Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap::Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. From video streaming to ride-hailing and cloud computing.
This has nothing to do with tech and EVERYTHING to do with FUCKING CAPITALISM.
What a dumb fucking post, tech didn’t promise us shit were still living in a capitalist nightmare where quarterly earnings are far and above the primary value, over any and all people.
What the fuck is this waaaa tech didn’t usher in an age of utopia!!! It’s almost like we have to solve other problems first. Fucks sake
Can we actually have a discussion on what’s at hand here instead of knee jerk reactions?
Perhaps you had to have been there for all the “building better worlds” and “bringing people together” horseshit every silicon valley company was spewing since the dot com boom in the 2000’s
It’s not an actual promise so don’t act pedantic. The point is- society was sold these concepts and ideas as solutions to existing problems, and they’ve instead become bigger and more expensive problems.
Honestly, not to blame the public, but people were sitting here for the last decade going, don’t like being censored? Don’t use Google/Facebook/whatever. Don’t like being tracked across the internet? Don’t use Google/Facebook/whatever. And everyone kept using it. As for streaming services, I mean, if you don’t want monopolistic pricing power, abolish copyright/DMCA. We complain constantly about the consequences of these big corps but society keeps religiously buying shit from them or participating in their services. Just like complaining constantly about global warming but driving your car 3 miles to the store to get a 1L bottle of water. We set up these structures and put people in these positions where they can exploit you, then act surprised when they do, and we have an excuse for why we think every individual part of it needs to stay exactly the same.
OK, maybe to blame the public a little.
abolish copyright
17 years is enough.
Cheaper has never been a promise of big tech. Better, personalized, more convenient, flexible, faster. Cheaper? I missed the promise where we’d get all these benefits for nothing, and in fact be given discounts for getting all these benefits.
Before anyone starts: yes Uber is better than a taxi. Yes, cloud computing is better than on-premises. I’m so sad for this author who can’t work their streaming services, but as bad as cable? Give me a break.
Yeah, but they said those things before going public or when a few people had the vast majority of shares.
If they cash out, there’s now a board in control, and the big investors want big returns. So that’s the direction companies inevitably go.
Because if capitalism.
It might be the same company, but it’s often not the same people calling the shots
Capitalism would never allow utopia to come about, because the concept of utopia doesn’t allow for an unequal distribution of goods. The inequality is very much a feature, not a bug.
I’m not usually one for an ad hominem, but it’s business insider—that’s probably one conclusion they are incapable of arriving at
Not incapable, unwilling.
Don’t blame tech, blame the bait-and-switch business model of loss leading products.
Uber never made money because they chose to undercut prices of all competitors and bleed them out.
I’d argue that newer streaming companies (those founded by studios, such as Disney +) did the same thing by roping in customers before jacking up prices.
It may be the “fault” of capitalism, but consider it was capitalism that birthed streaming in the first place. In the long term, the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming… the same way streaming was a solution to cable. Thus is the business cycle.
the expectation would be a better solution will surface in reference to streaming… the same way streaming was a solution to cable.
What would that look like though? The current streaming model was pretty easy to predict ~15 years ago with the advent of online video streaming in general, especially mainstream forms of it such as YouTube. I have a hard time imagining how any other business model for distributing video content would look like, but then again I don’t have a very entrepreneurial mind.
If you had the answer you could make a lot of money
Remember that every invention discovered and improvement made before capitalism, happened before capitalism.
Remember that even in a system in which workers own companies, those workers still want to make more money
A profit motive is not unique to nor a product of capitalism.
Those workers still want to live. The money is the means- controlled by those with the most money.
Capitalism and democracy as exclusive concepts.
None of this makes any sense, both on its face and as a response to my comment
Bold deconstruction of the argument. Capitalism didn’t invent iPhones, workers did. There are economic systems other than capitalism, that can do better, without the unilateral domination of capital.
You act like capitalism is something that was invented. Market economies have existed since the dawn of time.
Think of it more like a spectrum where free market and unregulated capitalism is on one end and economies under total state control are at the other.
There is clear evidence that one side of that spectrum favors innovation more than the other.
I guess you could argue that one end of the spectrum is more “moral” than the other, but I would counter that the opposite end is amoral rather than immoral.
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You mean capitalism is inherent in the matrix of the space-time continuum as opposed to invented?
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Market economies have not all been capitalistic.
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Innovation is not the singular motivation of mankind. Survival, comfort, stability, peace, equality are more important.
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An amoral society is no better than an immoral society.
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Also worth noting in the case of uber, even if price is equal with taxis, the experience is much better. Nicer cars, better drivers and much easier app use. Even at price parity, its a very superior product in most cases.
You had me until that utterly stupid drivel at the end. You cannot give credit to the system that happened to be in charge at the time…
Then you’d have to thank Monarchy for a billion things that weren’t invented by monarchs…
You’re confusing economic systems with systems of government.
I’m interested to hear how you explain the drive to create streaming as an option to cable without including tenets of a market driven economy.
Reddit/Lemmy/Etc really has a hard-on to blame all bad things on capitalism. Capitalism is amoral. It is cold and uncaring. But not recognizing it as a driving factor for growth, innovation and societal advancement is a path of willful ignorance.
Everything has pros and cons in life.
I always thought [dumping](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy\)) was illegal.
FTC has been asleep at the wheel for 50 years
Take video streaming. In search of better profitability, Netflix, Disney, and other providers have been raising prices
Piracy and buying/ripping physical media is back on the table bois. Been running my own personal media server secured with a VPN to access it. Costs are the symmetric gigabit connection, a simple raspberry pi for WireGuard, and old computer for media server. Plus some technical knowledge.
Any physical media I have has been ripped to digital form (4K where possible).
A 3-mile Uber ride that cost $51.69
Yet another reason why we need to have more diverse options in transportation. Public transportation is dismal in the USA due to suburban sprawl and car centric society. Alternative forms of transportation such as bikes or even walking is not accessible to a large portion of people.
Took a bus the other day and the total cost for 24 hrs was exactly $2.50. Don’t have to worry about psychos on the road driving to and from their deadass suburban home and deadend job.
Cloud promises are being broken
Fuck the “cloud”. It’s just another persons/companies server. Switched off major cloud platforms long ago.
Have off site backups take place nightly. No middleman scanning my stuff. No more upselling. Besides ISP costs, everything else is static or one time setup.
Yeah, I’m already automating my entire Plex configuration, got some friends as admins on my services to help me run it, and I’m sharing it with all my friends through secure connections with let’s encrypt. There’s no reason to keep giving massive companies our money, data, and freedom. Fuck the cloud, fuck these subscription services, fuck SaaS, fuck it all. It’s piracy all the way down from now on.
But I can binge streaming services and then cancel without multiple hundred dollar fees. And I can use the same app for Uber no matter what city I’m in.
So… I get things aren’t paradise but let’s be clear they’re still largely covering a lot of folks needs.
For now.
Moreover, not to take sides with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Dropbox, Box, etc, but storing files costs money to maintain (there needs to be redundancy, every once in a while drives need to be replaced, they need to be cooled, etc), so we’d like it to be cheap, but doing all these things cannot be free for the hosting company.
This is not to say they are jacking up prices, but that it cannot stay super cheap forever.
Still, these services have been very handy so far, though I’m looking to see if the plan I have is still convenient compared to the competition
Seems to me like it would be more sustainable if it was super cheap for a large common library so a large userbase would maintain a continuous subscription, supporting a large continuous revenue, rather than signing-up and quitting intermittently.
The media companies are ruining it for themselves by trying to squeeze more out of the users, which leads them not to stick with any of them.
Seems to me like it would be more sustainable if it was super cheap for a large common library so a large userbase would maintain a continuous subscription, supporting a large continuous revenue, rather than signing-up and quitting intermittently.
Excuse me, but how would a tiny percentage of people profit off of this?! What is even the point if there are no shareholders to demand record profits year after year? /s
“Needs” lol
On the flip side, piracy has never been easier.
Time to disrupt the disruptions.
I have this idea for a consolidated ISP, cable television, home security, and telephone landline company. Gotta have the landline.
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At first the internet was like the wild west. Free, wide open spaces, with lots of exploring (minus the slaughter of indigenous people).
Then the capitalists got hold of all the land and made it like everywhere else. Restricted, controlled, expensive.
Uber was never a tech proposition, it was a predatory disruptor.
The streaming fiasco is sad but inevitable as greed does what greed does.
Cloud was never primarily about price, the big cost save initially was to get rid of purchased or rented iron and locations but the main reason of the Big Switch was the scaleability and opportunities for quick deployment of new technologies and methodologies.
Cloud computing is very much like the timeshare computing of old. It’s the dream of every mainframe owner to keep the platters spinning. Ie, keep extracting computational rents for owning the big numbers boxes.
This is all by design. Once they have you/us/them captured again, we’re going to take another trip around the “raise prices and squeeze services until it’s unsustainable, because shareholder and CEO profit”. It has all happened before and it will all happen again.
The cloud is just someone else’s computer. The uber is just someone else’s car. Streaming is just someone else’s media library. They have you right where they want you, dependent on them.
I don’t use Uber because it is cheaper, I use it because I know the fare ahead of time, I don’t need to dial a dozen different cab companies, and the vehicles are generally nicer. I don’t use streaming because it is cheaper, I use it because I don’t need to worry about time shifting, and can access much higher quality content than on cable. As for the cloud? You can pry my big iron from my cold, dead hands.
In Czechia they simply made an app any Taxi guy can sign up to, Liftago, you input your destination and you get offers from Taxis in the area.
Taxis have more regulation regarding their cars (being well maintained) than Uber drivers so it’s safer, and because capitalism you get naturally low prices due to competition.
just a much better system than Uber.
Uber is also banned in a lot of places as they are basically Taxis sidestepping the regulations
Exactly. Its not the money. Streaming is ‘messed up’ because content producers all want to own their own ‘exclusive’ platform. Had goverments regulated the market so that content could not be exclusive to a platform (like they did with movie theaters), streaming would be fine.
Very good counter arguments. I hate how the headline just lumps in cloud with streaming/ uber in value. Shows the naiveity of the author.
Remember that all that “disrupting the market” ever meant was undercutting competitors. Everything else was window dressing.
Enshittification!
The cloud-to-butt addon has become obsolete.
The pattern is: Offer something really cool for cheap or even free, then once people are hooked slowly reduce service while increasing price. It’s a giant bait and switch.
I don’t know Google Drive options are pretty fucking cheap.
not if you have more than 2tb of data because you’re a videographer or an audio engineer
Bro, nothing is cheap for you if you do that.
For the average consumer cloud storage is still pretty damn cheap.
Sorry but you are using the wrong cloud storage provider.
I’ve switched to pCloud on black Friday. It was a one time payment for 2TB lifetime (10TB is also available) cloud storage. I checked and it was ~250€ at the time.
Considering the amount of HDD I’ve burned through in the early years I’ve already saved a couple thousand dollars and I haven’t lost any file since.
Just make sure to watch their price as they currently have a sale and I don’t believe for 1 second that the initial price was in fact 1140€ for 2TB as advertised.
I’m I the only person who goes to the library for movies?
You are not!! We utilize the shit out of our library
At that point? I’d just pirate. Streaming services are for convenience. Going to the library for a physical piece of media isn’t very convenient for me
And video games.
