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But what if I want a faster horse?

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Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#561

Post by boramalper »

myself248 wrote: post #128

I've heard this called the "Tyranny of the Marginal User". To keep the line going up, platforms have to appeal to wider and wider swaths of a population, eventually lapping at the shores of a population that really doesn't care or want this service. But if you can hook them with some dopamine in a 5-second video, or a quest to rediscover some neat thing that they saw two page-loads ago but is now mysteriously gone fr…

The Tyranny of the Marginal User: why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time

https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#563

Post by chii »

Arainach wrote: post #286
_kush wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Porsche is easy to replace only if you bought it as just another fast car. If you bought it for the design, the legacy, or what the brand means to you, it’s not so easy. Netflix has their content as their moat. Even if someone today builds a better version of what Netflix used to be, it wouldn't matter. They won’t have the rights and licenses to the shows and movies. That’s what keeps people from switching. Porsche h…

>Netflix has their content as their moat. Only Netflix-produced shows apply here. Before Netflix started producing content they had *no moat*. That's the big problem with media streaming - the content owners have all the leverage. Any profit you make they can see and simply increase licensing costs to transfer to them. If you don't want to pay they can (and will, and have done) start their own competitor since the te…

Which is why back in the 1930's, there's anti-trust legislations preventing movie studios from owning cinemas. This prevents the ownership of IP from dictating prices in the cinema.

The situation with streaming platforms are exactly equivalent, and these content production studios have learnt to prevent this sort of anti-trust legislations from forming.

in fact, the cinema ownership decree has been ended i think: https://www.laineygossip.com/with-sonys-purchase-of-alamo-dr...

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#564

Post by _Algernon_ »

sureIy wrote: post #238
patapong wrote: post #230

I am astonished by how much less delightful software has become. Computers used to feel like a magical tool, that would respond instantly and allow me to perform complicated transformations at the press of a button. Now, I feel like I am fighting against software most of the time, having to compete with someones vision for how I should be using their program, which is likely aimed at the least technically sophisticat…

Is this about software or is it about you? I loved my computer when I was a kid, now I only see flaws. I don't think software was flawless at the time, it's just that I became very keenly aware of its current issues because this is my field.

I have a lot more patience for flaws when I know they are not the result of a profit motive. For example if Linux deletes my graphics driver and I have to spend an hour reading up on fixing it.

If on the other hand I know that a flaw is a result of intentional, adversarial rent seeking behavior (eg ads in the search menu on Windows; introducing shitty UI design; dark patterns), my patience is non-existent.

Modern tech problem seems to land in the second category a lot more often than it did 15+ years ago. It is the environment that has changed, not me.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#565

Post by tyre »

greatgib wrote: post #435

I just hate so so so much the Netflix of nowadays, they manage to keep me because of a few good movies/series and releasing new seasons of shows that I watched previously. But otherwise, this interface is so much bat shit! Incredible to me that anyone can pretend to Product manager of something so badly designed and unergonomic. The most important thing is "continue watching", that should be almost the first line, bu…

Some people have turned to downloading qBittorrent[0] and use 1337x.to or thepiratebay.org (to start).

At some point these apps are so user hostile that it's simply isn't worth subscribing to. Their margins on content are so low on an individual—effectively zero since a flat fee means ~infinite content—that the effect on their business is incredibly small. Especially for people who have subscribed for months but don't watch consistently.

For movies that are 5+ years old, some would say that the companies have made the vast majority of what they will and copyright is so out of control, bought by those same companies, that it's not bad faith to counter-balance it.

Not sure. These are arguments.

[0]: https://www.qbittorrent.org/

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#566

Post by fc417fc802 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #342
feoren wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those two tiers are not really competing with each other, are they? I'd wager that most people are fixed in one group: either they will never watch anything with ads (e.g. me), or they just don't care about seeing ads. The former group will never switch to the ad-supported tier -- they'll just cancel if the price gets too high -- so the only calculation is price vs. retention among that group. Similarly, the latt…

Side note: I discovered by accident last week that uBlock Origin eliminates ads on Amazon Prime Video too. We don't often watch that service on anything other than our "smart" TV, but was watching one episode on a laptop with firefox while travelling and realized afterwards the very brief black screens were where ads would have been.

Apparently it works so consistently and so well that this is the first I'm learning that Prime has ads. I'm surprised they went that route.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#567

Post by yard2010 »

mailund wrote: post #132
neutronicus wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume it's about papering over the gaps in their content library. You can't provide a seamless UX for turning on the TV and watching The Office if you don't own the rights to The Office. They want to habituate you to scrolling through content Netflix actually owns and picking something, because it's apocalyptic for them if you ever treat the services as fungible content libraries that you hop between month-to-mont…

I think you're right! A short while ago, I noticed I only used Netflix to watch 2 classic comfort shows, and I started to doubt if it was worth a 2-classic-comfort-shows-as-a-service subscription. I tried looking through the catalog to see what else I was paying for and ended up cancelling my subscription. Netflix does an amazing job in giving the impression that they have an endless library of top quality content, b…

I'm using usenet and a bunch of FOSS (*arr) and I'm never going back. This way I OWN my library, there is no chance that in November I will lose the ability to rewatch the office due to some uninteresting bullshit.

Whenever I physically can I buy DVDs or digital downloads.

I guess I just didn't understand the Netflix model - why would I want to rent something that I can just buy and have for life? Especially with the enshitification these days - it means I have to pay a massive amount of money (over 5 years say), for a shitty experience, ending up having nothing when I cancel the subscription? That's just a recurring bad deal, in my opinion.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#569

Post by tuna74 »

kelnos wrote: post #108
api wrote: post #26

What this is describing is not what the Ford quote is talking about. Netflix and all the rest didn't TikTokify because they were trying to create some massive visionary innovation, but the opposite. They did it because it's more profitable to shovel slop than to distribute quality. Quality content is expensive to make. Slop isn't. The way you do that is by hypnotizing people with addiction. To do that you have to hav…

Part of the problem specifically with Netflix is that they lost the rights to most of the good stuff, or at least the stuff that everyone wants to see, because the Disneys of the world set up their own streaming services and pulled their content from Netflix. So in a way Netflix had to learn how to push slop. Because they can't make their own Star Wars or MCU or Friends or whatever. It's just not easy to build a cata…

"So in a way Netflix had to learn how to push slop. Because they can't make their own Star Wars or MCU or Friends or whatever. It's just not easy to build a catalog of reliably-profitable franchises. Especially when many of those franchises were born decades before Netflix even existed."

They could try. The budget for the first seasons of Friends was the same as any other sitcom of that era.

Sitcoms would be perfect for streaming companies but non of them seem to get that for some reason.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#570

Post by FinnLobsien »

dsign wrote: post #425
klabb3 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overwhelmingly, products are designed to maximize total recurring user interaction, aka engagement or attention grabbing. This is the proxy for ad revenue, the most popular business model (even if Netflix is different). Look at Quora, LinkedIn and even SO, which essentially degraded into content farms for these reasons, largely downstream of the Google search funnel. But engagement maximization looks the same everywh…

Coat the carrots in chocolate? One can always do as in "The good place" show: put a bunch of hotties to talk about and play with moral philosophy. I think the show was somewhat evil in that approach, but at the same time, it was also morally sound...

Yes, but I also disagree to some degree because it's a similar argument to "I can watch philosophy TikToks and learn".

Certainly, philosophy TikToks are better than "boyfriend caught cheating prank" TikToks, but to some degree the medium is the message. And the question is whether we want the message of "everything is a short video, everything has a simple explanation and you can always swipe away and something else will be provided for you"

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