this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Year of the enshitification, more like.
It feels like every company just decided 2023 was the year they finally pulled the trigger and tried to cash-out and bail.
With Plex adding "Live TV" and all the other shit for the past 6 years, their enshittification isn't new. Most people I know still on Plex are only doing so because they paid for a lifetime pass. They're full on sunk-cost-fallacy.
Still not worth, I have a lifetime plex pass but have switched 100% to Jellyfin now. Enshittification was part of it, but their response to the privacy hack was the last straw.
I'm still on Plex because the app experience just isn't there on Jellyfin yet. It's close, but switching audio/subtitle tracks is not as intuitive or straightforward as I want yet. I'm thinking it will probably be ready for my server in a year or two.
Really? I hit the subtitle track button on my remote and select english, and that's only for not-automatically chosen files whenever that happens. I watch a fuckton of Animes and 95% of the time it's automatically chosen. I'm using an Android TV client though.
Ditto for audio - I hit the little Music Note icon, and every audio track is there for me to select.
Might be that the Roku app is/wasn't quite up to the same standard as the Android TV one. I also remember not liking how they handled something in their official Android app, but it's been six months. I honestly don't remember. I just have a reminder to check it out again next summer.
Ah, I can't stand advertisements so I couldn't put up with Roku equipment. Ads everywhere. And yeah, since "Roku OS" is proprietary, it probably didn't see the same adoption as more standard stuff (Like, even just FireTV sticks are Android at least, so the vanilla client works on those)
This, I paid their lifetime Plex pass at a huge discount and bailed on it when they started adding shit and ruining it. Jellyfin since then.
Signs we are going to have another pandemic? Is this like a general "we know we aren't prepared" or like "there is a virus outbreak that hasn't hit the media yet"?
Tech has always been geared towards losing money to provide a valuable service but the understanding from investors who don't loan for free is that at some point you turn on the profit engine. Some tech companies are able to generate revenue without necessarily making their product awful for users, but the more pull and pressure investors have, and the more driven by impatience, the enshittifier things become.
The Fed turning off the free money tap last year by starting to raise interest rates was an inevitable wake up call for investors that they needed to change their model to start profiting or at least lose less. Many, many companies, users and products are experiencing US's investors-first-and-only capitalism's inevitable end; it destroys the good it created. Companies without long-term investors or leverage to hold off investors willing to kill the golden goose either enshittify, or if they don't have a way to enshittify, go under.
Interest rates. No free money.
Interest rates went up and the flood of money from investors went down.
Investors are probably demanding a return on their massive amounts of speculative investing in the tech industry.
There seems to be a pattern in services like this where they launch as a good idea that's under priced and take off like a rocket, then growth levels off as everyone is either already using the service or never will regardless of what they do. Once you reach that point, however, you still need to show revenue growth because capitalism, so if you can't get more users you either have to make the service more expensive for the users you have, or cheaper to run. The former we see happening all over the place, and the latter is actually a good thing in limited amounts as unnecessary parts are trimmed off, but will almost always also result in useful features being axed. Hence why everything seems to be getting more expensive and worse.