This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
piracy is legit the one example where the free market truly balances itself out.
However, since it is technically illegal, this means we should legalize revenue losing practices against large corporations similar to piracy, such that we can simply fix capitalism once and for all.
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.
Yall are overcomplicating things. Let me simplify.
Capitalist corporations + infinite greed = cannibalism
Yes, Netflix famously said they need to be HBO before HBO could become Netflix.
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
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.
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 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
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.
It turns out in every era, copyright is a sham. Information in its natural state is free - our legal system tries to change that.
The laws around copyright are designed to prevent citizens from doing things.
The laws around human rights are designed to preventing the government from doing things.
The later expands your agency while the former restricts it.
Anon: 2007
The music industry ca. 1981:
Also the book piracy that existed in universities through photocopying and sharing pages.
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.
Netflix has a market cap of 300bn. Public markets picked up right where venture capital left off no bother. The problem I think was the competitive forces as much as enshitified business model, though perhaps one cannot exist without the other. Certainly without doing their own content they could easily have become ludicrously profitable as a redistributer only, though I'm not convinced it would have stopped everyone and their dog moving in on the space.
Facebook is really the cleaner example of enshitification. They could have happily printed modest money for ever as the preeminent social network, but they took the greedy approach and morphed into a cesspool.
Merry Christmas to you!
2007? Anon is a sweet summer child.
I'll say. I was sailing the seas back in the late '90s. By 2007, I had amassed quite a hoard of treasure.
Motherfucker was unborn while the rest of us were downloading Darude - Sandstorm on Napster.
OP forgot Napster, as well as the p2p networks of old like WinMX, Kazaa, etc, nevermind Usenet.
Even before that, BBS, WaReZ sites, IRC. Dialup internet wasn't a problem when RAR files could be split up for a release.
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.
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
Exactly this and more.
I'm not even pirating because it's cheaper, or easier. I have near 100TB in storage, and it takes hours per week to search material, have it downloaded, checked, etc. I just am done with the marketing, the branding, the advertising, the bullshit rules. I just want to watch what I want to watch and media companies made this impossible so I'm forced to sail the high seas
Why not just... Automate that with an Arr stack? And use Jellyseer to find new and popular movies and shows.
Netflix didn't get greedy (well not in that way). The movie companies wanted to make their own platform, which would have left Netflix with nothing. So they had to become their own production company. They said "we have to become a production company faster than production companies become streaming companies".
2007 ? Everybody around me was pirating every single piece of media in 2000 and we were late to the party
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.
You pirate because prices are too high
I pirate because I have kleptomania
We are not the same
it's only theft if they lose it when you take it
People are willing to pay at least some amount if priced appropriately. Otherwise, we're going to take it for free. Remember, companies we're reporting record PROFITS during a pandemic when most people were struggling.
https://www.vendavo.com/all/willingness-to-pay/
https://fortune.com/2022/03/31/us-companies-record-profits-2021-price-hikes-inflation/
2007? I remember watching a DivX of The Matrix back in 99. Prior to that I remember watching south park episodes in the RealPlayer.
Blatantly wrong. Netflix started producing their own shows because studios suddenly realized they could make more money charging for their own back catalog rather than leasing it to Netflix.
Allowing production companies to be distribution companies / streamers is inherently problematic given that copyright is based around monopolies.
Even ignoring P2P predecessors to torrenting like Kazaa or Napster, there was still piracy early on. I guess it counts as piracy adjacent, but I got started buying bootleg anime boxsets off ebay, because the actual boxsets were like $200/season, and minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started, but I could get the same season on three DVDs from Hong Kong for $30. It wasn't too long after that, I found out about fansubs and started spending far too much time on IRC, downloading anime, manga and music off XDCC bots. I wasn't allowed to use bittorrent on the family machine, because "That's like Kazaa, we'll get sued into ruin," but those bots in fansub group channels were fine, especially since it wasn't immediately apparent looking at mIRC that I had one running too.
minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started
It’s currently at $7.25 so think about how much you could afford now!
Gentle reminder that i2p exists where torrents can be downloaded anonymously.
All I'm going to say is every computer I had was equipped with 2 disk drives until 2010. Elder Millennials and Gen X know why.