Quality down, prices up. How long is this trend going to last?
Until it stops increasing profits.
Beatings continue until morale improves
I was celebrating the signup / binge / cancel pipeline, but now I’m realising: a next step they could use to prevent that would be putting caps on your watch time, like “you only get 20h of content a month” or something.
Wouldn’t be a surprise to see this. I’m callin it now lol
They’ll call it a “fair use policy” and the exact limits are secret
lifted subscription fees
So they're not charging anything?
The Pirate Bay will always be with us.
You know what? I'm gonna Sonarr and Jellyfin even harder
You know what it means
See, the problem with publicly traded corporations is, they've got to constantly not only be making as much money this year as they did the previous year, but they've got to increase shareholder value, which means, raising prices, or reducing the product to save costs, we have termed that last bit enshitification. I mean, they don't HAVE to, but if they choose not to, the board of directors will push for a change in CSUITE personnel, and those fuckers are raking in the big bucks, and really really like their 3rd vacation homes in Aspen, so you pay more, or you get less, and sometimes you pay more AND you get less. And the beat goes on.
Publically traded companies only exist because capitalists willed it so. Capitalism will always seek the path to greatest profits for the capitalist class with little to no regard for the consequences of that
I don't see what would be wrong with a world where businesses just satisfied themselves with providing employees with a reasonable living, contributed to the communities they were in, and provided a good or service that was needed. Sitting under a tree and reading a book sounds better than watching the world burn in your name-brand clothes and 5 bedroom 2.5 bath house.
That sir, is communism. And we all learned from 80s action movies that communism is bad.
In the real world, communism also suffered from the mandated growth problem, as well as a long list of other issues that some people still like to pretend solely exist under capitalism and some serious problems that are exclusive to this system. Yes, it is actually bad, with and without Cold War propaganda making it sound both worse and better than it actually was. It failed everywhere for a reason.
This doesn't mean that there aren't real issues with capitalism as well. So far, the best system we've come up with as a species is heavily regulated capitalism with strong social safety nets. Not perfect, but nothing is on this rock.
So far, the best system we've come up with as a species is heavily regulated capitalism with strong social safety nets
And for quite a lot of human history the best system we had come up with was Feudalism, until we started doing something better.
Just because Capitalism is the best we've come up with so far doesn't mean we should just accept it, or that 1000 years from now people won't look at the Capitalism with the same disdain we look at Feudalism.
There's a reason I said "so far". I'm open to the idea that there might be newer and better systems in the future. So far though, they haven't been invented yet.
I mean, they don't HAVE to, but if they choose not to, the board of directors will push for a change in CSUITE personnel
If the board doesn't maximize profit, the shareholders can sue them, so functionally they do have to.
Specifically, the Board and thus the CEO must maximize company VALUE not profit.
There are other ways to increase company value that do not necessarily result in Q/Q / Y/Y profit increases.
But in the 1970s you get a guy named Milton Friedman who comes along with the concept of shareholder value in a 1970 essay for The New York Times, entitled "A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits".[5] In it, he argued that a company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders.
So there's been a lot of argument against it since esp as of late, but the economic hegemony still adheres to Friedman's economic principles.
Plenty of privately owned companies do the same things so I don’t think it can be chalked up to an issue with publicly traded companies.
The minor difference is private can choose what they want to do. public has a fuduciary duty to increase value
They legally don't. It's just expected.
That's generally false. But even if it's true, all the boss has to do is argue that medium-term profits will be generated by whatever policy they want to adopt. Since nobody knows the future, they might be right, and they're legally rock solid.
In other words, the duty to increase value produces unfalsifiable policy claims. So it is meaningless.
public companies do not necessarily have a Fiduciary duty to the shareholders, let alone one to increase value. Any that they did have (based on the laws and how they are incorporated in a given jurisdiction) would also be applicable to a private company. Private companies also have shareholders, the shares are just not traded publicly.
You’re probably thinking of the theory of “Shareholder Primacy” but that is a theory not a legal reality, although some insist it is based on a questionable interpretation of the precedent set by dodge vs ford motor company.
Public companies can be run in what ever way the board/shareholders see fit.
It’s all about who owns it and is sitting on the board.
Bunch of old money type people? They don’t care too much about a bad year, more important to weather the storms and keep the generational money intact.
Venture capitalists? Jack Welch this dogshit company and get us some short term gains!
They cancelled one too many shows we liked a long time ago and we swore off Netflix for life. Never going back. If they ever make another good show I will wait awhile to see if they cancel it or ruin it before I go get it from somewhere else. Their burned a lot of their old loyal customers that made them a success and now they have to acquire new customers faster than they lose them which isn't sustainable.
It’s not me, Netflix, it’s you.
Don't be a pleb. Sail the high seas!
AllDebrid is still €3 a month so 🤷♂️
lol - I love that I canned all my paid subs that were fucking me up the arse like this, and then used the savings to setup a half-decent Plex server for my family. Fuck those greedy cunts.
I keep telling my friends this. It was incredibly simple to do. And you can start with only a couple smaller 1 or 4 TB drives and still end up starting a decent collection
Netflix's content has gotten so much worse too. I don't think there are many people left that have a subscription for more than one or two shows. And this seems to be a trend across all the different apps. Makes me glad I set up automatic torrenting for everything I'm interested in, and all it costs me is $5/month for Proton VPN
I don't know about you but content has gotten better for me.
Ranma 1/2, Squid Games, Super Mario Bros Movie, new season of Arcane. I felt like every 1-2 months, there was always something interesting.
Also note that I don't pay for Netflix. I do own stock.
BUY MORE NETFLIX SUBSCRIPTIONS..
Hmm, it appears if we squeeze tighter, more blood will come out. Surely there is no natural limit to this principle.
Friendly reminder that the high seas are always an option. Download stremio, install the torrentio addon, and you are good to go.
Only use torrents if you know what you're doing. In the developed world, this usually ends with a very expensive letter in your mailbox.
I guess Canada must be undeveloped, cause I've never seen one of those "expensive letters" in my mailbox
I love that they think upping prices will keep people around to pay those prices?
TBH it has been working so far...
Yeah, Lemmy loves to talk about how this won’t work and they’ve moved to Plex, but overall it’s been working great for Netflix.
Eventually the bubble will burst and people will start to drop Netflix, but that’s a way off.
About once a year, we get a Netflix subscription for about two months. Catch up on everything we want to watch, then cancel it.
After 6 months, Netflix forgets about you. Does that mean we count as a new subscriber every year? How many people like us are inflating their new subscriber number?
The company is under pressure to show investors what will power growth in the years ahead, as its already massive reach makes finding new subscribers more difficult.
LOL i think the only potential "new subscribers" remaining are the people who never had and never will have a netflix sub. at this point one of the many reasons i'll never sign up is because fuck shareholders in general
The for profit model was probably created by idiots. Just because something like the market and economy are complex doesn’t mean it was put together by smart people.
Capitalism is cannibalism. Cannibalism of resources, of your job, of your society.
Idiots put the system together and idiots are holding it together.
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.