- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- brainworms@lemm.ee
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- brainworms@lemm.ee
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
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You say “broken promises” I say “the plan all along” and “bait and switch”.
Yep. The business model has always been “Lure them in and stifle competition with a low initial cost. Then when we have the market we can jack up the price.” Enshitification at its best.
Yarrrrr…shiver me timbers. Fly the Jolly Roger high matey, there be booty ta plunder!
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.
As far as Ubers, I’m happy to pay them as much as taxis in tips at least — the people driving them are hard working people who could use it.
But dang, there’s lots of streaming services. The new rise of piracy is not surprising.
I think it says something that people feel the need to subscribe to half a dozen services.
Never even mind piracy, people don’t need to be binging TV endlessly.
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
Agree, it’s 100% greed for investors’ money. But it’s way easier to get away with lying in tech than in most other industries.
And we still don’t have flying cars!
Thank god! When I look how baddly people act on our roads I REALLY don’t want them to have the ability to fly around as easily.
I never expected ride hailing apps to save money. Where from? Taxis were never a high margin business with some superfluous middleman.
Could there be some decentralized ride hailing platform?
Taxi companies need to own the car, pay for maintenance, pay wages for the driver, insurance, etc.
Ride-sharing apps offload all of the taxi-company maintenance overhead costs to the gig-driver while only paying about 50% of the fare.
But competition. If there’s another app that pays out 80%, it will have more drivers and be cheaper.
Could there be some decentralized ride hailing platform?
That was the original idea behind Uber etc.: you as a normal person would fire up the app when you were driving somewhere anyway, and pick up folks who happened to be wanting to go the same direction.
It only lasted about 5 minutes before people started turning it into their job.
Oh cool
Hotels >>>>> Airb&Bs
I’ve seen some pretty shit hotels.
Remember when we could only watch what had recently been on TV and cable companies were trying to lock people in to specific cable boxes that couldn’t skip ads and we paid $120 per month for ad supported content and cable companies would attach random fees and everyone had to buy hundreds of channels to only watch 4?
And we’d build movie and music collections of physical media we had to keep in our homes and cars and we’d listen to the same three albums for months and if we were lucky enough to get a TV series box set, it’d set us back many hundreds of dollars and we’d have to remember which disc we were on and navigate arcane and slow menus?
And when we had questions, we had to find the answers ourselves by reading long form content and just be satisfied that there were many questions we couldn’t answer at all because the information wasn’t available?
Or when we wanted cabs, we’d not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations and they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what’s a smartphone?
And when we wanted to go somewhere, we had to ask for directions and use atlases to figure out how to get to the general area of the destination, then drive in circles, accidentally drive past a turn 5 times because the street we were supposed to turn onto had two different names and we had been given the wrong one?
I was there and anyone who pines for the old days can just go there. We have cable and encyclopedias and taxis and atlases. Go nuts.
We have all these conveniences now and somehow people are not happier. Maybe the improvements you showed weren’t improvements after all and society should have spent more time to focus on people instead of developing and selling the next great music platform.
You are missing the point when you tell people to go back to cable, encyclopedias etc. because it’s not about those things, it’s about escaping into an idealized past while being depressed in the present. They should have your sympathy.
Streaming is still very cheap, a VPN for Torrents costs 15$/month and you get literally everything, something you wouldn’t get even with all services combined (which would cost much more).
Techno feudalism is the keyword.
On the flip side, piracy has never been easier.
