memes

No, that's the evolution of venture capitalism.

Step 1: groundbreaking service comes in that fills a market hole

Step 2: people flock to service

Step 3: service gets VC funding to continue operations, subsidising the users

Step 4: service gets "copied", competitors crop up, use VC funding to eke out their own marketshare while making things worse for everyone but themselves

Step 5: expansion plateaus as interest in service generalises (basically, everyone who could be interested, is already using it)

Step 6: VC funding depletes, company has to start making a profit - leading to price hikes, which is followed by other players in the market as that's how capitalism works

Step 7: price hikes not being enough, service tries to capitalise on their userbase (think restricting features to a higher paid tier, introducing new tiers that strip away features, introducing ads, etc.)

Step 8: market is saturated with plateaud services, user movement is minimal, and everybody hates it because it's expensive, and reintroduced the same problem the initial innovative service meant to fix.

If you have a VPN then change to a cheap country and get cheaper services.

If you absolutely must pay, pay for 1 per month and just switch between them?

They dont upload new content daily anyway

... you guys are paying?

🏴‍☠️

That's why you build your own streaming service (with blackjack and hookers) and share that with everyone ...

Fmhy

Refuse to pay. If we all just refused to pay, they would have to change.

But too many people don't care, so I guess we'll all just suffer.

I might be a unique form of grump: I recognize we get gypped by modern streaming services, but I still appreciate that the internet gave us greater breadth of choice than old cable options.

There’s indie and foreign streaming services that cost a lot less than the Netflix oligopoly, yet people never even seem to look for those, and just turn to piracy as their form of protest. “I can’t live without this show, and so I’ll give these services my vote of confidence, as well as political ammunition to enact higher levels of internet traffic spying!” What a genius self-serving plan.

Jailbroken firestick. Its a bit of a cat and mouse game with which app will work, but its pretty great.

I only pay for Netflix and it has more than enough to keep me busy. No gripes here.

The difference between owning the means of production and being gifted a bribe to establishing a new customer base.