Who's doing this to my internet?

We need to use the internet less and get outside.

How about building your own platform? Your post is a clear indicator that there is a space left in the market for services that deliver your model, without all the marketing bullshit and bigdata hype. How about a google with a proper query interface (not just +,-,")? How about a social platform for organising parties, without farmville and like this and like that? How about a platform where i can buy whole seasons of game of thrones for download or stream as soon they get released? Or how a bout a twitter for 30 seconds voice messages, that cost you a dollar for every extra minute? There is lots of money to earn. Sure i might be stupid for sharing these ideas, but id rather have them become reality instead of suffering from this dumbing down of the internet to become the TV 2.0. Yes i am paranoid, and i think i have right to be, as a member of a political party that once had the goal to preserve the beneficial part of the internet, which has now become just another political party with most of its delegates being the usual representatives of the 48 laws of power.

Constantly have to adapt and change or build services because commercial incentives will turn each and every successful service to shit feels like a problem to me.

It doesn't feel sustainable, and a backlash seems to me to only be a matter of time.

> They blog and write on forums about what they would like to see, but the things they write are always very, very different from what they actually do, according to the data.

That's because content providers make it fucking impossible to buy their content a lot of the time!

I've been looking into this here (the Netherlands) for the last 12 months or so. It is so incredibly hard to go into a pay-per-view movie service, whether that's a cable TV video store, Netflix, Apple TV or what-the-fuck-ever-else, search for a fairly popular movie you like that came out in the last 5-10 years, and actually BE ABLE TO BUY IT.

Content providers are almost entirely at fault here. (I know this as I'm currently working at a cable TV company). They insist on negotiating individual contracts for restricted selections of (movie, series, whatever) content with each streaming/VOD provider individually. They will happily let customers buy an SD movie but charge them again, 2x, for a HD movie. They throw up all kinds of hurdles when it comes to recording TV in the cloud -- it is LEGALLY DIFFICULT to just store one copy of a recording for multiple customers.

The list goes on and on, it will drive you crazy if you have to deal with it.

> But those suits are very well in touch with reality — it is a couple of SQL queries away from them, actually. (And I see that "managers" are getting more and more literate in terms of analytics, by the way — SQL and R aren't really that hard, and often you have much more user-friendly analytic services at your hands).

Those suits are in touch with reality indeed -- they see that this business model has worked and continues to work, despite The Pirate Bay. They just need a large enough army of lawyers to maintain their dominance, both over distributors and customers (via lawsuits and website takedowns).

Don't blame the users for the clusterfuck digital content distribution is. It is the content providers who are to blame. They screw the artists, the distributors, the end users, as hard as they can, for as long as they can.

Except we tried micropayments about a bazillion times and they have universally failed. People don't want yet another monthly bill, which is what micropayments would be. You'd "subscribe" to various sites and services and it would eat at your bitcoin or whatever that you would need to replenish monthly.

Ads aren't as terrible as the average INTJ male makes them out to be. They're trivial to block as well. The OP's post is just one long angry rant. I'm not even sure what the take away here is other than how monetization works on the modern web (internet is not only the web!!). Everything about this screams, "The mainstream doesn't care about my marginalized interests and opinions!"

If anything, the mainstream has it pretty good. I pay something like 1/10th for Google Music what I spent at the record store annually. As a music lover, being able to tap into 30m songs trivially is pretty amazing. Geeks used to write love letters to a future with a "universal jukebox" and here we are, yet no one is happy! Old fashioned ideas of "collecting" albums and such are bizarre to me. The people into that always seemed to do it for some kinda of social gravitas so they could show off their "taste." I just like the music. I don't need to own it, I just need access to it.

Hell, it even makes radio stations based on my library or by artist, or even by song if I choose. This completely invalidates whatever questionable value radio stations provide today. What a waste of bandwidth all these FM/AM stations are. Retiring them and selling that spectrum off for better LTE makes sense to me. The old ways aren't always good, in fact, a lot of the old ways were shit. They're old compromises and dinosaur tech that's overstayed their welcome. Lets not pine too badly for the past. It was shit for the most part. As a person in his 40s, I think we have it better than ever.