I’m amazed that ads are so effective that they can make more cramming unwanted video in my face than just asking me for a couple bucks.
Comment on Netflix will show generative AI ads midway through streams in 2026
lupusblackfur@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m all for services making a reasonable profit and being able to fund new shows and such endeavors…
But we’re rapidly getting into an environment of “soaking viewers for all we can get out of them” simply to feed the fucking shareholders ever larger payouts.
🤷♂️ 🤦♀️ 🖕
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Aux@feddit.uk 1 month ago
No one wants to pay money for the services they’re using. Ads is the way to go.
SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
Nobody wants to pay for all the little individual piecemeal services and shit, because it’s wildly expensive and inconvenient, and because they keep adding ads to the paid stuff anyway because greed, so what benefit is there to paying?
ferrule@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
you just need to keep a shit list of brands that are now dead to you.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I have a dwindling list of brands that are not yet dead to me.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
A good rule of thumb is that if you have heard of a brand but don’t remember anything positive about them they should probably be dead to you.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
The only brand I can think of that is truely not evil is valve, and that’s all cause of Gabe.
gradual@lemmings.world 1 month ago
All of them.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 1 month ago
exactly, if you want to be an ethical consumer you’d need to be a hermit.
in4apenny@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
What’s wrong with being a hermit?
gradual@lemmings.world 1 month ago
Hermit here, can confirm.
adarza@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
they already make significantly more profits off of each ad-tier sub than they do the ad-free… yet it still isn’t enough. greedy fucking bastards.
Don_alForno@feddit.org 1 month ago
How is showing me ads for things I will make a point not to buy because I implicitly hate the products of people showing me ads more profitable than the twenty fucking bucks a month I already give them?
Imagine if all that misallocated marketing budget got used to develop better products instead.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
And imagine if products that couldn’t get by on their own merits without ads wouldn’t exist at all. How much more productive and happy our society would be if we got rid of useless products and the negative feelings ads induce when we don’t have those useless products at the same time.
Aux@feddit.uk 1 month ago
Just imagine that your personal anecdote is not representative of human behaviour. The biggest lie and a myth is “I will pay more not to see ads”. No, you won’t.
Libra@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
There’s a word for that: enshittification
flandish@lemmy.world 1 month ago
the word is actually “capitalism.” it’s baked into its dna.
Libra@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Capitalism - and I am the last person to defend it - didn’t used to be like this, or at least not as bad. shrug I could probably tolerate capitalism if, say, no company was allowed to employ more than say 15 people.
flandish@lemmy.world 1 month ago
yeah it’s not like Smith predicted this but yeah … it’s certainly not human nature either.
i’d be happy if shareholders, all of them, were held criminally responsible for the criminal things corporations do - all the way down to wage theft and child labor.
wuzzlewoggle@feddit.org 1 month ago
Capitalism didn’t used to be like this because it was still developing, but it was always going to become this. Enshitification is not a bug, it’s a feature. Capitalism is supposed to work like this. And when it wasn’t, it was just because it wasn’t there yet, mainly due to technical limitations.
slaacaa@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s an interesting debate, if what we are seeing now is the natural, inevitable progress of capitalism, or it could have gone a better way, but eg. Reagan fucked it up for all of us in the 70s.
Strider@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That it wasn’t always like this doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t always lead there though.
I think that is the point.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
That’s like saying eating fatty food never got you obese when you started.
The end goal of capitalism was and forever will be monarchies. It’s the game of monopoly until one player owns all.
anzo@programming.dev 1 month ago
Continued expansion or ever-increasing profits is a definitive characteristic of the system though. Enshittification is just the latest feature it found, for software-based companies.
One could also argue that enshittification is independent to software, like diluting juice or other “innovations” that products received…
taladar@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Sounds a lot like gig economy for everyone.
leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 1 month ago
Late stage capitalism, then. 🤷♂️
GraniteM@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Or sinisterization.
There was a lot of invention in the 80’s. Home computer systems, video games etc. as we now commonly know them crystalized in the 80’s. We emerged from the 80’s with Nintendo as the dominant video game console platform, Motorola as basically the only name in cellular telephones and with x86 PCs running Microsoft operating systems as the dominant computing platform with Apple in a distant but solid second place. Video games were common, home computers weren’t that out there, people still had land lines, and maybe cable TV or especially if you were out in the sticks you might have one of those giant satellite dishes. If you were a bit of an enthusiast you might have a modem to dial BBSes and that kind of stuff, but basically no one has an email address.
There was a lot of evolution in the 90’s. With the possible exception of the world wide web which was switched on in August of '91, there weren’t a lot of changes to how computing worked throughout the decade. Compare an IBM PS/2 from 1989 with a Compaq Presario from 1999. 3 1/4" floppy disk, CRT monitor attached via VGA, serial and parallel ports, keyboard and mouse attached via PS2 ports, Intel architecture with Microsoft operating system…it’s the same machine 10 years later. The newer machine runs orders of magnitude faster, has orders of magnitude more RAM etc. but it still broadly speaking fills the same role in the user’s life. An N64 is exactly what you’d expect the NES to look like after a decade. Cell phones have gotten sleeker and more available but it’s still mostly a telephone that places telephone calls, it’s the same machine Michael Douglas had in that one movie but now no longer a 2 pound brick. Bring a tech savvy teen from 1989 to 1999 and it won’t take long to explain everything to him. The World Wide Web exists now, but a lot of retailers haven’t embraced the online marketplace, the dotcom bubble bursts, it’s not quite got the permanent grip on life yet.
There was a lot of revolution in the 2000’s. Higher speed internet that allow for audio and video streaming, mp3 players and the upheaval those caused, the proliferation of digital cameras, the rise of social media. When I graduated high school in 2005, there were no iPhones, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Youtube. Google was a search engine that was gaining ground against Yahoo. The world was a vastly different place by the time I was through college. Take that savvy teen from 1989 and his counterpart from 1999 and explain to them how things work in 2009. It’ll take a lot longer. In 2009 we had a lot of technology that had a lot of potential, and we were just starting to realize that potential. It was easy to see a bright future.
There was a lot of stagnation in the 2010’s. We started the decade with smart phones and social media, and we ended the decade with smart phones and social media. Performance numbers for machines kept going up but you kinda don’t notice; you buy a new phone and it’s so much faster and more responsive, 4 years later it barely loads web pages and takes forever to launch an app because mobile apps are gaseous, they expand to take up their system. A lot of handset manufacturers have given up so now there are fewer options, and they’ve converged to basically one form factor. Distinguishing features are gone, things we used to be able to do aren’t there anymore. The excitement wore off, this is how we do things now, and now everyone is here. Mobile app stores are full of phishing software, you’re probably better advised to just use the mobile browser if you can, mainstream video gaming is now just skinner boxes, and by the end of the decade social media is all about propaganda silos and/or attention draining engagement slop.
Now we arrive in the 2020’s where we find a lot of sinisterization. A lot of the tech world is becoming blatantly, nakedly evil. In truth this began in the 2010’s, it’s older than 4 years, but we’re days away from the halfway point of the decade and it’s becoming difficult to see the behavior of tech and media companies as driven only by greed, some of this can only come from a deep seated hatred of your fellow man. People have latched onto the term “enshittification” because it’s got the word shit in it and that’s hilarious, but…I see a spectrum with the stagnation of the teens represented with a green color and the sinisterization of the 20’s represented with red, and the part in the middle where red and green make brown is enshittification.
Libra@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I agree with all of that except the end: it’s definitely still greed, it’s just become easier to other your fellow man so you don’t even have to hate him, you can at best briefly consider his existence as you pave over him on your way to whatever absolute moral certitude you’re pursuing. That’s the true banality of evil: greed makes dehumanization so commonplace that advocating for awful shit to be done to your fellow human being isn’t even widely seen as evil anymore.