Netflix caused movie pracy to nearly case, because was affordable and convenient. People preferred to pay than hunt and download movies.

Once other studios started creating their streaming services, applying exclusivity for shows, jacking prices for their content (encouraging ads) all went to hell. They successfully managed to ruin the experience, and make it as shitty as cable.

The thing about intellectual property is that you create it once and then you can copy it infinitely and generate profit. The studios want to maximize the profit, it isn’t (as you are suggesting) how hard was to create content, but it is how much people are ok paying. It always was.

They can do this, because there’s monopoly due to crippled antitrust laws in the last 50 years.

Piracy is a natural response to this, but they are using copyright (which was originally meant for different reason).

Antitrust laws as well as laws like copyright, DMCA etc needs to be fixed.

their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have.

Isn’t the money for producing shows included in their operating costs, meaning that their operating margin already accounts for that?

“Content” at a minimum requires a video camera and people to stand in front of it. It’s involving hundreds of people in a production that’s expensive. People just hurl money at big centralized services, with the same mentality they had with cable TV, and of course they spend ungodly amounts, because they make even more. There’s all kinds of models that can work better than this.

i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out

They don’t. They just think content is generated in a vacuum and it’s their right to consume it in whatever way they see fit.

The solution is not one many people want to hear: reduce production costs.

Content is expensive to make mostly because the people making it keep demanding more pay for less work. While it is understandable that people want this, this is not sustainable for an economy. When the economy fails, prices go up. Demanding employers pay more will immediately raise prices the same amount the wages increase, effectively leaving employees who got a raise in the same place they were before but eith bigger numbers, and severely damaging the economy at the same time.

A show can be produced on a shoestring budget. Yes, the quality is lower than a million dollar movie. However, that doesn’t make the show bad. The X-Files was a great show produced on a tiny budget in its first season with phenomenal writing. Yet in the final season, it had a bigger budget but the writing was awful. In fact, most shows these days have awful writing. And the writers of these shows with bad writing are demanding more pay, yet their writing quality does not indicate they deserve increased pay. Certainly if a writer is outputting great work that should be rewarded, but increasing the pay of writers outputting garbage writing can only lead to more expensive garbage.

Then you get to costume, props, and visual effects. First, the damaged economy from before appears in costumes and props material cost. This is unavoidable. In many cases, I would say that good practical effects are cheaper and more convincing than cheap CG. My solution is simply go back to the way films were made in the 70s and 80s. Ditch the bad CG and go for more practical effects.

Last we have actors. Actors do not need more than 100k per film, and thats for the huge actors. Simple to understand, really. So many actors live opulent, overpaid lives, when they could live more simply, more normally, off of much less.

The above aalso applies to directors, producers, streaming company executives and CEOs.

Fix all these and your show production costs plummet. Now you can offer your streaming service at the same cost or cheaper than before while having a larger profit margin.

no one will ever get me to pay for ads

I don’t know where this comes from. Ads are a currency. You choose to allow ads to replace or supplement your payment, or you can choose to pay to forego them, on most all of these services. That’s not an option we ever had with cable (or any type of social media, for that matter).

Running these services costs money and you pay money to fund them. These industries have operating at a loss for many years and they are just getting around to being profitable, and they do that by increasing costs.

If you don’t want to pay for the service, just be upfront and say so.

There’s a bunch of analytics tracking and cloud integration in Plex. They are interested in what users are watching, which is concerning.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/7bim8n/plex_analytics_analyticsplextv/

Switch to Jellyfin or another open source server.

Bandcamp was nice while it lasted https://www.wired.com/story/epic-games-sale-bandcamp-music-platform-limbo/

There’s been a few poisonings lately, including half a dozen people in Australia about 2 months back that may have contributed… orrrr it might just be US law and broad optics.

I can echo this statement for a couple people I know that found this to work for them too

This reads as bait to me. You can see multiple peoples testimonies in the replies confirming that psychedelics succeeded in helping them or those they personally know, where repeated conventional therapy failed them. The long term repairing improvement of a persons mental and spiritual well-being also counts as ‘healing’ to me as well as many other people.

In the off chance you are genuinely interested in the ‘helps fight disease such as cancer’ claim, here is a ted talk by a professional mycologist. Its about mushrooms improving the human immune system. At the end he shares the very personal story of his elderly mother developing stage 4 breast cancer basically being told she was too old for conventional treatments and was done for. Only for her to make a full recovery after taking a few medications along with turkey tail mushrooms. You can skip to 9:00 to hear the story.

Fantastic Fungi is a good documentary on netflix if you would like to learn more, very well made and accessible to the common person IMO

Thats all I have to say. I hope you are open minded and learn something new if you decide to check out the ted talk and documentary. If you think its all snake oil BS anyways there probably isn’t much I can say to sway your opinion. Hope you have a good one.

You forgot the random instant site-wide permabans without explanation or possibility for appeal.

Are those the little mini brownie things? If so, yes, that sounds delightful.

What exactly do you think the upvote button is? You know brown is just a shade of orange.

It’s basically your entry point into the fediverse. You can still read and comment on other instances, as long as your instance is playing nice with others.

You can even set up your own and connect boost to that if you like. You’ll still be part of the bigger 'verse.

It’s the same as the people leaving Reddit but still talking about it

But they are not incentivized to grow numbers exponentially like shareholder funded companies. They make money from community involvement and value-added services. Instead, they removed these type of contents because they felt like those communities needed to reform their overall community personality. In the end, it is all a community effort to help one another. now that users have switched, there is less legal pressure, and the people who moved have helped make these other servers better. It was a win-win for us. I am grateful to all the people who made the move and participated in posting to their respective communities.

Also, this helps lessen the host cost on them. Lastly, a federated community is not the same as these mega corps.

My humble opinion is that the community can fuck off in matters like this. The random poster isn’t risking life-destroying legal trouble like the people running the servers are.

;)