- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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I wonder whether the average person is really as retarded as they are made out to be by large corporations.
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The difference is, that Netflix (or Spotify, or whatever) does bring value on its own. I am paying money to comfortably and legally stream content, which itself is paid for and licensed by the streaming provider. From the perspective of a lazy end user, it’s worth it, because you do not need to care about downloading, finding releases, opsec and whatnot. I don’t want to protect Netflix, fuck corporations and subscription services, but password sharing was always only tolerated at most. From the same end user perspective, reddit is just an empty platform. The content is brought in free of charge by the community. And now not only they want the same community to pay, but also for an objectively worse experience? I don’t think that you can compare that.
I find it a tad arrogant to believe costumers can’t make rational decision that differ from those of the vocal online minority of reddit et al. Whenever a website changes its product (arguably for the worse, most of the time) said minority prophesizes the end, and calls out some kind of revolt, whereas the vast majority of users or
costumerscustomers just makes due with the slightly worsened conditions, simply because they still see the product as worthwhile. Netflix, for all its flaws, still is a decent product for a decent price, as long as you’re into the kind of slop they produce. And there probably is a large portion ofcostumerscustomers who weren’t even affected at all by the recent changes.I feel this is relevant for both costumers and people who don’t wear costumes when using reddit.
I kept paying for a little while, until I had ripped everything off their site I wanted to see, then I cancelled lol.
…ripped? From Netflix?
Yep, I got a program that had to be subscribed to for about $30usd a year that allowed me to rip up to entire seasons of shows in 1080p at a time through a logged in account. I accumulated about 3TB of shows and movies then cancelled My subscription to both Netflix and the program I was using.
My GF pays for Netflix and other than some annoying messages and text account sharing is still possible, not as cool as before though.
Anyway, as she does not have the premium version, or whatever is called (no 4K) good quality picture films we end up watching them on Stremio lol.
She doesn’t care, but I do.
Remember a scary thing about average IQ: half of the people have IQ below that number, hence “average”.
I also hate the inclusion of the u/spez freakout about employees not wearing reddit colours in public for fear of physical harm. It is a full-on propaganda tactic, in the vein of Elon Musk or Trump’s bullshit. It immediately puts shade on the userbase. These “journalists” should get their shit together and either write about how ridiculously stupid he was to say that or just not present it at all, it’s barely relevant to the article. For anyone who has actually been following along, the way the article presents that tidbit is inane and completely false at best.
Cultish.
There’s this super frustrating trend where instead of making the paid version of things better, they just make the free version worse. Like how you used to be able to do background play on the YouTube app. It’s like they know these features are good so implement them to attract people to use their service, and then later take it away to force the subscription.
Oh it was so much worse than that. Google indirectly banned every 3rd party app on the Play Store from streaming videos in the background to push that feature. Seemingly overnight every app that could do it vanished or cut the feature. Sure you can sideload a fix but your average non-savvy users got screwed into paying up.
I’m glad they do that, it makes people switch to open source alternatives, like NewPipe for YouTube.
They simply have better features and privacy.
YMusic ftw. if you want to listen to music in background, it’s the better alternative compared with newpipe. newpipe is the best for videos…but YMusic for music.
What do you like better about YMusic? I’ve been using NewPipe for a little while and it’s OK, but it’s kind of annoying that you can’t sort by date or views. I usually end up searching Youtube and plugging the URL into Newpipe.
YMusic is specific designed to work with music so the player, loading times etc are better. in NewPipe you first need to open a video, click play (or tab and hold to play), select play in background etc… and also create your own playlists. in YMusic you click just on a song you like and boom, it plays. also it can download quickly the music and also recommend automatic new music etc.
YMusic is just way better for music. you can even login with your yt account and use your music playlists etc. from computer.
The problem with (almost) all social media platforms is they need a LOT of users. Because each individual users brings in such a small amount of revenue.
So these companies (running on investor money) go through a deliberate early “growth” stage, where their singular goal is to get as many users as possible. They usually do this by…actually making something people want to use. Plus some addictive tricks thrown in to keep people “engaged”.
Once they have their 100 million users, or whatever number they’re targeting, then the processor of turning it to shit begins. Because now they have the users they need to extract revenue from them. The problem is that growth stage often kills off competitors as well. So now you have a near monopoly tightening the screws on users, who have to just accept it because the cost of moving to an alternative is too high.
But eventually it hits a breaking point. Users jump to something new, and the cycle repeats. The users who stick around with a shit product are the ones who ultimately pay the debts that early users got to enjoy.
This is why so many apps and services have problems monetizing their stuff when they start out as free and/or ad supported as a means to pump the usage numbers fast for that juicy investor funding and sky high stock valuations.
Free/ad supported is essentially the “bottom” of race to the bottom when it comes to how to make money on a product or service. And it is hard to climb the ladder of convincing people to pay for something when the core product that provides most of the value has always been free. You can’t exactly just paywall the core product or people will likely feel ripped off and leave. So that leaves increasingly sketchy “value added” options.
It takes innovation and creativity to make the paid version better. It takes nothing but greed to make the free version worse.
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I‘m just glad seeing this place more and more active. Old stupid Reddit, you’ve made the Digg-move.
£5.99 a month…
i cant believe people actually pay that for what is essentially a forum.
it’d probably be decades before they made that off me in advertising.
They could have had my money too if what they were asking were reasonable and i retained the ability to use RIF
RIF is still working (not using it but i have friends that showed it to me) i dont know why
Boost still have access when I left. I read that it actually takes a while for the API changes to be implemented.
Intermittently working for me, cannot log in though
Do iOS users not have free icon packs? I’m so confused by this…
You can’t change icons from the system/launcher settings. Individual apps can offer icon options, but they are internal to the app.
What a scam…
To each their own, I moved from iOS to Android in 2020 and first days I started experimenting with different icon packs, but not all are perfect or of my taste, nowadays I only use the monet icons feature for Pixel Launcher, but if it wasn’t for that I’d just use stock icons lol.
I suggest the “Delta” icon pack, if you haven’t tried it yet. It’s really good, IMO.
Well, I tried it and I like it!
Yes, that is what Apple products have become. Add Reddit on top of that and you have a double scam.
There are plenty of apps that allow you to change the app icon for free. This is entirely on Reddit.
Have become? If anything, iOS have historically been getting more customizable over time not less.
And I don’t think it’s really accurate to compare iOS with MacOSX and earlier, entirely different systems with different use cases and form factors. I’d recon if Apple released a phone in 2002 it’s be just as locked down.
Not trying to defend this by the way, just surprised by the usage of the word “become” here as if it used to be different for iPhones.
It’s the same on the Reddit Android app too (although the icon option in the app looks ok, the icon in the launcher is pixelated)
Scamception, if you will.
Any opportunity for an “Apple bad” comment
I was expecting this was just OP making a dumb joke.
The fuck.
I know the feeling. Spent years on that app and it really hurts to watch it completely implode within two months.
Reddit can go fuck themselves. I’ve been gone since Apollo stopped working. Have never & will never go back.
Sometimes I’ll check Joey. Once, it actually worked for like 2 seconds then I refreshed the page by accident and it was down again. I did this like 3 days ago? Otherwise I’m here.
I got a notification for new comments in saved threads today, in Joey, couldn’t actually check them but somehow that got through.
Ok so this is just desperate right? Like chasing 3rd party devs off could theoretically force more people to use their app, the reddit gold thing could be them paving the way to put in something more abusive. But this? Hoping to annoy your users to the point that they’ll pay you a ransom to make you stop? How is this anything other than embarrassingly desperate?
I think it’s actually an ad for /r/place, which is kinda like when your ex tries reminding you of all the good times you once had in an effort to win you back.
I agree, it seems like they’re doing everything they can to force users into the mindset of “you’re going to have to spend money here.”
However… I don’t think that’s going to work. It’s a tactic that relies solely on Apple not allowing the user to customize their icons, which combines into a double whammy of “give me money to fix the thing that I broke.”
Why do I have to pay when Android users don’t?
Why is Reddit being greedy?
This other site is free and doesn’t make me feel like I’m being taken advantage of every turn.
Reddit is trying to capitalize on goodwill they already spent months ago. And the quality of the site is just going to get worse from here.
Spez is a fucking clown… I hope reddit dies soon.
“Dylanthedeveloper” on here apparently. He was spamming all over the other day about some drivel or another.
imagine paying for an app icon… what next ? paying for a ringtone like in the good old days?
Zedge comes to mind. A site for buying ringtones (among other things like notification tones and wallpapers) or at least barred you from downloading the “premium” ones without subscription.
Oh my fucking god, memories of that scam service “Jamba” flooding back. It was like two years in a row of Crazy Frog ads for it.
I don’t understand how Zedge still exists, and is apparently doing relatively well too
There will always be tech un-savvy people who prefer to pay for something (and have someone to call when it doesn’t work) than have to spend 5 minutes learning how to do it themselves.
Reverse it. Make it play an annoying sound without paying, only changeable with premium. Late stage capitalism in its finest.
Interestingly this may piss off more people than the real issues. Most people didn’t seem to care at all about the API / 3rd party app support issues as long as they got their Reddit doom-scroll fix. But I bet whole bunch of these will be upset at having an ugly pixelated icon on their phone, muhawhaw.
Yes! I definitely used to go to Reddit for their amazing icons! /s
Spez has already made it very clear that he has went full Elon and will stop at nothing to make the company profitable. I expect much worse from Reddit in the future.
what are you guys talking about? an r place themed icon wasn’t put there to get people to pay money? it was put there because there is gonna be a new r place. this isn’t some evil plan conjured up the criminal mastermind u/SPEZ that you just uncovered.
Yea, I was reading the comments here and people really think anyone gives a flying fuck about how ugly the app icon is? It’s clearly for r place. Still, fuck Reddit for doing r place just to gather traffic again, but this article is just silly.
