever that's worth; the inventory is frequently poor, & about on-par with Dollar General so far as brand-representation, goes. When tourists ask if the store has something, they get pointed to Walmart.
yes actually, you answered your own question
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.
It's the same where I live. Do I shop local and spend 2-5 times more for the item or buy it from lowes or Walmart? The kicker is that it is sometimes even the exact same brand and model item.
Cable is starting to look reasonable with all the subscription services and ads out there now
Cable internet? I agree. Nowhere near using all its last-mile capacity, yet.
I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner.
A year of prime costs about the same, or less, than every other ad free streaming service and prime video is only one of its benefits.
This is one of the reasons I say no to DRM
"Commercials in movies and series will be introduced in the U.S., UK, Germany, and Canada in early 2024, followed by France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Australia later in the year."
So rest of the world is safe from this at least until 2025?
I'd like to cancel my Amazon subscription but unfortunately, my entire family is using it to buy stuff off Amazon.
Just cancelled my prime membership. The movie offer was rather boring tbh, and I get more interesting series elsewhere.
I wonder what their reason for cable-cutting will be now.
I think a downloader will be neccessaire, it will cost too much money if we bought them all.
The combination of all these streaming services won't be cheap. I've just used a video downloader to optimise my subscription before I cancel my prime. (As long as I don't share it with others.)
Time to telegram.
Where do I find this stuff on telegram?
There are some telegram bots and channels. But those can't be shared here because of piracy reasons. Try searching in search engines, you may get few.
If you want a free version with ads they have Freevee. I mean, they don't have the same shows but it's free.