You have to remember that most users simply don’t care. The majority of consumers are some combination of either not technologically savvy or just outright intimidated by technology, are not very well educated, are incredibly reluctant to read, are not particularly observant, will not leave their routines or comfort zones without very significant motivation, and have spent their entire lives being the very frog in that gradually boiling pot of ever more numerous and intrusive advertising to the point that they just accept this as “normal.” They’re busy. They don’t read tech headlines. They don’t understand what’s going on under the hood, and nor do they want to.
Normal people don’t see the world like us nerds do. I am positive that these streaming services (and many other businesses) have studied this and understand it very well. If they lose 1% of their business which was made up by vocal nerds, but whatever odious change the just rolled out results in an increase in profit that is greater than the revenue from those subscriptions lost, they’ll go ahead and do it anyway.
They think they have a captive audience because by and large they functionally do have a captive audience. This stuff works, and people keep paying for it en masse.
I mean, look at Reddit. Huge uproar last year, nothing happened really.
Pretty much every service, platform, app has become worse over the last two or three years. But people keep using them. And not for a lack of alternatives. They are actively hostile against change and many really don’t care. They are so used to being fucked over, squeezed for pennies and bombarded with bullshit ads, that they gave up.
The same thing happens in politics, btw. People just vote whatever - if at all, because they already expected to be fucked over. All those activists you see on TV or online are a tiny minority.
The answer is apathy.
You have to remember that most users simply don’t care. The majority of consumers are some combination of either not technologically savvy or just outright intimidated by technology, are not very well educated, are incredibly reluctant to read, are not particularly observant, will not leave their routines or comfort zones without very significant motivation, and have spent their entire lives being the very frog in that gradually boiling pot of ever more numerous and intrusive advertising to the point that they just accept this as “normal.” They’re busy. They don’t read tech headlines. They don’t understand what’s going on under the hood, and nor do they want to.
Normal people don’t see the world like us nerds do. I am positive that these streaming services (and many other businesses) have studied this and understand it very well. If they lose 1% of their business which was made up by vocal nerds, but whatever odious change the just rolled out results in an increase in profit that is greater than the revenue from those subscriptions lost, they’ll go ahead and do it anyway.
They think they have a captive audience because by and large they functionally do have a captive audience. This stuff works, and people keep paying for it en masse.
I mean, look at Reddit. Huge uproar last year, nothing happened really.
Pretty much every service, platform, app has become worse over the last two or three years. But people keep using them. And not for a lack of alternatives. They are actively hostile against change and many really don’t care. They are so used to being fucked over, squeezed for pennies and bombarded with bullshit ads, that they gave up.
The same thing happens in politics, btw. People just vote whatever - if at all, because they already expected to be fucked over. All those activists you see on TV or online are a tiny minority.