YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Corporatism is running rampant. It's almost a full-blown punishment model. Soon the entertainment platforms will be demanding a fee for NOT subscribing to their service.

In the end, it all leads to advertising. This is just the basic business model in the US/World right now. Get enough eyeballs on your product, whether it's TV, social media, AI, the ditch on the side of the highway; then monetize it with ads. I don't understand why at this point anyone is surprised that a company like Disney would put ads every possible place, even their highest tier of streaming.

"But I specifically chose the highest option so I wouldn't see ads!" well, now you have the option to pay the highest tier to see less ads. For now. By paying for the highest tier, Disney knows you are a higher quality consumer with the most disposable income of all the users on that platform; that's exactly the users Disney can charge the most for advertising spend. From an exec's standpoint, why wouldn't you? sure, they'll lose some paying customers, but will probably make more in the short term at least, which is all that matters.

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of RAM.

Thats a weird way for Disney+ to go under.

The US executive branch should look into Disney for their part in bringing back piracy.

This is what happens when you don't have consumer rights protection.

E.g. Paid for ad-free OTT viewing but commercials ‘appeared after a month’, man wins Rs 9,500 ( https://indianexpress.com/article/legal-news/paid-ad-free-ot... ):

> Calling it a deficiency in service, the Hyderabad consumer commission ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499 and pay compensation to a subscriber after it introduced advertisements midway into his paid ad-free subscription.

back to the pirate bay

This is not an option for everyone, but as someone who gave up TV several years ago (not entirely, just mostly), not feeling the draw of these platforms or having to put up with their costs and changes is really nice.

TV is sort of like caffeine (another thing I gave up - though that one wasn't by choice, but required by my doctors) in that you cannot imagine yourself living without it and wouldn't want to. And the first few months of abstinence are genuinely very difficult.

But eventually it gets easier, and then it gets completely easy, and then you actually feel as good or better than before. And once you finally become accustomed to it, you can't imagine going back to the old way.

I just want a company to tell me truly what it is worth to them from me to not show me ads. Maybe the cost is truly so much higher than I expect that I wouldn't pay it, but for fuck's sake give me the option! Is it $15/month extra instead of $5? $30/month extra? Somewhere, that line exists where the company would financially benefit, I just wish they'd actually define it.

When I was getting married, I engaged a baker to make pies for our wedding. Two weeks before the wedding they cancelled, saying very apologetically they had not catered many weddings with only pies and couldn't do it at the price they quoted. I had to practically beg them to just give me a price that was profitable for them (20% higher, in the end), and then let me decide. This feels just like that.

Given how good illegal alternatives like Stremio are this seems like a very dangerous game to play.

You can squeeze customers quite a bit but once they go back to pirating it's incredible hard to get them to subscribe again.

From this point on, every year "physical media & a Jellyfin install" is going to be more sensible.

Assuming you even care about legality, of course.

Yeah, it's harder. But you can get a lot of "harder" things done in the amount of time you otherwise spend watching ads, after all. Because to me one of the worst things about ads is they're stealing dollars from me to make cents, if not fractions of a cent. This makes them on the dumb end of the bandit classification by the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity metric: https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi... It's so dumb.

And as long as we keep letting them give us an option to buy out the ads, but then they get to stick ads on that option anyhow, we can never get our way out of ads on these things. I don't mind buying them out because they make so little money anyhow but by simple game theory "buy out ads + put ads on anyhow" is always > "buy out ads". You need to cancel if they do this to you. I can't, because I don't have a Disney+ subscription. But you really need to. You need to turn the option into either "let us buy out the ads" or "lose the subscription" for them.

I’ll cancel the moment I see the first ad. I’m likely not alone, but under no illusion that there are a lot of people like me, either.

I find it extremely repugnant how _everything_ gets treated like advertising surface area now. Its disrespectful to everyone and I feel like we're far past the point of diminishing returns.

I've always been frustrated by the intense focus the modern economy has on advertising. If I am interested in a product, I would much rather discover it by searching. Having advertisements forced upon me at every turn is a massive waste of resources (time and attention) given only a fraction of a percent of the products have any relevance to my life. I block every form of advertising I can reasonably block. If a company raises the friction sufficiently, I'll find a way around it. I'm mostly an amoral participant in the economy. I pay for YouTube, Disney, etc. but if they make giving them money an unpleasant experience, I have no qualms employing a usenet subscription and *arr stack to dodge the whole thing.

They were actually doing this already. When you bought the premium plan, they just lied and pretended their in-house ads weren't ads and served you those instead. You still didn't get to just watch the content you wanted.

mumble mumble usenet mumble mumble

There's a contradiction in the "higher priced tier is ad-free" model which is that there are two kinds of people: (1) people who can't afford the ad-free tier who can't afford anything else and (2) people who could afford the ad-free tier who are worth advertising to.

It's been the reality of media business models for a long time, like those big thick magazines like Glamour charged a high subscription price to quality subscribers as people who can buy what's advertised. It's also one of the many reasons why I have distaste for The New York Times -- it is packed with low quality ads that discredit the quality of their editorial content. They're so greedy that an expensive subscription isn't enough, but the expensive subscription, in itself, improves the viability of the advertising model.

where are all the "just because they put it in their terms doesn't mean they'll do it everywhere" people from the original story

can anyone else see the AI-writing in this article? It's so unpleasant...

Maybe people will eventually catch on? All services will eventually be modified to make things worse for you. Always, 100% of the time.

(September 19, 2026)?

Netflix has done a good job demonstrating customers will complain but won't cancel, so not super surprised by this.

The world is so dumb.

When I was young, I pirated because I was broke. I could afford a DVD or I could afford to eat that week. Food usually won. Sometimes alcohol.

I got a decent job, and could afford to spend on things, but I still pirated because it was more convenient than going to a store I wouldn't ordinarily go to.

Then netflix started streaming movies/TV to the home and I stopped pirating basically instantly. Netflix was more convenient than pirating. Steam started getting good, so I stopped pirating games as well.

Then streaming service got balkanized. It wasn't enough to pay for Netflix anymore. I am expected to pay for literally half a dozen services, and when I do want to watch something, I would have to flip around between half of them before I find the right service to stream it from. And now they expect me to watch ads?

Fuck that. I still buy games on Steam and GoG because it's convenient. I pirate TV/movies because it's such a fucking pain in the dick to consume that media legally. I just can't be bothered when piracy is so much more convenient.