this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
716 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
68244 readers
4275 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
the problem is so many people are willing to say they'll take a stand.
but when the time comes, the mindnumbingly overwhelming majority suck it up, because they must have their precious shiny and can not suffer even the mildest of inconvenience.
Its my biggest gripe in gaming, but its a enormous gripe just in general, with everything. because it doesnt matter if you are talking about appliances, creative software, video games, streaming services, stores, etc.
To summarize what I was telling another person. The number of people who care are far outnumbered by the number of people who don't. It doesn't matter if you or I or all 10,000 (just a random number for the sake of argument) of the people subscribed to a sub like this were to cancel when r/justworks or r/normie (made up subreddits for the sake of argument) has 100,000,000 who don't give a damn about computers, privacy, or anything else beyond the service working or not.
I agree. Tech communities have a habit of drastically over estimating how much everyone else cares about the details of tech.
Even something as simple as PC gaming scares off a lot of people because of the perception that you need to be some kind of tech wizard in order to cobble everything together to make a game run. Actual cobbling together of software to pirate (no matter how simple it seems to people in the know) is just a bunch of technobabble.
I have people whom I still need to explain copy and paste to on a regular basis. Trust me, I understand.
I'm a millennial and sometimes I feel like we're the only generation that learnt how to use computers properly. Boomers / Gen X often aren't great with computers, and neither are Gen Z / Alpha since they use phones and tablets far more. There's outliers of course.
I'm more and more inclined towards the idea of piracy myself as time goes on and media continues to shave itself down into more and more ridiculous, unrelated shards, that you have to subscribe to just to be able to SEE if they have what you want.
I don't actively do it actively since I dont really know where to begin, and things I have found have been to sketch for me, or requiring memberships or even payments to join.
I poked around dbzer0 and found a few streaming sites, Nothing which carried anything i was particularly interested in.
Navigating this stuff without my ISP getting pissy is another hurdle, too.
It was much easier 20+ years ago when you just searched KaZaA or Limewire, or back when piratebay was the site (and before it got drowned in virus traps)
🏴☠️ 🏴☠️🏴☠️
I know you weren't using the number 5 as a hard example, but a thing that people still don't seem to realize is that the people in threads like this are the people that actually care. Even if the few thousand redditors who subscribe to a subreddit where they discussed that topic were to all (and I mean 100% of them) cancel there subscriptions. That is still only a drop in the bucket for Netflix. Losing a few thousand subscribers is still nothing if they made more money with the addition of ads.
these are also the people who would pay more for quality service if it was available.
It is interesting to me that the chorus always talking about "switching" to piracy after every incident is also intimately familiar with piracy already. Almost as if it's just people who already pirate talking to each other about how hard they are going to pirate. Meanwhile general audiences don't care.
It's the same with increasing the price of a service. Usually, the extra revenue from the price increase is far greater than the revenue loss from people that unsubscribe. If a business has a choice between a large number of customers with a small amount of profit per customer, and a small number of customers with a larger amount of profit per customer, they'll always pick the latter. Fewer customers reduces other costs, for example less support load, less bandwidth usage, etc.