And yet, they got 13 million new subscribers last 3 months
Gross or net?
Does Netflix still do the “free trial period” and “get free months if a friend sent you” thing?
Are there any numbers about how many unsubscribers to compare to the subscribers? That’d be a juicy number.
Why can’t people live without Netflix? Don’t they have a job, a family, OR a hobby?
I am honestly confused…
Same reason people can’t get off Twitter and other social platforms.
Movies and TV are some peoples’ hobbies. I have a co-worker who used to spend $300/mo on a cable bill because she had all the movie channels and stuff. She watched tons of movies and shows. At first I thought she was weird for watching so much TV, but then I thought about how much gaming I do, and realized “Oh, that’s just her hobby like gaming is mine.” Granted, I’m not spending $300/mo on gaming, but people do tend to spend money on hobbies. Sometimes even more than $300/mo.
Anyway, I’ve been letting her use my Netflix account – surprisingly neither of us have seen anything from Netflix about it – for the last several years. She recently (finally) got a Smart TV so she cancelled her crazy-ass cable package and I think pays for YouTube TV now. I’m sure she’s watching just as much as TV and movies as ever, but at least she’s saving some money.
You might let her know that she can borrow DVDs from the public library at no cost. Another little-known gratis option is freesat and terrestrial broadcast. I recently started using MythTV as a PVR to record broadcast TV and was pleasantly surprised to find no commercial interruptions (but if there are commercials in her region, MythTV can cut them out).
Uh that makes sense. I guess my original comment is more out of jealousy, I have so many movies that I want to watch, but I have never find the time and energy to do so. After work, dinner, chat, duolingo, and lunch prep for my wife, I barely find any time during my night, and it is kind of frustrating for me.
Last year, I have only finished like less than 5 from like 50 titles.
I am glad people are enjoying their hobby. I personally would not be on Netflix anymore as most of the movie I want to watch is not on there, but I can now kind of see it might be worth it for others.
Gotcha, apologies for the misread!
Honestly, I was surprised too. I guess given how ubiquitous movies and television are, it never really occurred to me that it could be a hobby. And I bet most people don’t think of it as a hobby, either. When I think of a hobby related to TV/Movies, I think more like “film snobs” (for lack of a better term). Maybe people who watch the AFI 100 or whatever and know all about film and cinematography. But not people just watching TV like anyone else. But by definition, it’s a hobby. It’s “a pursuit outside one’s regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation.”
For my coworker, she’s single and childless. So she has tons of time to watch movies and shows outside of work. I’m the same, but I devote it mainly towards gaming. Though I could certainly stand to devote less time to my hobby. Or pick up some new ones at least!
Hope you’ll be able to find some more time to watch the movies and show you want!
We moved from paying for a premium family plan to just using the free ads-based netflix plan provided by the T-Mobile.
Too late, we just canceled a couple months ago
Their subscriber rate goes up anyway, so they dont care.
Most of the people are to lazy or dont care enough to vote with their wallet unfortunately
Today they probably groan and attribute it to inflation tbh
I went to get a new phone plan and one of the plans I looked at has Netflix included. Am I counted as a subscriber if it comes bundled with something else I need, but never use Netflix?
Yep. I used to share my account with my family before Netflix’s password sharing crackdown. When they did it, I deleted my account day 1.
My dad and my sister just resubscribed separately. Unfortunately, a net win for them. Efectively +1 user. Just one example, but I’m betting this worked for many more of their users.
I understand wanting them to go bankrupt (or be punished some other way) for their business practices, but they still produce a handful of good shows per year, so is it so bad that someone pays them for it? Be glad that enough people are throwing their money away so that you can pick their fruits. Maybe some day it’s too expensive for your dad and sister and then you are there to show them a better way.
Yep. If you judge how Netflix is doing by Lemmy/Reddit comments alone, you’d think they’d be hemorrhaging subscriptions. But nah. They’re pulling records of money with these policy changes and price hikes. Turns out people just pay up.
For a streaming platform to be actually useful it needs to be a almost monopoly like steam. Netflix had a chance but missed the spot, due to the greed of Studios. So it’s back to fractured marked until someone comes with a fresh idea of how to distribute video.
Little unfair to say they “missed” anything when they can’t control what studios do with their licenses.
I still see people occasionally complain that Netflix “got rid” of stuff, like the Office. There’s a lot of shitty things you can blame Netflix for, but that isn’t one of them.
It’s also not new. HBO, Showtime, Stars, etc all had rotating on-demand catalogs for years before Netflix, with content appearing briefly before being removed, and no one thought that was odd. I never once heard anyone suggest HBO was shit because Austin Powers or whatever was taken off it. It came with the understanding this content was not permanently available.
Part of it is that people had a bad understanding of what Netflix was, and assumed it would be a permanent replacement for a personal collection. That was always a foolish mindset.
Netflix started out as a blessing. That’s why I bought a subscribtion intially. Nowadays they’ve been screwed over as much as I have and they suck as much as every other service, but I’m sticking with Netflix. It is the most convenient method for my kids to watch their stupid cartoons and I also get to enjoy something every once in a while. I’ve tried others, but it’s not worth it.
I hate subscription models. After adobe, never again.
I’d never subscribe to Adobe. I love Figma, but if Abobe takes over Figma and applies it’s usual tactics, I’m never using Figma again.
I did, because it was convenient. But I learned my lesson, it was quite expensive.
TBH Steam feels like a ticking timebomb. At some point Valve is going to get a new shite CEO or something and everyone will go “oh…”
I’ve been thinking about that. It’s the one walled garden I don’t mind, I’ve poured shameful amounts into it but the thought is always there in the background that it can’t go on like this forever.
At the end of the day I don’t mind too much and just try to enjoy it while it lasts, since worst comes to worst I’ll just have to sacrifice some convenience and dive back into full-time piracy to regain access to the vast majority of the content anyway. The wonders of an open platform!
Or many service providers competing on price, quality of service and features, not competing on exclusivity like they do now.
Like grocery stores. Imagine if only one chain has the exclusive rights to sell potatoes and another one has rights to pasta. They can ask whatever price they want, because what you gonna do? Go to another store to get your 'taters cheaper? Hah, you’ll cry and you’ll pay what we ask! (BTW, growing your own potatos and sharing them with your neighbor infringes on our rights and is illegal. We’ll sue you to oblivion if we catch you doing it.)
Does not work for media, since media is a good that you need a specific version of. You don’t really care what potatoes you buy (simplification) but if you want to watch a specific show, movie or play a game -you can’t really subsidize it with another. So exclusivity does not work for potatoes but works for media. We would need a global overhaul of copyright to work this one out.
It totally works for media. Just need a law that says, if a work is published, anyone can distribute it for the same fair licensing fee. That’s the way “cover” music works - any cover band can play any other musician’s work. Nobody can refuse them that right. Then the venue where they perform pays a flat fee to an agency for the license. This doesn’t work great in music, but we could create a better model for streaming. it’s not impossible.
Musik industry has an extra layer of rights management companies that deal with exactly that issue. So I agree, we could create a legal framework or even an industry self regulating system to work that problem out. But I kind of said that already:
We would need a global overhaul of copyright to work this one out.
I think a better example is just physical media sales. Retailers generally all carried the same physical stock. You would occasionally see special editions or something that might only be available at certain stores, but it was extremely rare to only be able to buy certain titles at certain retailers.
Or the prime example: movie theaters. We passed regulations to prevent movie theaters from being bought by studios and used as exclusive avenues for the distribution of certain media. You had a movie, you released it to all movie theaters that wanted it, you couldn’t just make a deal or buy out Regal or Cinemark, or make your own theater. It ensured a level playing field.
One of the biggest problems with streaming that we have simply refused to acknowledge is that the safeguards necessary to create a healthy market, the safeguards we’ve used previously with other distribution models, were never put in place. And we’re seeing the fallout of that now.
Imagine having to pay for your potato subscription even if you’re only eating pasta this month but maybe next month will be 'tatember
Ah, my favorite month, Octato
Not a great analogy since pasta is easy to make potatoes are easy to grow.
And movies are easy to pirate
No, it doesnt have to be. Look at Spotify vs Apple Music, vs tidal etc. full catalogues at all of them. It’s the business model that needs to change.
Good point, I think it might have to do with the way music is differently licensed. You will often have a “monopolistic” rights management organization like BMI in USA whereas rights for video and games the rights management lies more with the overarching productions companies.
I’m not sure why there are always monopoly apologists popping up in these. You know Netflix isn’t any less greedy than the studios, right? A private monopoly isn’t a good thing.
Why are you that antagonizing?
A private monopoly isn’t a good thing.
Most times. But for media, people want to have all their media in one place for a cheap price - so far only monopolistic or oligopolistic services were able to provide that. It worked quite well for games and in some form for music (you will often have single right management companies in the music industry - like BMI in USA or GEMA in Germany). But in general, I would agree that monopolies (outside natural monopolies and those should be run by the state) are unfavorable for the customer.
We have a way of doing that.
It’s called Radarr, Sonarr, Jellyfin and a big fuck-off hard drive, and they won’t like it.
But yeah, if there was a service with everything in high quality (up to 4K Blu-ray quality for those with the bandwidth) for like £30 a month (with no ads ever, and configurable UI that doesn’t try playing the next episode the millisecond the last one finishes), then they’d get paid for it. The longer they wait, the more entrenched into my setup I’ll be, and harder to wean off it.
standard stayed the same price for a whole year so i guess that it’s due for a price hike
After quitting i feel like im missing out on nothing. I sail the seas if i actually need anything, and it probably wasn’t on netflix anyway
I didn’t mind the small increase to 11.99, but the way they’re doing this just rubs me the wrong way.
They’re not only increasing the sub price, but tinkering with the display quality too AND laying people off… Netflix just doesn’t deserve my cash when I can access most of this content via other means.
I got rid of a bunch of subs at the beginning of the year, getting rid of NF too.
And their catalog is actually super small now. My wife and I watch a bunch of horror movies, and I think there’s only like 20. They try to pad that number by pretending that foreign films are actually in English.
Or they pad it with a ton of absolute garbage
Yeah the foreign films coming up are the worst. I’m sure it’s great for the people who speak those languages but I don’t generally find it entertaining to watch with subtitles. It’s annoying when they keep coming up on recommended and even worse when it takes more clicks to see the language then to just start it.
Somehow Netflix thinks I speak Norwegian and I didn’t see a way to turn that off
Anyway -1 premium account, when they started down their path to enshittification
I hate Netflix as much as anyone here but “how dare Netflix recommend foreign content to me” is the most American thing I’ve ever heard.
I guess, but shouldn’t it be a fundamental configuration to only see things whose language you know?
And their recommendation engine sucks.
Netflix used to be famously good at suggesting films. Articles were written about it, and there was even a cash reward for anyone who could contribute to its performance. Then it just turned to shit.
And the funny thing is that it would have helped counteract the shrinking library. Sure, there would be fewer films on the platform, so you’d be less likely to find a specific title, but at least you could select a film Netflix recommended based on your past ratings and be fairly confident you’d enjoy it. Now? Absolutely not.
My bachelors thesis was basically about recommender systems like this. Netflix truly is a sunken ship.
How do we read it?
If you are just interested in Netflix recommendation algorithms, you could start here
Thanks.
I am in the process of setting up a jellyfin server and was wondering how I would deal with discovery.
Well this can get quite complicated to implement I suppose. I heard letterboxd works nice for discovery if you are lazy, but I don’t know if they have a jellyfin plugin.
I find the same thing with music streaming on Spotify. I used to discover lots of new music I liked on it but these days I can’t get it to generate an interesting playlist. It’s songs I already know interspersed with things that are boring. Seems like the recommendations got worse.
They probably discovered that they can get paid to promote certain songs.
So now what you have is the same as FM radio, except you pay for it now.
I think they have always done that, but maybe they’re just doing more of that now. It seems harder now to find interesting artists I don’t know.
I quit Spotify when the “New Library Experience” completely fucked the music library side of the app. If you mostly use playlists, it was a lateral change. If you used it to collect some songs here, and album there, and keep them all sorted, it’s like it dumped your entire collection on the floor and expected a thank-you for the new organization system.
My guess, as others have mentioned, is that Spotify tries to squeeze more profits by pushing certain songs, whether because they get paid to promote them, or the royalties are lower. That’s easier to do with their playlists and recommendations, so they pushed people to that side of the app by making everything else dogshit. And now, apparently, the curated side took it too far and is awful, too.
I still use Apple Music, which is one of like two services that actually let you organize your music in a sensible way outside of playlists. That said, after I cut cords with video streaming services and set up my own library, I think I might do the same with music.
Discovery was always the thing that made streaming services better than buying recordings individually. If these services stop being good for finding new music, then there’s not much reason to keep using them.
And they change the pictures around all the time to make you think it’s something new, when in fact you’ve seen it before. And because it’s bland as all fuck, you notice this like 45 minutes in.
It isn’t just the cover art, they also A/B descriptions. And some of them are so different they’re basically lies.
Trailers too. Gotta love ones that tell you absolutely nothing about the movie.
The tags especially are just made up.
I got a picture of Matt Smith on one horror movie about a black couple. He was in it for like 2 minutes. It wasn’t terrible, but they’re algorithms are basic bitch enough to just go “you white? here’s a white man”
I’ve been spending the last 2 days downloading a bunch of horror, ramping up for when I finally get rid of the rest of our subcription services. I can’t even remember when Netflix’s horror selection was even remotely good. Like they have The Ritual and Apostle, but yeah it’s mostly crap.
Why is 2018 and 2021 skipped over?
Do you really think these years existed?
Granted, my memory isn’t great. But I think so. Maybe? I’m not sure any more.
They didn’t fit the agenda so they had to be removed.
I get that “enshitification” is the hot new buzzword but cold we please give it a rest. Reading this community you start to think that people can’t express that the Internet is not to their liking in any other way.
“Enshitification” does not mean “I don’t like it”. It is specifically about platforms that start out looking too good to be true and turn to shit when the user base is locked in. The term is generally used for cases where the decline in quality was pre-planned and not due to external factors. Using the same term each time is, in my opinion, an appropriate way to point out just how common this pattern is.
Yes, it is frequently misused, but not in this case.
You’re in the piracy sub. A large part of the conversation is going to be about the late-stage capitalism that is driving us to piracy.
No. That is the word. It’s not a buzzword. It’s a statement.
The graph literally demonstrates the enshittification.
Price increase alone isn’t enshittification. But the amount and quality of what they offer is dropping at the same time.
Agreed. Price increase is normal inflation is everywhere.
The number of insane limitations they impose is not acceptable however.
Please do not normalize this rampant artificial inflation. There is no reason prices should be as high as they are. None. Corporate profits are higher than ever. This is pure and simple corporate greed. This should not be normal.
Just don’t forget that YOU are a part of this greed.
Ive honestly become more aware of this and I am doing my best to be better about it. I try to shop local. I’ve mostly moved to free and open source software. My last car and all future cars will be used cars from the 90s. I try to buy used mostly everything honestly.
I got serious about my data and digital foot print.
I don’t want to be a product any more.
Good!
Kinda shitty of the chart creator to leave out 2018 and 2021. While the point still stands, it biases it against Netflix.
It’s just purposefully misleading. Not cool, chart maker dude. Not cool.
What happened in those years and why were they omitted? It’s odd that they just leave it out with (as far as I could tell from the linked source) no explanation for that.
Nothing happened. There was no price increase those years. The chart isn’t misleading at all, OP just cut off the title, “Netflix Price Hikes 2011-2023.” 2018 and 2021 aren’t relevant because there was no change.
Then why are 2012 and 2016 included? It’s extremely confusing to have a line graph over time where intervals of time are missing, even if you clearly call attention to it, which they don’t here.
This is definitely misleading. It’s a time series chart with arbitrary data points just casually missing.
This is not even a correct chart.
I wasn’t going to go that far and get blasted with comments - but I agree.
That is the article that made this chart.
https://flixed.io/netflix-price-hikes
If you want another one that shows the same basic increase in prices here is another one from statista.
https://www.statista.com/chart/16684/netflix-subscription-prices-in-the-united-states/
It’s included with our cellular plan. If they drop it, I be returning to the high seas, yarr.
What good content is still on there I have nearly nothing from Netflix in my Mediathek
If you use a VPN, change your country and see if that affects the content you’re offered. I’m in Manchester according to my VPN, and Netflix is offering me tons of British sitcoms and dramas, shows not available in my home country.
I really enjoyed the live-action One Piece series much more that I thought I would. Other than that, we’ll watch the occasional bad horror flick or goofy comedy.
Ohh, I see, yea, that one I added recently for my sister 😄
Can’t enshittificate our torrent clients 🤷
Utorrent moment
µTorrent would like a word
Who still uses that garbage? qBittorent is the same thing except theres no adware or spyware.
A surprising amount of people still ask questions about µTorrent and assume it’s still popular. Apparently there was a lot of value in that brand name. But yeah it’s an utter disaster.
qBittorrent is my choice as well. Deluge is also great, along with Transmission.
After seeing this post a couple times (which speaks to its relevance) it got me thinking that enshittification (of the world) will definitely continue until our morale improves, as in until we make them stop. Are there any online collectives that work together to stop this tomfoolery?
Are there any online collectives that work together to stop this tomfoolery?
Same as it has been for the last 100 years: Vote with your money. If you don’t like the product/service, don’t buy it. Stop thinking you can force them to change their offering.
Vote with your money.
I really hate this phrase. It basically is saying that if you have more money then you have more “votes”.
Or to put it in another way: If you have more money you matter more.
It basically is saying that if you have more money then you have more “votes”.
That’s simply true. It doesn’t do anyone any good to disregard the facts.
Or to put it in another way: If you have more money you matter more.
That abstraction doesn’t help much. And first of all, it’s more accurate to derive the statement “If you have more money then you have more influence”.
It’s still a shitty status quo, but it is what it is. The worse thing you can do is tell people not to boycott shit products on the basis of rejecting reality. It’d be like telling people not to vote in elections because their vote is a drop in the ocean.
Some people vote for democrats, then they cancel their own vote by getting their internet service from Spectrum, buying fuel from Chevron for their car, shipping their packages using FedEx, getting their phone service from AT&T, banking at PNC Bank, flying on Boeing planes, shopping on Amazon, doing their web searches on a Microsoft syndicate’s site (e.g. DDG), buying Sony devices… etc. They either have no clue that most of their voting is actually for the republicans, or they think that drop-in-the-ocean vote that comes once in 4 years somehow carries more weight than the daily votes they cast with reckless disregard.
Greg Abbott’s war chest is mostly fed by oil companies. If you buy fuel for a car, you help Greg Abbott and other republicans. And if you buy from Chevron, you give the greatest support to republicans (Chevron is an ALEC member).
It’s still a shitty status quo, but it is what it is.
I don’t like the status quo and I think it should change.
If you have more money, that means that society values you more. Thus you matter more. You’re just a better human being when you have more money.
But… that’s true?
Yeah it is but it just irks me either way.
Edit:
I just want to clarify I am agreeing that in our current society that if you have more money you tend to be highly valued.
I am not agreeing that this is how it should be.
The crackhead down the road wasting away in his own piss and shit isn’t equally “valuable” to me or anybody that contributes to society in a positive manner. I don’t care how you spin it
Eh, found the right guy that needs to spin an unrelated argument so he can purposefully miss and derail the point.
I didn’t see the OP’s pic but these groups generally work against enshitification of the world:
- !asshole_crappy_design@slrpnk.net
- !activist_investing@lemmy.whynotdrs.org
- !escapebigtech@lemmy.escapebigtech.info
- !cyber_activism@sopuli.xyz
- !netneutrality@sopuli.xyz
- !right_to_unplug@sopuli.xyz
- !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net
- !anticonsumption@sopuli.xyz
- !fightforprivacy@feddit.ch
- !offgrid@slrpnk.net
- !foss@beehaw.net
- !privacy@links.hackliberty.org
- !climate_action_individual@slrpnk.net
Notice that none of those communities are on Cloudflared instances (thus also avoid propagating the enshitified portion of the fedi).
Thats awesome! Thank you very much!
The only way to stop this is bringing down capitalism.
Ending capitalism is not the /only/ way. Within a capitalistic system, you can boycott shit. Most consumers are pushovers but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m boycotting hundreds of shitty companies. Off the top of my head:
- Amazon
- Cloudflare
- Microsoft
- Apple
- (surveillance advertisers in general)
- (all closed-source s/w)
- HP
- Proctor & Gamble
- Unilever
- all ALEC members (American Express, Anheuser Busch, Boeing, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, Chevron, FedEx, Motorola, PNC bank, Sony, TimeWarner)
- many shitty banks
- Paypal
- AT&T
- GMA members (Coke, Pepsi, Kraft - Heinz, Kellogg’s, General Mills, McCormick, Hormel, Smucker)
- BetterThanCashAlliance.org members (visa, mastercard, unilever) – war on cash
- Bayar-Monsanto
- Dupont
- Hershey
- Nestlé
- Exxon/Mobil
- Comcast
- Koch
- Home Depot
- Lowes
- …etc
Those are all shitty companies that significantly worsen the world. Giving money or data to any of them contributes to enshitification of the world.
Long term, this is probably the consequence. But to delete a giant tree (or tumour, decide your own mental image) you have to cut it back, then cut it down, then rip out the roots, one after the other.
You can also rip it out at once but you need giant machines and will cause tons of damage to the environment and leave a giant crater.
I dont think capitalism is even the whole tree. Its actually greed and selfishness which needs to go.
People who miss the basic empathy to take from others just because they can need to be educated and - if needed - contained and pathologized as to keep them from winning against the fair and „gullible“. This will be insanely complex and long to eradicate that.
But step one is joining a collective to change things. All positive change came from collectives, never from individuals. Individuals are easy to beat, to intimidate, to silence. But groups are very hard to do this to.
Doing something to lift the dread off your heart and getting change going is the most sane approach imo.
I dont think capitalism is even the whole tree. Its actually greed and selfishness which needs to go.
This is because capitalism glorifies greed and selfishness and considers it the primary driver or human behaviour. Which it isn’t for everyone. Many of us leftists vote left despite it not being in our personal financial beat interests. Sharing is caring etc.
Unfortunately the system is so damn rigged in favour of the multi billionaires.
I think capitalism favors greed and selfishness because greedy, selfish people have corrupted an otherwise useful idea. I dont think the original iteration was bad. We just left the door to the machine room ajar and a bunch of trolls laid some cables to steal power from our generator. Actually a very fitting metaphor. The sad part is that we‘re still trying to agree on the fact that someone is stealing energy.
If you have seen lord of the rings, society is the ents, discussing endlessly if the hobbits are actually hobbits or orcs while their forest is being cut down en masse. Thats how I view humanity atm.
I don’t agree. Capitalism is and has always been about greed. It’s why people invest, to get maximum profits and externalise all the negative side-effects.
I think capitalism works if it’s balanced with socialism and strongly restricted by law as we used to do in the Netherlands and some EU countries still do. Unfortunately the Netherlands was lost to the neoliberals and now to the fascists :( But luckily I don’t live there anymore.
crony capitalism
Or limiting it at least. Instead of the free for all big business American and Chinese version.
The only show I even care about on Netflix these days is I Think You Should Leave. I’ll just pirate the next season when it drops. 🤷🏻♂️
