Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap::Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. From video streaming to ride-hailing and cloud computing.
You say “broken promises” I say “the plan all along” and “bait and switch”.
Yep. The business model has always been “Lure them in and stifle competition with a low initial cost. Then when we have the market we can jack up the price.” Enshitification at its best.
This is just capitalism at work. Capitalism = enshitification, exploitation, and destruction.
Literally working as intended. Not sure why it takes people so long to figure this out.
A healthy dose of western/capitalist propaganda since birth and until death helps a lot. So many people under the illusion that this is the natural progression of civilization, or the best.
When you’ve been exposed to nothing but capitalsm your whole life it’s incredibly hard to be convinced that anything else could even work. Just like people born into religious cults, it’s hard to break when it’s all you’ve known.
Growing up in the '70s and '80s in the US, I know that the “greatest country on earth” propaganda worked on me. It took me until my 30s before I kind of looked around and said,“What the fuck is going on here?”
So much propaganda some people think that if a government offers public services they are about to be sent to a gulag.
It’s just impossible to have a conversation about anything here, isn’t it?
Capitalism without any regulation*
Yeah but then the wealthy eventually start buying away regulation. The only thing that made capitalism get under any sort of control was fear of a worker’s revolution
The only thing that made capitalism get under any sort of control was fear of a worker’s revolution
Yep, and so they made capitalism global, exported all of the union jobs to countries where labor abuse is permitted or encouraged, and then created new categories of unorganized, exploitative jobs faster than labor could keep up with them.
Even well-regulated capitalism strives for this and somehow manages to achieve it. It is the nature of capitalism.
It is in the nature of power. Reducing this to a particular economic system is nearsighted.
Every social system with a power dynamic (i.e. a system with two or more people in it) is vulnerable to power abuse. Power blinds, blindness strips powerful of perspective, decisions made without good information drunk-walk towards ruin.
The only common thing is the fact that it’s the average Jane who suffers first and whose rage ends up counteracting the ruin.
It is in the nature of power. Reducing this to a particular economic system is nearsighted.
I will agree that it is the nature of power. But I will argue that few other economic systems actively facilitate (and actually reward) the concentration of power the way capitalism does. I’ll also point out you are basically resorting to a “whataboutism” argument.
I’ll also point out you are basically resorting to a “whataboutism” argument.
That explains… a lot. I apologize for wasting your time.
If its actually well regulated it wont be capitalism. Just like Europe has many kingdoms yet isnt full of actual monarchy.
All capitalism is, at its core, is the system of owning and investing capital for greater returns later. You can have that while regulating things–at least in theory.
An actual dictionary definition of capitalism:
an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit.
Any definition of capitalism that doesn’t in some way mention private ownership of capital is simply wrong.
So your issue is that I didn’t use the word “private” in my write-up?
Also known as the Wal-Mart business model.
A lot of these things were proudly unprofitable, which is basically their way of getting around anti-trust violations. If they had a revenue stream to make the business profitable (outside of investors handing them more cash) then they’d be hit with anti-trust lawsuits for offering services at a loss in order to drive the competition out of business. But instead they just convince investors to hang on long enough to achieve the same goal, then raise their prices when they’ve got too much power to fail.
“Rent seeking” has a nice ring to it in this case, I think. The previous situation was fine, except for not being profitable enough for the right people.
Yeah it’s called capitalism
Capitalism is just one big con, and you have no alternative but to play along.
This has nothing to do with tech and EVERYTHING to do with FUCKING CAPITALISM.
What a dumb fucking post, tech didn’t promise us shit were still living in a capitalist nightmare where quarterly earnings are far and above the primary value, over any and all people.
What the fuck is this waaaa tech didn’t usher in an age of utopia!!! It’s almost like we have to solve other problems first. Fucks sake
Can we actually have a discussion on what’s at hand here instead of knee jerk reactions?
Perhaps you had to have been there for all the “building better worlds” and “bringing people together” horseshit every silicon valley company was spewing since the dot com boom in the 2000’s
It’s not an actual promise so don’t act pedantic. The point is- society was sold these concepts and ideas as solutions to existing problems, and they’ve instead become bigger and more expensive problems.
Honestly, not to blame the public, but people were sitting here for the last decade going, don’t like being censored? Don’t use Google/Facebook/whatever. Don’t like being tracked across the internet? Don’t use Google/Facebook/whatever. And everyone kept using it. As for streaming services, I mean, if you don’t want monopolistic pricing power, abolish copyright/DMCA. We complain constantly about the consequences of these big corps but society keeps religiously buying shit from them or participating in their services. Just like complaining constantly about global warming but driving your car 3 miles to the store to get a 1L bottle of water. We set up these structures and put people in these positions where they can exploit you, then act surprised when they do, and we have an excuse for why we think every individual part of it needs to stay exactly the same.
OK, maybe to blame the public a little.
abolish copyright
17 years is enough.
Cheaper has never been a promise of big tech. Better, personalized, more convenient, flexible, faster. Cheaper? I missed the promise where we’d get all these benefits for nothing, and in fact be given discounts for getting all these benefits.
Before anyone starts: yes Uber is better than a taxi. Yes, cloud computing is better than on-premises. I’m so sad for this author who can’t work their streaming services, but as bad as cable? Give me a break.
Yea cable sucked way more, atleast we aren’t locked into contracts with these services. Subscribe for a month watch the last years entire catalog and unsubscribe, rinse and repeat. You don’t need every subscription to be always active.
Yyyyep. The way they package channels is so irritating. And the advertising load you get with cable TV is intolerable to me. My parents are conditioned to it after decades but it drives me insane fast.
That’s why I just bittorrent the fuck out of everything. I’ll never play the game.
For now. Long term contracts are coming to streaming
Haha good luck with forcing people into a contract when you got like 2 shows airing at any given time. If they want a contract the content has to explode by atleast 4 fold
Yeah, but they said those things before going public or when a few people had the vast majority of shares.
If they cash out, there’s now a board in control, and the big investors want big returns. So that’s the direction companies inevitably go.
Because if capitalism.
It might be the same company, but it’s often not the same people calling the shots
They were/are solutions to some of the problems though. Uber makes it way easier and convenient to get a ride which also helped lower the amount of drunk driving happening. Streaming made it was more convenient to watch what i want to watch when i want to watch it and without ads.
The real solution would be for public infrastructure like subways, busses, etc so we dont need privatized solutions that start cheap and then ramp up the prices when we’re hooked. And we could have had films/series that get funded directly by the viewers without middlemen so for a cheaper price we can enjoy the art and have the money go directly to the artists but we instead we got different middlemen
Friendly reminder that Uber makes use of public infrastructure to do its thing.
As do all the airlines.
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“Tech” doesn’t exist. Entire concept is a lie propagated by companies trying to appear like something different.
Not a tech company - a taxi company, a short term rental company, a video distribution company …Look at what they sell, not what tools they use to do it.
“the cloud isn’t tech it’s a rental company” is a pretty dumb take tbh.
Like, if you’re trying to argue that AWS (or gcp, azure) services don’t provide technical solutions that aren’t available otherwise you just don’t know what you’re talking about. Is it expensive, yeah it definitely can be. But cloud is much more than server rentals at this point. Want a host that gives you bare metal? Great there are ‘rentals’ to choose from. I can see arguing SaaS hasn’t really ‘tech’, but PasS and IaaS provide technology and solutions to problems. I hate Daddy Jeff as much as the next guy but AWS is very much ‘tech’.
I could buy a server and run AD. I can rent a cloud server and run AD. In that way, you’re correct.
But what I want to do is buy a local server and run AAD. They won’t let me. Their cloud solutions are an artificial limitation to force us to rent servers rather than license software. It’s another form of vendor lockin.
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You know how to fix air conditioning? How about program an alarm system? These are side services a storage company provides their clients to enhance their main product. If uber is a taxi company and Netflix is just Blockbuster 2.0, the cloud is just a big Westies in the sky.
The cloud is just data server farms with fancy marketing. Shut your pie hole.
Uber isn’t a taxi company. They don’t own a fleet. They’re a company that makes an app.
Um, not sure where you live but in most cities I know taxi companies don’t own the fleet
Capitalism would never allow utopia to come about, because the concept of utopia doesn’t allow for an unequal distribution of goods. The inequality is very much a feature, not a bug.
I’m not usually one for an ad hominem, but it’s business insider—that’s probably one conclusion they are incapable of arriving at
Not incapable, unwilling.
Agree, it’s 100% greed for investors’ money. But it’s way easier to get away with lying in tech than in most other industries.
It’s not even that; those services were subsidized by investors money on this idea that once you get a user base, you can then capitalize on the user base.
Those promises were made at a loss which later had to become a profit. It’s like Discord, there’s no way hosting literal hundreds of thousands of servers for free and killing all the competition can and will continue indefinitely. I wouldn’t be surprised if their monetization gets even more aggressive because transmitting all of that audio and video is not cheap.
That’s not even a “capitalism” thing, that’s just a “someone’s got to do the work thing” and the majority of gamers went “yup that somebody can not be free!” And what always happens does, the existing solutions lost tons of revenue and became increasingly stagnant because they can’t compete with “free”.
That’s why I’ve started paying for stuff (even when there’s a “free” option or paying more for domestically produced goods – even when there’s a “cheaper” option). Cheap isn’t cheap when it comes to manufactured goods (i.e., cheap imported junk), and free isn’t free when it comes to online services. Ultimately, somebody’s gotta make “free” happen (even if it’s a government, and then that really means the tax payer).
The race to the bottom only exists because that’s what people vote for with their wallets. If it wasn’t rewarded with sales, it wouldn’t happen.
I guess the thing where tech is relevant is that regulations thought it was different, so they didn’t apply the rules against dumping and other illegal tactics (“because they’re a start-up, it’s different when they lose money year over year”).
Technology has and will always be awesome…… unless it’s in a society that is structured in an inherently exploitative way.
Did you mean exploitative?
Yup thanks!
Well, you’re right that the bigger issue is people expecting tech to solve social problems created by social structure. But Yes, tech is absolutely failing at this. How could it not?
Why not instead take this show of contempt for tech as another chance for people to recognize the underlying issue, not as a threat to the future of tech developments.
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Yarrrrr…shiver me timbers. Fly the Jolly Roger high matey, there be booty ta plunder!
Main reason I’m in the works of a nas myself.
After a long break from the seas, returning after close to 8 years, pirate life has really improved.
Synology + dockers + automation tools = the experience that streaming should have been
Pirating taxis?
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Yes. Yes I would.
A fake taxi like they say.
I think that’s just called robbery, but taxi pirate does have a nice ring to it.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
I love this response. 😀
Don’t blame tech, blame the bait-and-switch business model of loss leading products.
Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.
I’d argue that newer streaming companies (those founded by studios, such as Disney +) did the same thing by roping in customers before jacking up prices.
It may be the “fault” of capitalism, but consider it was capitalism that birthed streaming in the first place. In the long term, the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming… the same way streaming was a solution to cable. Thus is the business cycle.
the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming… the same way streaming was a solution to cable.
What would that look like though? The current streaming model was pretty easy to predict ~15 years ago with the advent of online video streaming in general, especially mainstream forms of it such as YouTube. I have a hard time imagining how any other business model for distributing video content would look like, but then again I don’t have a very entrepreneurial mind.
If you had the answer you could make a lot of money
The answer was already found with music streaming. Whether you’re using Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube whatever, you’re still getting 99% of the same content. These companies compete on price and features not on content.
That case is a bit different. Most music streaming platforms haven’t leaned heavily into the production of exclusive content like Netflix or Amazon, or own a huge swath of IPs like Disney. We might get there yet, however…if we do, we’d likely see the same price hikes and fractured availability of content.
I would do the same as was the case with cinemas: anybody can buy any streaming content. If you produce a movie, you are forced to sell it to anybody who is willing to buy it. (Just like every cinema can have any movie which wasn’t the case back then. There were specific cinema exclusives before the law forced this shit out.)
This is the way. Unfortunately, it requires competent lawmakers that dares to target anti-competitive business practices. I guess we could pin our hopes on the EU, but they might not want to open this can of bees (yet). Besides, they are plenty busy dealing with all the other areas that the US allowed to run rampant, my guess is that there’s a hard limit to how much can can be targeted at once. Let them handle right-to-repair and big tech privacy violations first, since they don’t have soft solutions / workarounds.
You had me until that utterly stupid drivel at the end. You cannot give credit to the system that happened to be in charge at the time…
Then you’d have to thank Monarchy for a billion things that weren’t invented by monarchs…
You’re confusing economic systems with systems of government.
I’m interested to hear how you explain the drive to create streaming as an option to cable without including tenets of a market driven economy.
Reddit/Lemmy/Etc really has a hard-on to blame all bad things on capitalism. Capitalism is amoral. It is cold and uncaring. But not recognizing it as a driving factor for growth, innovation and societal advancement is a path of willful ignorance.
Everything has pros and cons in life.
Remember that every invention discovered and improvement made before capitalism, happened before capitalism.
Remember that even in a system in which workers own companies, those workers still want to make more money
A profit motive is not unique to nor a product of capitalism.
Not making any profit does not imply running for losses.
Many companies can run for minimal margins, ensuring they can pay staff, stock and services.
Profit is what is left on the table after every expense is paid, including salaries, which usually doesn’t reach the workers pockets.
No but companies raising prices to make more money is absolutely related to making profit, and a worker-owned company still has a profit motive.
Companies being able to run at a loss is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. Most small businesses do not turn a profit for two to three years.
If a company sets its mark at not making profit, it does not mean it runs at a loss.
Was I unclear?
Profit is what is left after all expenses are paid, including salaries, and a company can run with a non profit objective and still create jobs with fair salaries.
Profit is the end goal for the so called investors that have no real involvement in the day to day operations of companies and demand quarterly reports with ever increasing revenue.
If a company makes enough money to pay salaries, replenish stocks and/or provide ita services and pay its daily and monthly expenses it is not running on a loss. Profit is not a requirement for a business.
I am aware that non-profits exist as a concept, but that’s irrelevant to what we are discussing which is how profitability and viability are not necessarily linked
Those workers still want to live. The money is the means- controlled by those with the most money.
Capitalism and democracy as exclusive concepts.
None of this makes any sense, both on its face and as a response to my comment
Bold deconstruction of the argument. Capitalism didn’t invent iPhones, workers did. There are economic systems other than capitalism, that can do better, without the unilateral domination of capital.
You act like capitalism is something that was invented. Market economies have existed since the dawn of time.
Think of it more like a spectrum where free market and unregulated capitalism is on one end and economies under total state control are at the other.
There is clear evidence that one side of that spectrum favors innovation more than the other.
I guess you could argue that one end of the spectrum is more “moral” than the other, but I would counter that the opposite end is amoral rather than immoral.
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You mean capitalism is inherent in the matrix of the space-time continuum as opposed to invented?
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Market economies have not all been capitalistic.
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Innovation is not the singular motivation of mankind. Survival, comfort, stability, peace, equality are more important.
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An amoral society is no better than an immoral society.
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Also worth noting in the case of uber, even if price is equal with taxis, the experience is much better. Nicer cars, better drivers and much easier app use. Even at price parity, its a very superior product in most cases.
Other than the ease of app use I wouldn’t say any of these are accurate anymore. I’ve been in plenty of hoopties using Uber, dealt with drivers juggling different apps at once and literally driving past me with some other customer in the car on the way to their destination (while Uber app shows you your driver is arriving), and had plenty of awful drivers take me places. I think this was true in the beginning but once the facade came down and people realized they aren’t really making any money, Uber lowered their standards and took what they can get.
I always thought [dumping](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy\)) was illegal.
FTC has been asleep at the wheel for 50 years
Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.
I think that is only the first part of it. Uber invested a ton of money in autonomous vehicles. I think they were originally betting that they would undercut prices, bleed out competitors, and then be the only one who has the capital to deploy fleets of driverless vehicles.
We are still far from having driverless vehicles and I think investors are realizing that so Uber upped their prices and lowered their pay. There is nothing revolutionary about them. They implemented a good tracking system and the ability for drivers to more easily figure out which rides would be best. They do not have that advantage anymore since taxi companies now largely have the exact same tech but without the massive overhead that Uber has.
A better solution already exists. It’s the arr stack.
Is this surprising? The prices were always going to adjust to the market. Any new cheap thing that undercuts the market will eventually become the market as it becomes mainstream, and prices will be increased to what the market will bear to maximize profits.
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Sure. But torrents are for files which is different from streaming. And Kodi + Trakt is still far beyond Netflix.
The costs to you with torrents are the relatively small risk you may get sued for a lot of money and/or the cost of covering up your activity with a VPN to make it harder to sue you.
People who were always going to pirate are still always going to pirate. But companies like Netflix know that people will pay for a convenient, legal service with features they like. But if they start charging too much or make their platform suck, people will be more likely to cancel them and pirate.
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Well that’s the difference, most people will pirate when it’s more convenient to do so. And as long as prices are so exorbitant.
I pirate hockey games, because watching hockey is ridiculously inconvenient and/or expensive.
I do not pirate music anymore, or video games because Apple Music is more convenient and not very expensive and steam has all the games I’d ever want to play, and has enough sales that it’s not that expensive either.
I don’t pirate movies and tv shows because Netflix and Disney really cover anything I want to watch and anything else I share a crave subscription, like for Game of Thrones
But I do pirate hockey games.
I use WebTorrent nowadays, since it allows you to stream torrents. But before that, I also used qBittorrent, great application.
Qbit also lets you stream torrents, you just have to ‘download in sequential order’.
Oh didn’t know that, thanks!
I think the problem comes in with all the copyright and monopolization bs companies like Verizon and apple pull to remove all possible competition and allow them to jack up their prices
This is surprising from a naive market based perspective. Think about how TVs and computers have gotten cheaper and better. The hope was that this wouldn’t just be the same product with new players. The idea (or the lie if you prefer) was that the new technologies would lead to efficiencies so we can all get more for less.
It just didn’t make any sense for something like Uber. It costs money to give someone a living wage and their app wasn’t going to change the fact that someone still had to drive the car. The whole idea made no sense, which is why they were racing to autonomous cars. That hasn’t panned out.
I actually think streaming is a much better value than cable, even at the same price. Shows are higher quality and more plentiful. Many high quality movies are included. You’re also not required to get every package. Skip Paramount if you don’t want it. I still think streaming easily beats cable.
Exclusive rights to content are the problem here. There is no competition if the consumer has no choice (except not watching at all).
There is a case here for legal separation between content production and distribution. Not just streaming services, it goes for any content, games, cinema, even patents.
Uber on the other hand - I have a problem with their employment rights, not paying people or calling them “contractors” instead of employees.
Otherwise it’s a great positive example of free market in practice. Someone had an idea for a new business model, tried it, it appeared to work for a couple of years, and now they will fail because it doesn’t have a long term perspective. It shook up existing monopolistic practices in the industry, and then tried to establish their own monopoly. And will fail because of that. It goes in circles.
The prices were always going to adjust to the market
The prices will always be inflated regardless. The free market is a myth at best, a delusion at worst.
No it’s not surprising, we ALL STILL live in the same fucking capitalist nightmare.
Anyone surprised is simply naïve and/or a literal child lol
Remember when we could only watch what had recently been on TV and cable companies were trying to lock people in to specific cable boxes that couldn’t skip ads and we paid $120 per month for ad supported content and cable companies would attach random fees and everyone had to buy hundreds of channels to only watch 4?
And we’d build movie and music collections of physical media we had to keep in our homes and cars and we’d listen to the same three albums for months and if we were lucky enough to get a TV series box set, it’d set us back many hundreds of dollars and we’d have to remember which disc we were on and navigate arcane and slow menus?
And when we had questions, we had to find the answers ourselves by reading long form content and just be satisfied that there were many questions we couldn’t answer at all because the information wasn’t available?
Or when we wanted cabs, we’d not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations and they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what’s a smartphone?
And when we wanted to go somewhere, we had to ask for directions and use atlases to figure out how to get to the general area of the destination, then drive in circles, accidentally drive past a turn 5 times because the street we were supposed to turn onto had two different names and we had been given the wrong one?
I was there and anyone who pines for the old days can just go there. We have cable and encyclopedias and taxis and atlases. Go nuts.
Exactly right! While I think companies like Uber and Netflix did price things like Taxis and Cable out of business unethically, I don’t want to go back to those days. I remember having to try to catch a Taxi and waiting over an hour and a half in the cold. They would ask where I was going and just drive off. Cable was full of scummy tactics and slowly introduced ads until it was just basically paying to watch ads. I don’t want to go back to that shit. But Uber and the like should have been honest about what the pricing structure would have been from the get go.
The business practices of Uber and Netflix are also unethical but in a different way. Uber pays basically nothing. Netflix as well as streaming pays very little to actors/writers/film crew.
Oh, for sure! Corporate greed exceeds new levels year on year! To think they raise interest rates to curb inflation, but then banks and most other companies are posting record profits without any social return is disgusting.
The term for this is Platform Capitalism
But Uber and the like should have been honest about what the pricing structure would have been from the get go.
Pricing structure will be adjusted based on the market conditions. Applies to any company at any time.
Not the same situation. They purposely went low to price out the competition for years, accepting losses until the competition hopefully didn’t exist or had everyone semi dependent on them. This is not a supply/demand situation or increase with inflation. This is creating market dependency until you can increase your cost to what you want it to be by obliterating competition.
That’s just normal price dumping.
We have all these conveniences now and somehow people are not happier. Maybe the improvements you showed weren’t improvements after all and society should have spent more time to focus on people instead of developing and selling the next great music platform.
You are missing the point when you tell people to go back to cable, encyclopedias etc. because it’s not about those things, it’s about escaping into an idealized past while being depressed in the present. They should have your sympathy.
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Improvements to technology and improvements to society are vastly different things.
I remember those days. People were happier then
So now we can only what the streaming providers have licensed, and those things which we’ve “purchased” can and do disappear from our devices. And our answers are increasingly becoming hidden behind paywalls that require specific subscriptions & unskippable ads.
“Today” is only better than yesterday due to a recent huge disruption called “the internet” and companies are absolutely scrambling to restore the “bad old days” status quo that you allude to.
when we wanted cabs, we’d not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations
Any cab I’ve ever been in had the mileage cost clearly posted in the taxi along with all of the other regulations. And they didn’t change their rates depending on 'busy times of day’band inflate charges 2-5x as much.
they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what’s a smartphone?
This sounds pretty much like the experience people tell me in any Uber or Lyft, except for the cell phone but you can use your cell phone in a taxi just fine, so I’m not sure why this is even relevant.
looks like an exaggerated strawman
Take video streaming. In search of better profitability, Netflix, Disney, and other providers have been raising prices
Piracy and buying/ripping physical media is back on the table bois. Been running my own personal media server secured with a VPN to access it. Costs are the symmetric gigabit connection, a simple raspberry pi for WireGuard, and old computer for media server. Plus some technical knowledge.
Any physical media I have has been ripped to digital form (4K where possible).
A 3-mile Uber ride that cost $51.69
Yet another reason why we need to have more diverse options in transportation. Public transportation is dismal in the USA due to suburban sprawl and car centric society. Alternative forms of transportation such as bikes or even walking is not accessible to a large portion of people.
Took a bus the other day and the total cost for 24 hrs was exactly $2.50. Don’t have to worry about psychos on the road driving to and from their deadass suburban home and deadend job.
Cloud promises are being broken
Fuck the “cloud”. It’s just another persons/companies server. Switched off major cloud platforms long ago.
Have off site backups take place nightly. No middleman scanning my stuff. No more upselling. Besides ISP costs, everything else is static or one time setup.
Yeah, I’m already automating my entire Plex configuration, got some friends as admins on my services to help me run it, and I’m sharing it with all my friends through secure connections with let’s encrypt. There’s no reason to keep giving massive companies our money, data, and freedom. Fuck the cloud, fuck these subscription services, fuck SaaS, fuck it all. It’s piracy all the way down from now on.
Where do you keep your off-site data?
Parents house across the country. Nightly backups. Added a residential UPS. SSH access for updating/maintenance.
Tech never promised anything. They cut the price for people to be dependent to them and then rise the price.
It’s just basic capitalism.
On the flip side, piracy has never been easier.
We should have seen this coming. I remember the early 80s when cable was the new hotness, and it was cheap, with no ads unlike broadcast television. That was its major selling point.
Then over the next decade the ads crept in, and we were all paying for cable with ads, even though the whole point had been no ads. Then the price skyrocketed and the ads remained.
Steaming was always going to follow the same path. Cheap with no ads at first, then adding ads, then skyrocketing prices, then crazy prices with ads too.
They know as long as all of them raise their prices, where are we gonna go? They have exclusives. We can’t just take our money elsewhere.
Time to disrupt the disruptions.
I have this idea for a consolidated ISP, cable television, home security, and telephone landline company. Gotta have the landline.
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But I can binge streaming services and then cancel without multiple hundred dollar fees. And I can use the same app for Uber no matter what city I’m in.
So… I get things aren’t paradise but let’s be clear they’re still largely covering a lot of folks needs.
For now.
Moreover, not to take sides with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dropbox, Box, etc, but storing files costs money to maintain (there needs to be redundancy, every once in a while drives need to be replaced, they need to be cooled, etc), so we’d like it to be cheap, but doing all these things cannot be free for the hosting company.
This is not to say they are jacking up prices, but that it cannot stay super cheap forever.
Still, these services have been very handy so far, though I’m looking to see if the plan I have is still convenient compared to the competition
Seems to me like it would be more sustainable if it was super cheap for a large common library so a large userbase would maintain a continuous subscription, supporting a large continuous revenue, rather than signing-up and quitting intermittently.
The media companies are ruining it for themselves by trying to squeeze more out of the users, which leads them not to stick with any of them.
Seems to me like it would be more sustainable if it was super cheap for a large common library so a large userbase would maintain a continuous subscription, supporting a large continuous revenue, rather than signing-up and quitting intermittently.
Excuse me, but how would a tiny percentage of people profit off of this?! What is even the point if there are no shareholders to demand record profits year after year? /s
I still believe there’s a huge markup though. Look at premium Usenet providers - they store something like 1200 days of the posts (minus DMCA takedowns) which I think run something like hundreds of petabytes of data. Yet they can provide the service, including transfer, for what has to be a niche market at rates around $10 a month. Presumably there’s no “magic” or subsidies in what they’re doing. Yet what they’re doing is essentially what a big streaming service is doing.
Now you might say - well, yea, $10 a month - right around streaming prices. Sure, but you figure in the larger scale to spread the costs over. For Box etc, they’re not even having the content costs that a Netflix would have (which I’ll admit is a lot, and might well make up for the difference between just storage and transfer of Usenet) which makes them comparable in some sense.
Even if you say that well, Usenet gets multiple companies cooperating in their competition and storing the same data so they get some redundancy for “free”, compare to backup providers like Backblaze at $7 a month for unlimited storage (unless you’re on Linux, then f**k you, so I don’t use them, but still). Or Jottacloud that runs around $100 a year for 5TB soft cap 10TB hard cap.
I still think there’s a mix of a lot of markup, and people not actually looking much into competition - I know people who don’t cross compare.
We talk about being able to stop paying things as a service in it’s own right lol.
“Needs” lol
This is all by design. Once they have you/us/them captured again, we’re going to take another trip around the “raise prices and squeeze services until it’s unsustainable, because shareholder and CEO profit”. It has all happened before and it will all happen again.
The cloud is just someone else’s computer. The uber is just someone else’s car. Streaming is just someone else’s media library. They have you right where they want you, dependent on them.
The thing about unregulated capitalism is it will always fuck over society in favour of sociopaths. Unregulated capitalism rewards sociopaths because it focusses on profits above all else – shareholders get stupidly rich only if they don’t care about the damage done to workers and the public, sociopaths who don’t care about such damage can promise the highest profits, and that’s rewarded by a hyper-focus on the bottom line.
Unregulated capitalism rewards ruthless cost-cutting, treating people like robotic assets, slash-and-burn corporate policies, and a culture of near-slavery.
Adding new tech only makes inhumane policies easier to implement. It’s why people like Musk have more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. When the goal is to maximise profits at all costs, of course the consumer will get fucked. That’s rather the point.
E: in short, prices will continue to increase as these people try to find the ceiling. Ps: there is no real ceiling.
Uber was never a tech proposition, it was a predatory disruptor.
The streaming fiasco is sad but inevitable as greed does what greed does.
Cloud was never primarily about price, the big cost save initially was to get rid of purchased or rented iron and locations but the main reason of the Big Switch was the scaleability and opportunities for quick deployment of new technologies and methodologies.
