fuck streaming, long live piracy
2007… that guy was late to the game. And before this we had burned CDs and Zip Drives
Anon: 2007
The music industry ca. 1981:
Also the book piracy that existed in universities through photocopying and sharing pages.
I’m doing my part 🫡
lol 2007.
Definitely my reaction lol try 2001
Hell, we were on Napster in 99.
Usenet early/mid 90’s. A huge stack of floppy disks and a few weeks of all night downloads so dad didn’t lose his shit over the telephone screaming at him.
I miss that most of all
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
While I agree with the trend for the average person, I think in pure numbers there are always going to be more tech savvy people in the foreseeable future.
Sure, 80% of people online in the 2000s and 90s were all tech savvy hobbyists, but their numbers was low (let’s say a million).
Now only 0.5% might be tech savvy, but that is 0.5% of a billion people, which would be 5 mil compared to 800k above.
I obviously picked convenient numbers but the point still stands, there are lots of tech savvy places today and it’s growing, just not as fast as the non tech savvy crowd unfortunately.
I am personally still friends with two people who even know how to navigate their filesystem beyond clicking the downloads or my documents link in the start menu. I hope you’re right, but all I see around me at work and personal life is ignorance. People can’t even figure out how to use their phones beyond the basics.
I’m also inclined to believe what the other person was saying, because nowadays like you say people don’t know how to use their devices to their full potential, but then I remember there used to be a time when I was the only one with a smart phone and everyone else was looking at me like I’m a weirdo for being on this phone during a commute for example, something that today is normal.
The nerdy people are still there and know how to use these tools, the general masses are still as clueless as always, they are just late adopters that never learned anything past what the walled gardens feed them. At least that’s my feeling.
Yeah, on average you will find less and less tech savvy people in real life moving forward.
But if you were to ask a programming question on the most popular coding site, you would get more responses today than 20 years ago.
I hate you. Because you’re not really wrong in most parts. Ownership of devices pisses me off for what feels like an eternity now. I can’t imagine how sales would go for PCs if you would get not admin-access anymore. But I smell that future coming. At least if we had not all switched to Linux by then. But even if, then the war between corpos and community would be on the “you can’t access amazon from this insecure decice”-front.
Me, personally, currently live at the peak of piracy right now. The pinnacle I’ve dreamt of days back when selling wares on CDs for triple digits was a thing. Sonarr/radar/etc makes it so easy and awesome now. Enter a movie’s name, wait a minute, watch it.
As to your Netflix/streaming-point: add that only muricans had it THAT nice. Some countries had to pay full price yet only got access to like 30% (Romania, Italy,etc.). The rest got filled with local crap. You saw the shit when using search but then it was gone. I had Netflix for a year or so. When it was more comfy than wares. And then it gradually became worse but also more expensive. The usual enshittification
I think the end is where some people are moving but I think its a bit too pessimistic. While kids are becoming more tech illiterate there is always gonna be a certain amount of people that know a bit more than the masses and they are not gonna let themselves be pushed around.
What are they going to do? Manufacture their own silicon? The ability to make a computing device of reasonable power is fairly prohibitive and as things move forward manufacturers seem intent on doing things that are more and more hostile to consumers. You say people won’t let themselves be pushed around and that sounds nice but people have consistently done exactly that to date.
Our power as individuals is minimal here; we can vote politically and financially. These companies do amazing financially so voting with our wallets doesn’t work. Voting politically also hasn’t done in terms of enacting regulation aside from some small wins in a few states with right to repair (and big losses in many more states as well as federally). And given the fact that those wins are small and fragmented with only a very small handful of states having any policy (like less than 10) it’s likely that big tech will push back hard rather than simply comply. And we are heading into political times where regulations will likely continue to erode.
So as things worsen the people who “know a bit more” can have the choice of using cutting edge hardware that is more locked down, or being a stallman type that uses relatively ancient hardware full of compromises because it is compatible with an ideology. That is just but it also means they will be constantly hampered and the problem will only be compounded as technology becomes more advanced, which is inherent and constantly occurring
This is also not just a generational thing to be clear. People my age, younger, and older, who were into this stuff have become tech illiterate as time progressed because they’ve allowed themselves to move away from their computers and go to their phones which have become a reddit/youtube/tiktok/pintrest/amazon/twitter/instagram/etc box. The etc is whatever skinner box game they’re playing at the moment, because most of them who played actual games don’t even bother to play games anymore. They’re so caught up in the cycle of “engagement” that they don’t care about much else. they come home and doom scroll then complain about how they feel aimless and anxious all the time and never get stuff done
You’re right that there exceptions, but they seem to be dwindling
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.
Kinda inverts inverted the causality of Netflix starting their own production and other companies pulling their licences. Netflix started their own production to survive the licences getting pulled, which was inevitable as soon as Netflix looked profitable.
They didn’t get greedy, they probably started out greedy, ran a good service to grab market share, then had to make moves to defend against the predictable greed of the incumbents.
It’s greedy turtles all the way down
2007 ? Everybody around me was pirating every single piece of media in 2000 and we were late to the party
Napster was a household name and made mp3 piracy mainstream in 1999!
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.
Yes, Netflix famously said they need to be HBO before HBO could become Netflix.
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.
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.
2007? Anon is a sweet summer child.
I really wish I was a consultant for these fucking jokers.
Back when Disney+ was just “Rumor has it Disney wants to launch their own Netflix-like streaming service.”, I called this shit. I said “Well that’s just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart, no one’s going to juggle 50 different streaming services just to be able to find something to watch.”
And I was fucking right.
The only ethical streaming service is Tubi as it doesn’t charge relying on ads alone, and it’s a neat little bonus that Tubi has actively aided in the restoration of lost media.
If it aint on Tubi, then I’m going to yo-ho-ho with a bottle of fuck you.
just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart
Disney Plus generated $8.4 billion revenue in 2023, an 13% increase year-on-year.
lol
Yes, but they also brought back piracy, eroded faith in the brand, and while Disney+ is making money…
Disney’s newer efforts are kinda showing it’s not the powerhouse it used to be. With the only thing they really have going for them are the legacy media that they’re holding hostage on a platform, they arbitrarily removes things from time to time for seemingly no reason (the Willow series for example, which makes very little sense since that was original to Disney+ to begin with and for some reason Buzz Lightyear of Star Command isn’t on the platform despite all the other Toy Story media being present… and there are several episodes of The Simpsons that are just straight up memory-holed; most infamously the Michael Jackson episode)
If this trend continues, Disney will be left with people pirating the legacy media that people at home have shaky access to at best (Monthly fee for content that may be removed with no notice and for no reason), especially as prices soar and wages stay the same, and interest in newer project dwindling.
Or to be blunt, one of the most classic blunders: High short term profits at the cost of being unsustainable in the long term.
Sure it’s easy to think of Disney as laughing its way to the bank, but… think of it this way.
Disney’s been king of the world, especially in animation (Which has been getting sidelined in favor of live-action. I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it’d be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind). They’re a luxury limousine running fast on a road that has no other cars (because Disney bought those cars), and the tank’s running out of gas. You won’t know it’s running on fumes until it comes to a complete stop, but at the speed it’s going it will take awhile…
And the second it stops, a simple fuel service isn’t going to get it running again. It will get running again, too many people need it to run. So they’ll call a mechanic, and it will take to the streets once more.
Is Disney cooked? of course not, but they will see a return of their darkest days. A decade or two of the Disney brand no longer being that shining seal of quality people take it for.
I see it comparable to Nintendo’s Wii-U days when the company was a joke with no 3rd Party support and consumers who weren’t even sure what the Wii-U was even supposed to be. (Too many passed on it, believing it to be an overpriced gimmicky tablet add-on for the Wii… The launch title being NSMBU instead of something fans hadn’t already seen before I think is a big part of the blame for that.)
Nintendo didn’t wind up in bankruptcy, but they’d need to reinvent the wheel via the Switch, win back 3rd Party Support, and rekindle the faith of the fans, to get back to being a power house.
Don’t forget another thing in common between Nintendo and Disney: lawsuits. And obsession with intellectual property. Not required to be against their own fans, but it is preferred.
At this point I’m surprised I haven’t been sued for wearing a Waddle Dee hat that I paid in public. (I don’t have the Kirby License)
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.
