I do feel the more and more pervasive all of these subscription models become the more compelling data hoarding becomes. The main problem being as it gets worse, storage prices keep climbing. Physical media is cool and all but collecting DVD, Blu-ray, books and CDs or any combination of the 4 quickly becomes a physical space issue. Collecting all of this media digitally and keep it all on HDD space is a much more attractive solution. Give you ‘physical’ forever access and doesn’t take up so much space.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2026
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Give you ‘physical’ forever access and doesn’t take up so much space.
Some of us figured this out 20 years ago and never turned back. (I figured it out about the time that I realized I had more music in my mp3 collection than the college radio station I volunteered at in 2000.)
My Cinemageddon account turned 18 earlier this year.
who could have seen this coming? oh right me
This is literally capitalism, if you do something people don't like they are free to choose a product where they get what they want
In a democracy outside of voting money is your biggest weapon to change
Nice! I'll just stop buying this enshittified product/service and switch to—
...oh, wait. They're all enshittified.
My seedbox is not enshittified. heh
I think the main problem is that the amount of people who couldn't care less overweight, always.
your first statement still applied... stop buying.
That's great in theory, but there are tons of essentials that people have to buy to remain employed and/or alive.
no, that's a competitive market.
Capitalism historically has usually sought to undermine them - because the only metric of capitalism is return to current holders of capital.
[REDACTED] Pissed [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] Shit
I just started my physical media collection but it'll take a while
I never stopped collecting physical media luckily 🤭 They will never own my shit
Started this year with CDs, games, vinyl, books and DVDs. Buying second-hand is great too; sure, streaming looks "cheaper" at first glance but I can do with my property what I want and don't lose it if I can't afford a subscription, the service goes down or they lose licenses. It's preservation, too, and if need be can be lent out to others.
Plus, I'm just discovering the joys of making my own mixtapes and burning CDs. Spotify playlist are... good, of course, but it feels like an actual thing now.
Does it count as physical if I pirate it then put it on my hard drive? I see no difference to owning DVDs or BluRay disks.
A hard drive is physical media, yes.
There is a difference, and not just a legal one. For DVDs and BluRays, the disc's first purchase partly funds the people who worked on the disc's contents. With pirating, nobody gets paid (unless the pirate(s) that is/are distributing the content accept donations).
Although that does make me wonder how different is buying a second-hand disc from pirating... other than the legal part, that is.
Second hand markets help to keep the primary market propped up higher than it otherwise would be. If you can buy something and it retains resale value, then the initial purchase price is more worth it. Whether that balances out with supply/demand and price/sales numbers if there were no resalability is another question.
I never thoght about it! Thanks!
Second hand is different from pirating because the royalties have been paid. When it's sold to the second owner the status of having paid the royalties passes with it. With physical media the disk, tape, or reel and the license to use it privately are the same thing. Otherwise we'd need a system to keep track of who owns every disk, tape, or reel, and who owns the license to each and that's a sure fire way to get everyone to begin pirating.
That's a great point.
Basically if a thing has a reliable second hand market, people will be more inclined to buy them.
DVDs for the longest time had no market, you couldn’t give them away. Now it’s picking up again. Blurays even more so.
Technically, but that's not usually what people mean when they say "physical media".
Too bad, it's physical media, and people acting like "that's not what I mean" contributes to this whole idea that data is ephemeral and like it lives in the air or something. No, it all lives on physical media, on drives, somewhere. Just because Netflix streamed it to you doesn't mean that the movies files don't live somewhere on physical media. Yeah, you don't own it, it's just streaming, but the physical media it exists on still exists, you just don't have physical access to it (well, technically you do, it's just little chunks instead of the full film that live on your PC just long enough for the film to play).
Sorry, this grinds my gears because I think not being clear about physical media including things like hard drives and USB thumbsticks is what contributes to a general lack of understanding of how any of this fucking works and why corporations were able to get away with how they abused "licensing" for so long.
Sealed media is like the new collectible. Prices are crazy.
trust me, people are not pissed enough. noone cares about these topics around me.
It keeps coming up in my circle once in a while. Usually people complaining about subscriptions. That's your in.
Yup. Doesn't feel widely popular yet but I think it will increase especially thanks to Sony discontinuing physical releases. My family luckily is getting there too.
Seriously, I tried talking to a friend about Sony going digital only and how that means you can't own a game anymore. He just said technically you've only ever licensed a game via physical media.
Which is so far from the point
Exactly. Most people don't understand the concept of "ownership" in this way. When you try to explain it you may as well be talking about UBI or other mythical crack pot ideas.
The relevance of these objections is diminishing if anything
I'm literally one of those consumers that goes to great lengths to pick devices and appliances so that I really own them. I can tell you that right now it is harder than ever.
These movements really have to put some weight, otherwise nothing will change.
Thank you.
"Our continued existence as a publication relies on people being able to freely access information, and there's a burgeoning movement to actually make people aware of something they've been too arsed to bother with for decades. Wrote an artic-"
"Paywall it."
"On it, boss."
It’s not perfect, no, but what are they supposed to do to keep the lights on? Double down on ads giving everyone malware, that everyone should be blocking anyway?
…That being said, we have every right to try and bypass the paywall too, heh.
They should be a little bit discerning about what they paywall. It won't kill them make public interest stories of serious value free as a public service.
This is true.
Some sites do this already. Wired may do it; not sure, though you are right in that advocacy posts should make the cut.
maybe they should take a class from the 14 yr old influencers keeping the lights on with socials, follows and clicks.
…Those “14 year olds” make money with ads, if not by being straight-up product shills. And social media takes most of the cut.
Also, that’s quite different than sustaining a whole journalism business. There is of course social media centric journalism, and Wired does plenty of that too.
Social media isn't a sustainable model. Yes, there are people that have success in that model, but those people have to sacrifice a lot, especially in the content quality, to acheive that success. Many media companies have already tried it, but the content they produce ends up dissolving into mostly clickbait, because they would fail otherwise.
Via sponsor spots and ad revenue?
Fuck whoever downvoted you. You’re doing great bro. Keep it up.
While I haven't seen the DDOS attack in their code for a while now, once you have done something like this (tampering with captures) the trust is just gone.
Assuming the commenter created the archive (probably not) they should've used a better service. Maybe Ghostarchive.
Fucking corporate bootlickers I tell ya hwut.
the boy ain't right
Oh, Louis Rossmann. Sounds good.
Shit means electronic devices here.
He has a non-profit now and I can hear him speak through the text of the site.
No paywall for me btw. Here's a screenshot of the article.
It’s a righteous screed that feels infectious in the crowd. People cheer and call out their own ownership issues. Rossmann is a preacher at the pulpit of people pissed off by subscription services, the steady decline of physical media, and the inability to fix their stuff.
Ok, but what does fulu mean?
It's the battlecry you yell as you charge down the greedy ceos with your sword made of worthless PlayStation Blu-rays
FULULULULULU
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