374 points

Definitely don’t go to fmhy.net and definitly don’t join the !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com community. Also don’t visit torrentgalaxy.to, 1337x.to or solidtorrents.to. You probably also wouldn’t want to check out rutracker.org or therarbg.com.

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103 points

Saving your comment to remember what sites to avoid.

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31 points

Save offline or bookmark in case it gets deleted.

Also share it when you can in other places so people know what pages to avoid.

Arghh

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7 points

I posted another comment with a ton of useful media sources to avoid. You might want to save that comment as well.

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74 points

Please do not do this. It’s illegal and you could end up getting free movies and tv shows.

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35 points

It’d be a damn shame if you accidently downloaded cloudstream, an android app that allows you to download and watch offline, or just stream nearly any show or movie. I wouldn’t recommend the super stream source, as it almost always has a version available. Also, just in case, maybe don’t download tachiyomi to allow you to read any comics, manga, or graphic novels you want. It also has shitloads of hentai and pulls from almost every website imaginable.

And avoid Anna’s archive, as it has tons of ebooks which might(I’m not a lawyer) actually just be legal?

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8 points

And definitely avoid libgen and scihub, lest you accidentally learn something new without paying the exorbitant fees.

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5 points

You the real MVP.

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1 point

Cloudstream says you need to install sites from repositories in order to stream. What sites or repositories should I avoid at all costs?

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30 points
*

You absolutely should not subscribe to a VPN before not visiting any of those sites. I can’t recommend www.privateinternetaccess.com or www.expressvpn.com at all, clearly having never used them. They’re also useless for circumventing cell network limitations on video quality. Completely useless, otherwise I’d use them to subscribe to a cheaper lower data tier but still get 4k video.

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9 points

please also don’t check about protonVPN.

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23 points

Also, stay away from usenet and definitely don’t use the arr apps to automatically download your favorite shows and movies.

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12 points

Any guide on how to find the usenet groups? I’d hate to stumble upon them accidentally, so it’s best to be prepared.

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10 points

https://old.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/faq

You’ll need one or more indexers to find content. Keep an eye on that sub for when some of the good ones open their registrations.

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Btw, you should also never get a seedbox to torrent anonymously. You also need to stay away from private trackers.

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20 points
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Thanks a lot for telling us which services to avoid. You’re a lifesaver.

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14 points

Imagine if people set up a Plex/Jellyfin after visiting those sites to have their own streaming service setup. Pure madness!

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4 points

After learning how to do it on lemmy.world/c/selfhosted ! Madness

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13 points

Thank you for your service and I will never visit those websites.

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7 points

Also definitely dont look into setting up sonarr, radarr, prowlarr, and overseerr in combination with Plex or jellyseerr in combination with jellyfin. Otherwise you could find yourself with an extremely low touch automated downloading and organizing system that you can let your friends log into to request movies and shows without them needing to bug you at all for it to be downloaded in your preferred quality, size, codec, etc and automatically show up in Plex/jellyfin as soon as it finishes downloading, all renamed and sorted into folders as you please. That would be horrible.

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6 points

So like what’s the actual deal with pirating content nowadays? I remember in the early 2000s it was don’t seed and don’t torrent just-released content and you won’t get caught. Are the companies more rigorous nowadays? Are they going after people and you really do need a VPN? Can you torrent content at a human-watchable pace (like a show or two a month, maybe a movie or two a week) and no one’s going to notice you?

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11 points

Depends on the country. In the U.S., instead of chasing users themselves, they have leveraged the Internet providers to act as enforcers. If you torrent something they first send you notice of violation from your Internet provider.

If you continue to torrent, they can
cancel your service or the copyright holder can start legal action.

Honestly, I would never torrent anything anymore. There are great webpages that offer streaming for no cost.

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A direct download/streaming site can be shut down at any time. Torrents are resistant to censorship, as they are decentralized. Just grab a good VPN or a seedbox and you can torrent as much as you want.

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4 points

Just get a VPN and torrent like normal in the 2000s. Nothing has changed. Seeding is not really a big deal anymore because everyone’s internet speeds are so fast.

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2 points

I personally love QBtorrent and the built in search engine, plus if you look for it there are block lists you can quickly install into it that blocks you from connecting to known IP addresses of copyright enforcers but I’d still recommend a VPN anyways for good measure from your ISP but those are cheap and easy too.

I definitely seed a lot more than I did in the 2000s but I have fiber and unlimited data so that’s an easier ask.

There are supposedly great private torrent sites but I’ve been ok with the ones everyone else uses and haven’t figured out if I need to do different.

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2 points
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They generally ignore it unless you become excessive and then they just warn you, nothing horrible. But if you do it over a VPN, they can’t do anything. Or do it from a cloud instance from Amazon, or Google, and then download the files locally from there.

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6 points
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i wouldn’t download a car because i have no space, but i would stream it.

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3 points

Be careful putting that stuff on lemmy. Big studios aren’t afraid to sue

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2 points

Definitely don’t set sail on the seven seas

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2 points

I unironically love that fmhy.net’s site would work well in Gopher.

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178 points
*

I dust off my robe and wizard hat.

Plex is a great streaming alternative. Cancelling Netflix pays for the upgrade to gigabit Internet. Hard drives are cheaper now than ever. Usenet access remains safe and speedy. The DIY community for automation is thriving.

Is that the Jolly Roger coming in to port? Welcome back old friends.

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91 points

Worth checking out Jellyfin as well

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69 points

I MUCH prefer Jellyfin to Plex. Jellyfin seems to have active development whereas Plex is more interested in adding in a ton of “features” (aka garbage) that I never ever wanted and continues to leave YEARS old bugs out in the wild. I think it won’t be long until Plex enshittifies itself to death. They clearly have a financial situation that is not aligned with its users.

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6 points

Plex has a client on my TV and Xbox. How would I watch Jellyfin content on those?

I say this a guy that got his RasPi3 Plex server running just good and stable a year ago and doesn’t touch it except to cycle in new content.

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6 points

I agree, I’ll give the software another try once I have more free time to learn and troubleshoot

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5 points
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Deleted by creator
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1 point

Unfortunately, there’s no Jellyfin application on my TV, or I’d swap :-(

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1 point

Jellyfin feels like it’s 95% of the way there. I switched from Plex to Jellyfin back to Plex again a year or two ago, but I am thinking I should give Jellyfin another shot some time. There was some media that Jellyfin wasn’t able to play even without transcoding that Plex handled fine, but those transcoding issues could be solved by now.

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16 points
*

I tried but the technical gap from Plex to Jellyfin was too intense for me to try and make work at this time of my life. Plex works well for my purposes and I paid for the phone apps when needed ($6 per device I think).

I admire and support Jellyfin as FOSS and hope I can jump on when I have more time to make it work.

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8 points

Yeah for sure, didn’t mean to imply folks shouldn’t use Plex just giving it a shout out as an alternative. I’ve used both and they are both pretty awesome. One of my friends set up a seed box with Jellyfin so I kinda cheated in leaving the tinkering to them but I don’t think it was too bad with the provider they went with.

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3 points

Exact same thing happened to me, i just couldn’t get it to consistently work.

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3 points

I can’t for the life of me get HW encoding working with Jellyfin. Plex was just plug and play.

i7-11800H

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-14 points

worth checking out until you get to the cry for developers that they posted yesterday. fuck switching my media serving to a dying platform

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13 points

Yep. Finally got Radarr and Sonarr with overseerr setup this summer because I need a GUI solution for my family. It’s been working pretty great so far!

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3 points

I have the same but the one thing I can’t get working is accessing overseer from outside the network (ie internet). I’ve read guides of course but at some point they start talking about domains and certificate signing and I start to have a siezure.

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5 points
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Look into Caddy, it’s by far the easiest web server/reverse proxy with automatic SSL support out there. Setup both Caddy and Overseer in Docker and then just simply write

overseer.yourdomain.com {

reverse_proxy overseer:overseer port

}

Assuming you have you own domain name and have DNS records setup.

I was using Nginx and Let’s Encrypt for years but it was a bit of a pain in the ass. I just rewrote my entire Docker Compose script to use Caddy so I can deploy everything in about 5 minutes.

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1 point

I just set up a VPN with wire guard and duckdns. Connected my phone and works great. Some one will mention a show and I’ll pull out my phone and add it via overseer. Get it on plex in like 2 minutes.

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0 points

Cloudflare zero trust tunnels are your answer

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9 points

Plex is cracking down on pirated content. They can’t do anything locally (yet) but they sent out a mass email about two weeks ago saying that anyone that hosts a Plex server in the cloud (they didn’t specifically mention Hetzner, but that’s who is largely being affected) will lose access on October 12th.

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21 points

That’s because people were creating their own ‘streaming services’ using pirated content and selling access to it using Hetzner servers, which is very bad for all parties involved because it brings a lot of negative attention when actual profits are being generated from distributing pirated material.

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1 point

Yeah, but it sucks for people like me who just set everything up a few weeks ago and are using it privately. I’ve hosted a massive Plex server locally for about a decade, but finally decided to stop doing everything locally. I had it running for two weeks in the cloud before I got the email from Plex. I just setup Jellyfin yesterday and all of my users will have to migrate to that.

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17 points

People thought hosting copyrighted content on someone’s cloud and making it available to others was a good idea? 🤦🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️

This is why we can’t have nice things.

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9 points

It’s specifically people doing this and selling access to the servers en masse, like these servers have a hundred or more users each. The don’t care about the small fish that are doing this privately for no monetary gain.

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9 points

Plex is cracking down on pirated content.

I’m just as jaded and cynical as the next guy, but I think that this is a mischaracterization of that email. People were hosting Plex servers with thousands of users and terabytes of pirated content on Hetzner and selling access. I don’t read them taking action as a signal for them blocking local libraries in the future.

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2 points

They all do it just to get the lawyers off their backs. Plex is just a bigger target. Plex can’t block anything locally so they take action against user distributing pirated content on a cloud service and are like “Here, we took action, can you leave us alone now?”. It would practically be impossible for them to block the distribution of pirated content at the local level.

Plex fucked up when they created their Client-Server model because it allows traffic to run through their servers (the Plex Relay and their “phone home” model). This makes them legally responsible for “facilitating access to pirated content” even though they don’t host the content. Jellyfin doesn’t have this pitfall since you host everything yourself, they just provide the software.

You’re the second person that says " Plex isn’t cracking down on pirated content… but they’re banning people who are hosting servers with pirated content." If that’s not " cracking down on pirated content" IDK what is…

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-1 points
Deleted by creator
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4 points

That’s their entire userbase. Bold call haha

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5 points

Yeah, people act like Plex and other media servers are used for legally obtained content only. Plex is just covering their asses and they can’t block users hosting locally so this is a “here we did something, are you happy now?” to the copyright lawyers.

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0 points
Deleted by creator
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3 points
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Deleted by creator
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3 points
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Plex’s (almost) entire user base is pirates, it’s the same with Kodi, Emby and Jellyfin. I don’t know of anyone that has legally ripped all of their DVDs and Blu-rays themselves, it’s just too much of a pain in the ass, and I know multiple people that have run servers for years.

Plex is just covering their own asses from getting sued for “enabling the distribution of pirated content”. Kodi and Jellyfin aren’t big targets since they aren’t a business, they don’t sell a product, Plex (and Emby) does. Kodi and Jellyfin can’t get sued (or it doesn’t make sense to sue them) because they have the disclaimer that says “we make this for streaming content you own, we don’t host anything, we don’t support the piracy plugins, do what you will with it, we’re not responsible for your actions” but since Plex can route traffic through their servers (the Plex Relay) and the fact that they offer PlexPass puts them in hot water.

Instead of Plex blocking the specific users based on email, specific IP or something else specific to that account, they said “fuck anyone using Hetzner, regardless of whether or not you’re violating our ToS.”

I’ve paid for a lifetime PlexPass and have actually paid for it a few times over since it took years before I finally bought one. Yet, I get treated like I’m some mega-pirate making money off of them. They don’t give a shit about their users, all they care about is money and not getting sued.

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3 points

Sorry I don’t buy it. It stinks of puppeting for rights holders. I moved to Jellyfin as soon as that story broke. I’ve been a Plex pass user for over 10 years (albeit lifetime single purchase) and the only thing I miss is in-TV subtitle search.

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1 point

Good to know, hopefully this creates a drive to make alternatives a little more user friendly to set up

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-1 points

It’s easy to setup remote access to Jellyfin… once you know what you’re doing. I’ve been doing it for years, and just recently gave Caddy a try as my reverse proxy and it literally takes 3 lines of code to create a SSL secured reverse proxy (literally just Jellyfin.yourfqnd.com { reverse_proxy Jellyfin:8096}).

I’ve written a docker compose file for each of my categories of apps on my server: Plex, Jellyfin, Admin apps, and Pirating. The Caddy config file is simple so I just copy that to its app directory. My DNS and my CNAME records are already set.

So after a bit of work writing the aforementioned scripts I can have my entire setup on a new server in about 5 minutes and one command.

IDK if docker-compose works on Windows, but I’m happy to share it if you run Linux.

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-1 points

Gotta sell out to get more VC cash somehow /s

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9 points

Is there any links/guides on how to get into the usenet side of things? I’ve been using torrents forever but people keep saying usenet is safer.

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8 points
*

Google/learn about/consider these things

VPN, Usenet provider (i.e. EasyNews), Usenet indexers (i.e. NZBgeek), Usenet client (i.e. NZBget), Managing your library (Sonarr, Radar, Prowlarr, Filebot),

Media server & streaming (i.e. Plex, Jellyfin)

I watch through my firestick or android phones

I might be missing something, but there are lots of guides once you figure out what you’re looking for. A little technical know-how makes things go smoother and faster though.

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4 points

Thanks for the info. I’ve got. Sonarr radarr and prowlarr set up with qbitt right now and jellyfin. I’ll have to do some digging this weekend.

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3 points

I tried to get into Usenet but I’m old and unable to learn new tricks. I just looked at EasyNews and it’s $9.99 pm for 20GB :| so, like, a single 4K movie with Atmos. I don’t understand the allure of UseNet, perhaps because I am a dumb.

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2 points

Also, what makes Usenet safer?

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1 point

Running a VPN makes torrenting just as safe and you’ll be paying a subscription fee for Usenet so it’s a wash in my opinion.

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1 point

I second this and I’m in the same boat as you

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8 points

Got any names in particular? I’ve been looking at Usenet for a long long time and I think I’m going to finally get serious about it

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6 points

Sure, check through this comment thread as a few have already been mentioned.

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2 points

I will take a second look!

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3 points
*

Stremio + Real Debrid is definitely not worth investigating. Avoid it at all costs. Keep giving these media companies more money. All the money. Disney needs your dollars.

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117 points
*

the capitalists are unable to understand that the “eternal growth” their books mention is not feasible in real world and in fact it is a bug. There are physical upper limits that cannot be overcome. There will not be unlimited people that will always enrol in a new subscription. They need to somehow understand that at some point a company may reach their ceiling. This is not reason to do whatever panic change in order to show growth in the numbers. It will just not happen.

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28 points

Ah but when the prices can’t go any higher they can always remove content, paying their suppliers less and getting cheaper hardware. I wish I was joking but these are the options that are left.

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18 points

“Do we really need all these CDNs everywhere?”

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26 points

“And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds left to conquer.”

– H. Gruber.

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7 points

The thing is, they do know this. They are perfectly willing to drive a company into the ground on the promise of annual growth, and they’ll dump it the moment it cannot serve them monetarily.

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2 points
*

Lies!

It’s mathematically possible to have infinite growth as long as it’s in nominal terms and you have infinite inflation!

(Joke aside, ponder on why central banks have a positive non-zero inflation target…)

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106 points

When will the greed stop? At what point will these corporations realize that the average American is completely stretched thin financially and will have to cease unnecessary expenses? They’re all just shooting themselves in the foot.

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139 points

“When will the greed stop?”

Never

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50 points

It‘s laughable to expect corporations to act against their only purpose. As soon as a company sells shares it takes the route of infinite growth which is impossible. First they grow their user base and once they start to inevitably stagnate, they start milking their costumers, shaving off features and laying off workers in order to grow their income. It is really the only way for them to remain existent when the market is saturated. They cannot stay in business when they make billions a year when these billions aren‘t even more billions than last year. You can‘t attract new investors that way and therefore cannot continue to exist. Enshittyfication only just started. It cannot possibly get better when they can‘t expand their user base, only worse. They know they will self destruct eventually, but that doesn‘t matter as long as shareholders get their piece of the cake and jump ship to sink the next one. Just being a massively profitable company is bad business if you‘re not growing. That‘s the state of capitalism we‘re in.

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9 points

As soon as a company sells shares it takes the route of infinite growth which is impossible

yeah, the stock market makes that a company that is stable and generates a reliable income each year is seen as bad, but a company that has large grow in obviously unsustainable speed, which doesn’t have plans on how to ever become profitable is good (i am not specifically taking about netflix here)

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3 points

Seems like, at a certain point in your growth and success, you could use your billions to buy back stock. That could keep the stock price high, which keeps investors happy. Once you’ve bought back enough stock, you can effectively go private again, with all of the growth paid for by investors.

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5 points

When the platform dies.

“first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. “

Source

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4 points
*

Incorrect.

It will stop when our species exterminates itself out of greed.

Climate change will probably only thin our numbers by the billions as a result of of the owner’s greed, but then they want to profit off AI, and CRISPR, and innumerable other potentially profitable means to our self-extinction.

The greed will stop when all the humans are dead almost certainly by our own hands, and humans are actively working to accomplish this.

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33 points

As consolidation continues corporations do not need to compete on prices as there are no alternatives. Yes people will pirate but they’ve already lobbied vendors to embrace DRM and governments to make it illegal so that makes it as annoying as possible.

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22 points

Are we reading the same thing? Netflix has more competition now than it ever has. When Netflix had cheaper prices when it has no competition than it does now. Piracy has been making a huge resurgence as well.

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20 points

“More competition” meaning less access, people having to pay for multiple different services instead of having it in one place.

The competition should be about having the best platform, not exclusive content. There’s no reason why the same show couldn’t be on two different platforms. And available globally. Practically, all you really need is more local servers for where there’s more traffic.

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2 points
*

When Netflix started they entered the market as a licensor of content from studios to be distributed as part of a streaming service.

This possibility largely no longer exists. All of the studios have bought out competition, stopped licensing a lot of their popular content, and now release their content themselves. This means there is little competition in the film distribution market for streaming, beyond PayPerView.

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10 points

Oh you sweet summer child…

America is founded on greed and power, it’ll never stop.

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10 points

As long as people pay for it and they make massive profits through it.

I mean, look at the last situation in which netflix addressed account sharing. Their user number actually increased because of it from what I have read.

Those people that can’t afford it will most likely switch to a less expensive tier and then probably see ads. I have seen that recently with my father who wasn’t even bothered or annoyed by the constant ads while watching a single episode.

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5 points
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I don’t understand how people are ok with ads? They annoy me so much. It’s wasting your time so it can attempt to manipulate you into buying stuff with the money you can’t afford to spend.

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8 points

When enough people cancel. Keep paying, they’ll keep raising the price.

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6 points

We keep saying this but they keep profiting more and more every time lol. Remember when everyone on reddit was gonna quit Netflix for the password sharing block? Ya, their users increased afterwards.

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3 points

To be fair, we only have their word for how many subscribers they have.

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1 point

If Netflix is out right lying, I’m sure stockholders would be happy and not tank the stock at all

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4 points

AND KILL THE AMERICAN DREAM THAT ANY MAN CAN BE KING?! might as well just side with those broke natives /s

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3 points

They’ll stop if everyone sailed the high seas.

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87 points

Price of WD red HDD’s about to go up too

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11 points

Storage right now is probably as cheap as its gunna get for a while, good time to stock up

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5 points
*

Well… New tech should make higher storage densities mainstream again in 1-2 years. Seagate just released 32TB HAMR drives for commercial use

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4 points

Damn boooy

A couple of those and I don’t even have to delete stuff I already watched

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1 point

I wish there was a betteter way tou say “yes, you are right”

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