I got annoyed that "the price" of a subscription is really two prices — the one advertised and the one you end up paying — and that nobody keeps the receipts. So I built a tracker that checks 27 providers' public pricing pages daily, and separately curated dated, sourced price histories for streaming services going back to 2010.
The streaming number surprised me. Nine services, flagship tiers:
March 2021: $95.91/month. Today: $154.41/month. That's +61%, or $702 more per year for the same nine subscriptions.
Per service since 2021-03: Apple TV+ +200%, Disney+ +138%, Peacock +100%, Hulu +58%, Netflix +43%, Paramount+ +40%, YouTube Premium +33%, Spotify +30%, HBO Max +23%. 75 documented increases across 11 services, every one linked to the announcement or report that covered it. The most recent was Apple TV+, $12.99 to $14.99 on 28 August.
Two services are tracked but deliberately left out of that basket: YouTube TV (a live-TV bundle, $35 to $82.99 since 2017 — the steepest riser I have, but it is a cable replacement, not an on-demand subscription) and Prime Video (an add-on to a Prime membership, not standalone). Putting either in would have made the headline bigger and the comparison worse.
One methodology note, because I got this wrong first: my initial version summed each service's launch price, which gave a bigger, better headline. But those launches span 2010 to 2021, so that basket never existed — nobody could have bought it. Recomputing from March 2021, the first month all nine existed, gives the smaller +61% figure. I'd rather publish the smaller true one.
Same thing happened with the ad tiers. I expected to find ad-free plans being hiked faster to push people toward advertising. Disney+ fits — ad-free +73% vs ad-supported +50% over the same window. Netflix doesn't: it raised both by exactly 29%. What did happen at both is the cash gap widened — Netflix $8.50 to $11.00/month, Disney+ $3 to $7/month.
The daily side covers hosting, VPN, antivirus and SaaS: 42 of 75 tracked plans renew above their advertised price, averaging +196%. The extreme is IONOS at +1,300% ($1/mo advertised, $14/mo at renewal). 9 providers never raise renewal prices at all — two of them, Mullvad and Windscribe, run no affiliate programme, so nobody has a commercial reason to mention them.
Limits, stated up front: I measure published pricing only — I don't test the products and make no claim about quality. Prices are read from one fixed location (Pakistan), which is stated on the site; for most of these the price is global, but where a provider geo-prices, my figure describes that vantage point. Streaming histories are curated from primary sources rather than scraped, which is how they go back further than my own tracking.
Happy to talk about the scraping side — Cloudflare, JS-rendered prices, A/B-tested prices, and providers who publish no renewal figure at all.
So in real terms it's up 26%. Which of course is to be expected, people have a set amount they are willing to spend on entertainment, in the past it was cable -- in 2015 the average US cable TV subscription was about $100, that's about $140 today in real terms, or $1700 a year.
Seems that streamers have a long way to go before they extract all that money.
That’s the average household cable tv subscription, no?
I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions.
I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.
The average household cable tv subscription didn't get you access to all the music, enormous amount of youtube content, shipping benefits, and ad-break free watching. And it wasn't on demand viewing. And it required using a special device in a specific room in a specific house.
In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).
I don't know about in the US, but I live in a fairly small city in Canada and we have DVD rentals. I go to the video store almost every week, and it was on the papers that a second one (which will also rent out VHS!) is opening.
The Library does DVD rentals too, I check it out every couple of months.
It's even better in Toronto, Bay Street Video is an institution.
Eh, I miss video rental stores in the US, but I don't agree that they would solve this problem. I worked for a large chain of them as a teen, and know first-hand that people were spending just as much on rentals as they do with subscription services, especially when you add in game rentals and late fees.
More importantly, it does not solve the problem of ownership. We don't own a rented disc just as much as we don't own a DRM-controlled digital purchase that can only be accessed via the subscription portal it was purchased on.
Hi honestlyranked you might want to reach out to the mods, your comments are dead. I think you are meant to put info in the submitted post text field, not in the comments, I could be wrong!
This is what I am always curious about with these tech valuations. They’re valued at multiple times earnings, often 30+. That implies 30 years to earn back an investment iff earnings are payed out. Yet all are immediately enshittifying or price gauging when they hit monopoly / have market share. Is the bet then that thats just gonna be the status quo? I guess historically it was a good bet.
What is the alternative to subscribing to streaming services? Can you purchase your movies online and be guaranteed to have access to the movies in the future?
If you want guaranteed future access, then this is probably the only online option that actually fulfills this guarantee... other than that, physical media.
I regularly snag DVDs for $1 USD or less at garage/yard/boot sales. I see tons of cheap used physical media in record shops when I travel, too. eBay and Facebook Marketplace are also great sources for used DVD.
I promote this because not only does it restore some mastery* over your media, it keeps these discs out of landfills and oceans, where they will linger in a shredded state.
*we are, of course, still subject to any anti-piracy measures and non-removeable advertisements on the disc, which admittedly seems quaint by today's DRM standards, but I ccannot rightly say "complete" mastery over your media, here.
I watch films on streaming rather than old dvds with unskippable nonsense like "don't pirate this dvd" (well obviously I didn't, that's why I have the dvd), or the pain of the menu systems to just press play.
Physical media isn't guaranteed to retain future access. There are protocols for players to update various bits of data from the newest disk you have ever inserted into them. The Nintendo Wii certainly does this, I'm not sure if BluRay does but I don't see why they wouldn't.
You can still buy physical media online, though an increasing portion of movies and shows are produced by the streaming companies, and you don’t really have an alternative there.
No. The whole issue is that the seller needs to maintain an online service to allow you access to the movies. This online service costs money so over time is likely not worth the cost. This plus the online service provider undergoing changes (bankruptcy, acquisition, mergers, etc) or they themselves losing rights to the movies. Seems to me that rental or purchases are still unbeatable. The alternative is streaming but the downside is higher costs over time and worse quality movies.
Libraries! They often have digital access to various services—e.g. Kanopy—but also often have lots of physical media sources! It involves a little more planning and a little less algorithm, and there are shows and movies that won't ever be available—e.g. things from Netflix, Apple—but there's enough out there already.
Subscribe, screengrab what you like, unsubscribe. Repeat. Really easy to do in a virtual machine, so it doesn't conflict with anything else happening on the computer.
You can stream your own stuff, from home, to all of your devices and your friends' devices, for free. And since the movies are on your own hardware, you have them forever. Movies, tv, music, books, comic books, video game roms, basically any sort of media you can even name. And it's been possible for you to do so for the last 15 years, maybe more.
I'm mostly down to one. It's called Daddyflix (Jellyfin, actually) and runs on a Mac Mini in my home office. Costs close to zero, is accessible everywhere and there's no ads or other bullshit.
Yeah same. I have an agent running on it, so whenever one of my kids asks to watch something that their friends have told them about it, provided it's not retarded, I tell the agent to go find it and it shows up on the kids TV. No monthly bullshit (apart from the AI supscription I pay for anyway). Automated piracy. I love it.
Which metric of inflation are you adjusting it to? And which assumptions are built into the goods and services measured, as well as their respective weights, of that index?
I am still happy with my decision to never get entertainment subscription services. I buy CDs (that I rip) and BDs (that I let someone else rip, since that's a science in itself). This guarantees me access forever and I get to sell down the line, if I feel like it.
Streaming services do not offer you what you like forever, they offer you what you didn't know about for the amount of time you need to watch it. So these are two different things
Same here, that's the main value I get from especially music streaming services: I hear about anartist, and can immediately go check otu their discography.
There is so much garbage on streaming platforms, I rather research and pay per song/movie than waste time on trash. And that was before AI slop. Only reason I have subscriptions is family (cheap babysitter)
I have a hard time understanding your opinion. What do you even mean by garbage? There's thousands of legitimate music bands/musicians on these platforms. Naturally you won't care for a majority of it, but an interpret being niche doesn't make them garbage.
So dont listen to it? I mean what is the problem here.
I never listen to basically anything spotify recommends me, just songs from bands I already know and love. And if I were to purchase the whole discography of the breadth of music I listen to it would cost the down payment on my house
FWIW I went through a phase of this (feeling like streaming services were full of low grade stuff) until one day when basically nobody seemed to understand me except Amazon Music, which has an almost eerie recommendation mechanism that I think people don’t talk about much because the rest of the app is so meh.
In one single afternoon Amazon
Music served up loads of niche old favourites I had not thought to search for, introduced me to a couple of artists I would not have known existed otherwise, and probably rescued my failing love of music.
I now play a game with it and pick somewhat diametrically opposed aspects of my music tastes in quick succession— Superorganism, Cardiacs, Gavin Bryars, Nanci Griffith, Vivaldi, Anouskha Shankar, say — and then see what it comes up with. Invariably one of the recommendations will be something I already adore and one will change my life.
I stumbled into the Chris Thile multiverse this way, for instance.
Movies and TV shows I can maybe see. There hasn't really be a show that I really wanted to watch for the past... two years, except a few that are on public broadcast or only available on DVD.
Music I don't get, you can't even buy a single CD for the price of a streaming music subscription, unless you buy used, in which case you can get as many as 10 CDs per month.
Video streaming and it's licensing model is horribly horribly broken, there's no reason why I should have three to five subscriptions just so HBO and Netflix can produce yet another drawn out true crime show about someone how got lost half way around the world in 1983.
I'm not questioning not having streaming services. I'm questioning it actually being cheaper than buying physical media in the long term for anyone who listens to more than the occasional song or watches the occasional movie.
If the answer is "I pirate stuff", that's fine. But just be honest about it.
It's absolutely cheaper in the long run for me. I spent a fair bit on my CDs (and digital downloads), sure. But I never need to pay another dime in my life. I'm going to guess that I spent somewhere around $1000 on my music collection. But $13/mo for Spotify for 60 years (if we figure one listens to music from 15-75) is $9360. I'm coming out quite far ahead by owning my music.
If you are someone who wants to frequently listen to new music, then sure, Spotify is cheaper than constantly buying new albums. But I at least don't do that; I listen to the same music I listened to as a teenager and I pick up 0-1 new albums per year. So again, no real advantage to using Spotify.
Tbh just recently I found the full extended version box set of LotR on DVD just lying on the street together with ~dozens more decent movies.
I could probably fund my viewing habits entirely out of found stuff.
As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.
Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.
Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex
You know computers have the ability to compress videos, right?
>Do I really need 4k HDR to enjoy Seinfeld?
No, but the difference between 480p and even 1080p is pretty significant and definitely makes the viewing experience just generally more enjoyable. But that's just Seinfeld, where you can basically close your eyes and guess what is being shown 90% of the time with great accuracy. Where this doesn't work is with movies/shows/etc. where the visual component is important. If you go to a LotR watch party and bring a 480p rip and expect people to watch that, then you might need to get your eyes checked.
Some are 576p and at that point the difference to higher resolutions isn't as pronounced, especially if you sit a fair bit away from a TV that isn't 120".
This is going to vary by age range, right? For anyone over the age of ~35, the percentage has to be way, way higher than the full population, regardless of technical capability.
Some of us owned thousands of albums (or movies, or shows) on physical media before the legal streaming party even started.
Personally, I also listen to a lot of ad-free college radio and watch a lot of online videos. Depending on what type of entertainment you enjoy, it's really not hard to pay next to nothing for it without compromising.
LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, mp3 players, etc.
You didn't have the whole world at your hands. You had to pick what to listen to, what to buy, what to carry.
Yes, it's nice having the world available, but also, it's nice being able to sometimes think, ponder, make a decision, and explore that decision.
Based on all the responses, people need to learn to make a decision and live with it for a bit.
- Picked a song and it's not the perfect one? meh, okay.
- Also learn to be in the quiet. Oh, the song is not meh, but bad? Turn it off. It's okay.
- learn to read a book
buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.
Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13
There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.
So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.
300 songs is not many at all. I have purchased around 20,000 songs in my life. Would it have been cheaper to use Spotify? I suppose so but (a) they don’t have all the music I want and (b) I prefer having the independence to control my media. Also Spotify didn’t exist when I started :)
300 songs might not sound like many, yet that is how many items have been added to my library or to a playlist in 12 years.
So I can't really speak to anything else than that. That's my usage pattern, yours may be different.
I keep yearly playlists (starting 2023) where I add songs I like and each one is only about 30 songs on average, so that somewhat matches the aggregate number over a decade..
I guess I stick to the things I like and find things I like in DJ sets or on the Gym radio- I'm not investigating new music through subscription services.
I have 15 years worth of songs, account is less than 10 years old. Arguably I would be okay dropping some of those songs if I wanted to buy the songs. The biggest difference for me though is the issue of discoverability. It is very easy for me to find and save new songs on Spotify, it would be much harder for me to find the songs I like if I had to pay for them, especially since a lot of the songs I like are not just songs from popular artists but are often just one of two random songs from random artists. Is there a good middle ground here? I keep a copy of my song list in case I want to ditch Spotify but this is the main hurdle for me.
> buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.
Sure.
And when I had Spotify I added about that to my liked songs every month.
> There is a compounding effect
That doesn't sound compounding, it sounds like a linear increase of 13 per month.
> for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
Yes, that is the advantage of Spotify and other steaming services.
I can listen to dozens of new songs a day, picking out my favorites while being exposed to new music allowing me to find more that I like.
And if I don't like it, meh, didn't cost me anything.
A library of 300 songs is tiny.
I guess you don't listen to much music?
Back before I lived in the city 300 songs would have lasted a week, I'd statistically hear a repeat on the drive home on the first day.
In my last.fm account it says I have listened 122.000 different tracks, I would have gone mad listening for the 300 same songs for 12 years, it would be like torture for me.
Not everybody listens to music all of the time. I almost never listen to music. I watch few movies and mostly, I rewatch old ones that I like. Paying that amount of money for any subscription to a content faucet (while Youtube is still free, if you absolutely must watch video) sounds crazy to me.
Buying breaking bad on DVD is <3 months of netflix subscription (no ads).
So if you watch <2 seasons per month on average, you already come out ahead, and this is assuming only a single subscription.
People tend to wastly overpay for subscriptions because they end up underutilized and are typically never cancelled quickly enough because people are lazy.
I mean obviously there are people that consume a lot more movie entertainment than the average, but I'm personally getting nowhere close to 70 seasons per year.
Bingewatching occasionally might not be enough to economically justify your subscriptions.
It should be easy to calculate this for your own needs based on your playlists. The advantage of buying is that you build up your own catalog of artists that you listen to regularly which means you don’t have to keep paying for them. So, at first, buying the albums would be more expensive but after a few years it would become much less expensive. The exception would be if you are always looking for the latest tracks by a large number of artists but I don’t think that’s most people.
Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.
Our society overconsumes by insane degrees. TBH the world would probably be a better place if most people limited their consumption to what they could reasonably acquire on disk.
As you age, you have less need to grow your collection. You'll also forget about stuff from decades ago and can watch everything again without remembering much of anything.
Similarly, as you age you'll have less time spending on entertainment.
The initial investment might be higher, but it will eventually be cheaper. And you'll curate more instead of mindlessly watching whatever crap there is.
Don't just look at the next decade. Look at the entire rest of your life and keep in mind that inflation made a thirty cent school meal go up to five dollar over the course of someone's life. Your money will continue to lose value, so you'll have to pay more and more for streaming. And you can never stop without losing access to everything and being left with nothing.
It's not way cheaper long-term at all, I mean unless you really watch/listen to a tiny amount of content, you can rip the same way with Netflix, Hulu and so-on as well so I don't see how that makes it more durable?
What you are doing is practically the same equivalent as downloading torrents, how do you have "more guarantees" than just downloading?
PS: I'm saying this because what you are doing is already illegal so there is virtually no difference.
It's definitely cheaper long term for me. I don't watch/listen to a tiny amount of content, but the cost of buying the stuff once and never paying a dime after comes out far ahead of the cost of a subscription every month for life.
I'm not even buying. If governments think my data is worthless and e.g. don't kill the businessmodel behind data brokers, then why should I respect their copyright laws?
Well they do have a choice, and that's to switch to windows.
I run linux too but I'm not going to pretend like my choice to run a niche setup means I'm entitled to pirate content because they don't 100% support it
We aren't talking about a choice between running a mainstream setup or a niche setup though. There is much more to this choice—I'm sure you understand what I mean. I don't want to dive into this discussion, I just want to highlight that it isn't as simple as you suggested.
I don't see why you'd be any less "entitled" than you would be to go outside and play in the dirt or watch birds. What difference does it make to them? They've told you they don't want you as a customer anyway, and you're not using their resources since you'd be downloading it from someone else, so your decision has literally no impact on them, and carries no moral weight at all.
Surely we are all entitled to do anything that does not affect others by default?
I buy movies on Bluray and physical games for “trinket” collecting aspect mainly, but it’s also a gatekeeper to my consumption habits. DRM-free Digital is a better method of preservation
I only buy things that I’m really motivated to watch and play, and it makes it much more fulfilling as a result. Netflix turns watching a movie into something that just feels as hollow as doomscrolling Facebook.
They're $20-50 for complete series on dvd on Amazon right now. That's 14-35 new shows to get every year for the same price. I believe it's cheaper. This is why so many companies push subscriptions. If DVDs made them more money than they'd be pushing you to buy them.
I bought some complete series in DVD in the past but, even putting aside the inconvenience of having to manage discs in the player, there's the quality issue.
I got my 1080p copies on the high seas and that's just a whole different experience.
> Are you really buying and watching DVDs in 2026?
> I got my 1080p copies on the high seas and that's just a whole different experience.
There's _a lot_ of stuff that has only ever been available in SD (or equivalent). Some of it was shot on film that could maybe be remastered, but that costs money. Some of the older/less popular stuff wouldn't be profitable if it was remastered (assuming remastering is even possible).
> even putting aside the inconvenience of having to manage discs in the player
This strategy could at least amass a huge horde of older media (which I think still constitutes the bulk of GOOD media), if combined with thrift stores, for very cheap. Probably you could profit during the buying & selling of the media.
They all have piles of audiobooks, audio cds, dvds, a blu-rays for $1-$2 each. Sometimes big boxes at yard sales for a few bucks.
I get Netflix HD free for 2 through Tmobile,
Hulu for free from Spotify, for probably about 7 years.
Peacock for free from Xfinity.
HBO Max for $3 for 12 months when Amazon had prime sale last year.
I get prime since I have Amazon prime.
you can stream for free/cheap if you lookout for deals.
Buying CDs would be so much more expensive than my Spotify subscription with the variety of music I listen to.
Another helpful element of the streaming services is no incremental cost to try out a new movie or series. I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it.
I will listen to 20 or more new bands each week on Spotify. It’s how I discover new music.
For someone who only listens to a small number of the same CDs over and over it might be cheaper, but it’s not a generally true statement.
Try before you buy is what piracy is for. I would prefer if there was another venue to try before paying, but the industry hasn't figured this out in the past hundred years, so piracy it is.
Streaming could be an acceptable compromise if it was $10 a year for everything in existence, but the catalogues are splintered across multiple services and even when you combine them all there are plenty of things not available.
Try bandcamp (no really it's actually been improving over the years). Also there's still youtube for trying popular ones. Should cover "trying" almost all music legally afaik.
There are a bunch of albums I found on Youtube that I ended up buying, yes. It's only a very small percentage of my collection, though and not generally how I discover new music.
> I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it
IMO, that can also be a problem. When I was young and buying CDs, occasionally you would buy one you didn't like at first. But since you had spent money on it, you'd listen to it. And I discovered some good music that way.
Same thing with movies and tv shows. Sometimes it takes a bit to get going, or I 'm in the wrong mindset for it, but repeated viewing or just sticking with it gets me through that.
My CD collection is around 30 years old. Spotify is currently $13/month. $13 times 30 years is $4680. A lot of people could cover most of what they listen to with that much budgeted to buying CDs... and I'd remind people that the relevant price isn't list price but what you actually pay. Fetching a Michael Jackson album out of a bargain bin for $1 is that album for a $1, whatever someone else somewhere else somewhen else might have paid. I also buy my own movies, and there's a lot of "$5 for the entire Lethal Weapon series collection" sorts of purchases in there.
You're probably objecting to the fact that you don't have 30 years, which is correct, but is also the point of the "long term" part of the comment. Someone who listens to stuff that is on the streaming services and is literally constantly switching between artists and who doesn't mind if some stuff disappears from the services sometimes and so on and so on is perfect for the streaming services, yes. However, the more of those clauses aren't true, the less obviously advantageous the streaming services are, and I don't think most people are sitting down every week and sampling a dozen brand new artists. A lot of people could, with just a bit of care to buy things frugally and used, build a CD collection with $14/month faster than they will want new music.
It can help to jump start a bit and not compare this to building a new collection from scratch. It also helps that such a jump started collection can start by buying the cheap stuff that fills out collections quickly.
On the plus side, the "cosmic jukebox" seems to have mostly worked out for music streaming and most stuff is available from most services, which is a huge point in favor of the music streaming services. In my opinion for movies and TV shows that can be legally acquired (putting aside piracy for the moment) the analysis tips much more heavily in the direction of just building your own collection. I don't even know what it would cost you to buy a month's worth of access to, let's say, 80% of my movie & TV collection (since I have stuff that is just plain not available on streaming at all). They're so fragmented it's insane. And with my rate of consumption of TV, oh, call it $50/month just for a nice round number, that's way more than I'm spending on building out the collection anyhow. Maybe if Hollywood would hire more writers who have taken and passed Writing 101 my consumption rate would increase, but that's not the current situation.
> and I'd remind people that the relevant price isn't list price but what you actually pay. Fetching a Michael Jackson album out of a bargain bin for $1 is that album for a $1,
If going to physical stores, sifting through bargain bins, accepting whatever nobody else wanted, spending the time to physically rip the CD, and hoping that second hand bargain disc wasn’t scratched is your idea of a good time then that’s great for you.
I will pay $4680 over 30 years of my life to not have to deal with that and to be able to listen to anything I want whenever I want without having to manage a library or streaming setup.
That honestly sounds like a bargain when I consider the time saved over 30 years!
Once your collection is built, thirty years down the line, you'll add less than five CDs per year. With streaming however, you'll end up paying a whole lot more than $5000 for the next 30 years, thanks to inflation. If you started this journey at 20 years old, you'll only be 80 after 60 years of streaming, but you might get to live until 110 and get to pay for yet another 30 years, which you may not be able to afford at that point in your life anymore.
There's also an interesting side effect of owning limited media that streaming advocates overlook.
When you own 3 albums, you'll listen to them more often. You will put more effort into memorizing them. You'll listen to the tracks that were not designed to be radio hits by a committee but were instead the songs the band came up with on their own.
You get way more out of your investment when you invest mentally and emotionally into the full spectrum of their music.
This guy is talking about finding 20 new bands a month. He's not getting anything out of it other than a mild dopamine hit, and he thinks he's somehow cool for that?
It's like being a connoisseur of children's cereal and never having home cooked steak and eggs for breakfast. It's like bragging about your weight loss journey because you started smoking crack.
Is that a good thing? One of the benefits to streaming for me is precisely that I don't want to get stuck being an old guy who just listens to music from when I was a teenager/young adult. 20 new bands per month is certainly excessive, but with the radio long-dead, how do you discover new music without some kind of streaming service?
Music stores still exist. Many of them have setups that let you listen to clips from new albums as well. You can also buy secondhand albums at thrift stores and pawn shops, or trade with others.
Friends might mention a band they enjoy, or you might hear a snippet on a video and look into it. Movie soundtracks occasionally have great music from well-established bands I've never heard of.
And you can go to live shows and check out local artists, buy their merch if they're any good.
Streaming is not the only way. Never has been, and never will be.
As far as your first question, is that a good thing, it's entirely subjective. But listening to a full album when you only "like" one song on it will expose you to new music, and might broaden your horizons or help you develop taste.
You have to actually look not just get spoon fed by the algorithm. Community is how you find music. Subreddits, forums, record stores. You find reviewers with similar tastes and see what they like. You search “bands like X” on the Internet. You keep up with artists you like and watch for new albums. It’s more active than just letting the algorithm feed you stuff but it works. Also radio still exists and public radio especially is still great for discovery.
Or if you’re ripping your CDs and listening via apps you can just scrobble and get algo recommendations still while owning your music and without a monthly fee.
"You'll listen to the tracks that were not designed to be radio hits by a committee but were instead the songs the band came up with on their own."
And amplifying that, we see more and more "built for streaming" music, which is not the sort of music I want to listen to. I have phrased that carefully; it is a personal opinion and I won't criticize anyone who discovers that actually, yes, generic AI rock that is pumped out by the hour is something they find some use for. I could see someone who wouldn't want to "listen" to that with intentionality finding it useful to code to or as background noise in their life or something. But it's not what I want, and unless the streaming services do something about it it is what is going to dominate their platforms over time.
I don't go in for super deep relationships with the musicians, reading about their histories and stuff, but I do enjoy the way that the music I like most on first listen often pales quickly and the tracks that I initially didn't like very well become my favorites.
I don't think that logic really holds but its pushed by spotify. People used to listen to a lot of varied music -- and theres a lot of ways to do that still without paying for spotify.
Anyways Spotify is just a platform/gatekeeper for record labels to push their products and theres no way that spotify prices ever become static. They will need to continue to push more products through the model to continue to grow and pay for company especially as all the other players have wizened up.
FWIW if you lapse in payment they kill all your downloaded content immediately. Super annoying service. I get why but like 10 days after probably about 10 years of subscription seems like a real jerk move. Even content that wasn't theirs and was mine -- they wiped it. You own nothing.
I don’t think you’re in the majority? 20 new bands a week is… I’ve met music lovers with hi-fi setups that maybe try 3 new albums a week! That’s really quite a lot.
If I enjoy an album, I’ll listen to it some 15-20 times before picking favourite songs or simply moving on. What you’re describing sounds more like consuming albums, not enjoying them. My 2 cents :)
> 20 new bands a week is… I’ve met music lovers with hi-fi setups that maybe try 3 new albums a week! That’s really quite a lot.
If you’re thinking albums and hi-fi setups, it would be a lot!
A valuable part of streaming services is the recommendation engine. Spotify generates a new playlist called Discover Weekly that has songs and bands loosely related to what I’ve been listening to. I turn it on while I do yardwork. If I like something I pause and add it to a playlist.
It also has options to continue playing related music when your playlist runs out. You can also enable a mode that mixes suggestions in between songs in your playlist to mix it up.
I’ve discovered a lot of new music this way. It’s probably great for small bands who have good music but lack a marketing budget to get it out there.
I just always cancel my subscription directly after subscribing. So only pay for a month basically. A new show is out that you want to watch, subscribe, cancel directly, watch it. And just repeat when the next season is out. I never understood why people maintain their subscription across multiple services
Because it's a pain to mess around subscribing/cancelling over and over. Time is far more valuable than money and the older I get the more the disparity grows.
But by torrenting you are participating and engaging with that culture...
I get it, the big brands etc aren't very palatable. And some things get lost with no way to purchase because the companies don't care. But for things that are readily available I find it just as easy to buy if for a few bucks on ebay / local library sale / etc.
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched information in the world, but with such an obviously vibecoded site I'm not going to attempt to read it.
You could be presenting the most carefully-researched text in the world, but with such obviously machine made paper I'm not going to attempt to read it.
Even if the information is accurate, I'm calling it low effort slop... Smart LLMs have basically automated producing a plausible looking "content farm".
FrontPage didn't generate your content for you! So there was no reason to assume a FrontPage page might be meaningless just from how it looked. For AI-generated sites, though, if the page looks like slop, is it worth bothering to figure out if it actually is slop? It's not like they're uncorrelated variables. Sure, occasionally it won't be. But I'm drowning here. I must simply assume that if someone is serious about conveying a message, they won't package it in this form.
I don't think it's even gatekeeping. You could copy-paste two tables and write two sentences into a Word document and export to HTML, one of the laziest possible ways to produce a website, and it'd still be less off-putting because it doesn't have the association with slop content.
The TV license is insane to me, as a non-brit moving to the uk.
I am happy to pay a reasonable price for something I use.
But the threats I get about a GBP 1,000 is very un-british.
I don't know who runs the TV licensing scheme but they need to be sacked.
Thankfully if you can look past this gamesmanship then it is possible to call them and decline to participate in this nonsense.
The "licensing" has a point because it does make the BBC more impartial since the current government cannot adjust their funding down or up depending on their programming.
However, the same aim could be achieved by just setting a formula in law. 1 pound per british citizen, or 0.0001% of the average income per citizen last year. Numbers pulled out of ass as i have no idea what an UK tv license costs. As long as they make the formula extremely hard to change, it will work.
"TV licensing" exists in a lot of countries and it funds the public service broadcaster. It is essentially a tax, it just happens to be collected by a third party (in this case, Crapita) rather than other tax collecting mechanisms.
Some countries (like Finland or Switzerland) require you to pay it even if you don't own a TV. It's really just a tax.
The reasoning for it not being a tax is that the public service broadcaster should have political independence from the government. Most people don't want their country to have a "government mouthpiece" state broadcaster, and it is much easier for the government to tell the broadcaster what to do and say by fucking with its funding if it's directly funded from the treasury.
Other countries do the same thing with a different trick, such as inserting it into your electricity bill.
The UK is a powerhouse in media production, part of that is due to the BBC funding all sorts of productions, both the visible (actors, etc.) and the invisble (camera operators, set designers, costumers, writers, directors...).
It has also been clear for centuries that private media, historically just the newspapers, but now TV channels, film studios, etc., have been disastrous, as their private owners either focus on profitability and pump out scandal and lurid stories, or if they've made their millions some other way, they run a paper in order to pump out biased propaganda. So a state-funded but not state-controlled broadcaster is an ideal thing to have.
> the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.
I get a letter every month from the licencing people, it just goes in the bin. I've had 1 visit, he asked to come in, I said no. That was basically the end of it.
(For the record, I have a TV but I currently have no way to watch live TV on it, so why should I have a licence! I don't use their service)
Some of it is a function of my household's love of sports, and their fragmentation across the services. Some of its just sheer laziness to pick one and stick with it or rotate the subscriptions.
I don't think I could realistically drop lower than 3 on this list though: Spotify gets used constantly. One TV/Video streaming service. My wife would likely divorce me if I cancelled YouTube Premium.
I think the point is that inflation numbers are bs. The official number from 2021 to today is 23%. But we didn't see prices only 23%. A restaurant mean didn't go from $20 to $25. It easily went up 50% or more.
Inflation isn't some force of nature that needs to be accounted for like the curvature of the earth.
Agreed, $95.91 a month in 2021-03 is $120.91 in July 2026 dollars. The current cost is $154.41, so it grew $33.50 a month after accounting for inflation.
I am probably an outlier but I don't honestly know how much someone can watch on theses services to be always subscribed, I subscribe to watch something and unsubscribe after a month or two because that's when I'm well and done. My husband had some free three months of Disney+ and I don't think either of us watched a single thing on there in that three months. Tubi has better content than Disney+.
Are you saying that a single data point contains the same amount of information as a dataset of hundreds if not thousands of entries from across the economy?
Completely wrong. CPI is based on the prices of all things people buy. Comparing inflation in one sector to inflation in the whole economy is a very useful signal.
No, it's like making a snow report for a handful of skiing areas in a small geographical area (e.g. Sierras) and then contextualizing it against the snow report for all skiing areas in the broader region (e.g. Western US).
Context matters, because absent it folks will look at these increases and shrug it off as inflation (or let companies shrug it off with that excuse).
To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points.
From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.
Important context here is that many of these streaming services operated at a loss for years, and some still are. HBO Max didn’t turn a profit until 2023 and Disney only become profitable in 2024 after bundling with Hulu. AFAIK Paramount+ and Peacock are still in the red.
Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.
Is that important context? I would say it's not. What if those companies already made massive profits and said "I think people are willing to pay more for this, so I'm going to raise the price." And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I've raised the price of my services many times in my career for exactly the same reason.
They are the ones who set the market so that’s on them. They are the ones who set what people were willing to tolerate. If it’s not sustainable, then it’s not a good business. They aren’t entitled to existing.
Armchair theories on paramount and peacock, so take with a mountain of salt:
Paramount will probably stay in the red because they are overly-catering to conservatives (a little too much emphasis on baby boomers as well), narrowing their potential audience.
Peacock just doesn’t have enough going for it period. Weak library and not a real first tier consideration for folks
In the old torrent days I was only watching classical masterpieces and top level world directors. In the streaming era I only watch mediocre straight-to-streaming movies, few popular TV series and too much reality TV that I'm not proud to watch.
Realistically you don't absolutely need a VPS to run your own tunnel through for bittorrent. You can do something like install a virtualbox machine that mounts your local samba file share across the LAN (to store downloaded stuff), and otherwise has a default route outbound to the world through a $5/mo VPN that exits to the Internet in like, Chișinău Moldova. Or similar.
The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.
From an aesthetic point of view, I am getting pretty tired of this obviously LLM generated static site content template design in 2025/2026.
98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar.
Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. "
I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.
Yeah it was interesting to me that I identified it immediately.
Perhaps been spending too much time w/ Claude
It's capable of many different designs but this site tells me Rashid didn't even bother.
New proposal for LLM-on-LLM wars: Have an automated system that retrieves every front page URL link on HN and feeds it into a "smart" LLM for analysis of whether or not the site html, css, JS and general template layout match that of a known LLM generation engine. Then give it a "probably vibe coded slop" rank number. If you can't beat 'em, let them fight...
As a paid service it probably works great. In the spirit of weaponizing vibecoded slop vs vibecoded slop, I'm fairly sure that I could 'teach' locally hosted Qwen 3.8-Flash-Next to identify vibe coded slop, with a thorough enough system prompt and access to like, playwright and headless chromium.
Or since a lot of vibe coded static sites are just plain html, cs, js, a first try attempt via wget to mirror the first 500KB of the site and then analyze it.
It looks close to the kind of documentation artifacts GPT 5.6 Sol would generate for me.
That style is still rare enough that I prefer it over OP's "we installed shadcn + Tailwind and look like every seed-stage startup SaaS from 2024" style.
Please, do not use LLMs to do actual statistics. They suck at doing actual statistics (like they suck at everything else).
Use proven traditional statistical methods like supervised learning for this. You can use traditional (not large) language models to tokenize the content and then a supervised learning trained on the most popular models to detect if those models generated the content.
Why can't anyone just run it through one of the "make this not appear so clearly LLM-generated" obfuscation utilities open sourced on GitHub, or something similar just with prompts.
The level of phoning in the complete lack of any work beyond the absolute bare minimum is the most frustrating aspect to me.
In the spirit of not speedrunning towards the dead internet theory, then what we need is a slop-detector that detects things that have been run through a script to "make this obviously not look like slop", in a recursive looping battle royale until the heat death of the universe.
If you create content that people like, with a distinct style, one can direct their LLM to it and copy the style. The more content you have out there the better the copy will be. I don’t think it’s really a differentiation you can rely upon
The world you are describing assumes nobody will produce anything anymore because of theft. I think there will be a reset and hopefully content producers like Mr Beast will lose out. But, I do not think people, similar to the original participants on the Internet, will refuse to make anything. I expect a return to Live journal similar content where we get actual opinions even if we sadly lose out on long tail content/production because people do not want to work hard for free. The return of the hobby style Internet isn't necessarily bad.
> The world you are describing assumes nobody will produce anything anymore because of theft.
I don’t believe that at all, and it’s not implied in my comments. What I’m saying is that the value isn’t in the style, that part can also be replicated. It’s not in the content, that can be replicated. It’s the same for >90% of startup ideas people come up with when discovering agent coding. You were able to create a cool SaaS project in a weekend? Congrats. Any other dev can point their LLM to your website/app and make a clone in even less time. The safe ones have a high barrier of entry, such as hardware, or similar, but the vast majority is trivially cloneable.
I don’t know what that will result in. I assume we will be chasing more human experiences, but I have no idea.
I would say, because not everyone cares as deeply as you do.
If it's readable and aesthetic, it is perfectly serviceable for the purpose of reading a post.
Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles, so most of what's going on is actually your feelings about AI taking primacy.
> Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles
Apologism at best. People have been bemoaning this issue for a while now..., pre-AI even.
First time I'm seeing this defended from an "oh you're just anti AI" perspective (which, ironically, is exactly the sort of bare minimum a couple comments over was bemoaning)
I assure you that I am a meat based mammal that engages in normal human activities such as respiration and generation of saliva. I also enjoy consuming calories and watching branded entertainment products.
Looks like every other website to me, even before Claude was a thing. IMHO new sites have looked like this for a long time.
I think it's less of a distinct aesthetic rather than having "Tells" in the template that you might be sensitive to for having worked with it.
I've seen word documents that the first time I saw them I thought nothing of it. Wasn't until I had ChatGPT work on something later and noticed it's exact use of particular fonts and colors that I realized the other was AI generated.
There was nothing materially wrong with the documents, but after seeing the connection you can't unsee it. It's not really a new or AI specific phenomenon either, any template can trigger it. like how every RPG maker game looks the same, or every substack blogs all are samey, even on custom domains.
I can understand that its tiresome, but its also not new.
Every medium, livejournal, blogger, etc page in the look nearly exactly the same. Or Twitter Bootstrap sites.
I'll give them some credit here: its at least been worked into a terse format unlike a lot of the docs I get from people who seem to think AI's ability to add verbosity is somehow a virtue.
Honestly, this feels like we're in the Geocities era again. Tons of people are making stuff again.
I'm excited by that.
And even LLM design tropes are better than seeing the same platform design on every page. The same Instagram, Reddit, X pages over and over and over forever. It's monotonous design. Platforms suck in more ways than that, though - you're forced into their constraints, algo bait, spam, hyper-drama, Reddit mods, contrarian view downvoting, etc.
It feels like we're entering the 90's - 2008 era again. The indie web. Microformats and self-distribution and hacking and remixing.
Interesting, as someone who started making sites on geocities I don't find this anything the same. I remember learning tons about weird little niche hobbies and making little learning sites and stuff with my own brand of weird Photoshop graphics.
An llm making the exact same layouts for everyone with obviously zero input from anyone who cares seems absolutely nothing like the old geocities days.
This couldn't be further from the truth. The indie web was exciting because it was the product of distinct human voices. LLMs only speak in one voice (with subtle differences between the major models but similar "tells"). This is why so many people have such an immediate and visceral negative reaction to AI slop. It is distinctly lacking the human spark and it is uncanny and off-putting in that way.
Looking the same is not itself the problem. This is a same-looking that indicates a lack of human thought underlying it. That is a problem, and it is concerning to me if one does not think this.
Even the URL captures the ubiquitous "honestly / genuinely / let me be up front" verbal tick that Claude can't resist. That is, "Rashid" likely couldn't even be bothered to come up with his own website name. I hate it.
Also the dark theme is something not everybody likes. Especially with red-green inside. Think of color-blind people. My eyes are in pain from just trying to focus.
That's the surprising part. It's pretty obviously spit out by /frontend-design, the tells are too obvious because Claude has built me too many of these, but /frontend-design by default will give you both a dark and a light theme and make it adapt to system theme with no prompting at all, so why would someone build a lazy stock /frontend-design but override that specifically?
Very very small fonts is one of the things that annoys me most; truly a sign that design-based post-training is in the hands of the young and inexperienced. Far too many AI-generated site designs look like a teenage fan site designer trying to do “corporate”
I'm surprised that with the complaints that companies trained on everything that it results in the LLM having aesthetic preferences. With all of the templates available on sites like Wix or Squarespace, you'd think generated sites would have more variety. Then again, I have no idea what the prompts are that generate these sites to know if there's something that gives the generator the notion the style is the one people want.
I’m not meaning to be abrasive here, but these comments are also getting old and tired.
And it’s not even relevant to what’s actually on the site linked.
Who cares if the site is LLM generated? Did you care before when you saw the same Wordpress theme repeatedly, or Bootstrap layouts?
The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
Edit to clarify: I read the comment as the issue being the look and feel of the site being AI generated - as in, “this website looks AI generated. It sucks.” NOT the content itself being AI generated.
Using AI to spit out cookie cutter layouts is fine, offloading your thinking onto AI is not something I support.
My stance: An AI generated website with the authors original thoughts is fine to me. I don’t care what it looks like, as long as it serves its purpose.
Different people have different feelings. Bucketing into binary "good" and "not good" based on whether they have the exact same framing as you do is dehumanizing. Stop it. Respect other people.
There is space for nuance:
If you're spitting out raw LLM output and not looking at or reading it and requiring other people to use it as-is, while representing it as your own original work, you are treating your own time and attention as more valuable than that of others. You can expect a reaction based on this.
If you're blanket-dismissing someone else's work because they used one or more specific tools, regardless of how much of their own time and attention they put into it before sharing it in a place where you were able to see it -- or perhaps you're doing that dismissal without even seeing it -- you are treating their time and attention as superficial and a rounding error compared with their choice of tools. You can expect a reaction based on this.
In between, there is a _whole_ lot of room for different take and opinions, and we're collectively figuring out what's acceptable and what isn't. We'll never fully get there and that is Okay. But we can at least try to calibrate on "are we treating other people respectfully" instead of a shitty proxy for it.
One of these things was wholesale systemized actual state-run murder. The other is a range that encompasses big companies run by awful people and also a binary blob I can run on a GPU in my basement.
Me. Because if there's no human checking the content I don't actually have a reliable signal that what I'm reading is true.
I'm not a subject matter expert here but I know that list includes Disney+ at $18.99 and Hulu at $18.99... but Disney and Hulu bundled together is $19.99. From the exact source the site cites:
It's not like the before times were a paradise but putting together anything like this took time. If you're going to expend hours creating the page, the table etc etc then you're far more likely to also pay attention to the research. In LLM land you can just tell Claude to fart out an investigation in a few minutes and never invest time in it.
>If you're going to expend hours creating the page, the table etc etc then you're far more likely to also pay attention to the research
There are and were entire sites and networks dedicated to conspiracy and disinformation. Hell, people have been payed to spread disinformation. People have done it deliberately for the lolz.
It has alway been possibly to get your nonsense enrgaved upon the web in an afternoon. That it now takes less time is irrelevant. You should have been checking your sources then, and you should be checking your sources now.
Authors of the past would often not provide sources, so if you were interested you'd have to track them down. This is also true today.
That an LLM is in the loop is no different, in kind, from the old copy-pasta and network driven spread of misinformation. The problem was never the tools (ah, damn, now anyone who knows [html] can just lie on the internet)(ah, damn now anyone who knows [prompting] can just lie on the internet).
The problem isn't the tools, it's the users unwillingness and or reluctance to develop critical reading and thinking skills. If you're using "Not an LLM" as a proxy for "gains reliability in my mind" then you're being lazy. It is just as easy to lie without an LLM.
Lots of people. Even on HN, which is wildly unrepresentative of the US as a whole, comments that "this site was AI-generated" are commonly upvoted to the top because people do care.
That includes me. If it's AI-generated, I don't care about it - if it wasn't worth their time to write, it's not worth my time to read. I can generate it myself.
> The content is what’s interesting
If it's generated, the odds of it being wrong are far higher, because people who publish generated content are far less likely to care about quality or correctness.
Where do you consider the line here to be? What if the design and the core code is mine but I use AI to apply it to additional elements, pages, etc (something I do a fair amount)? What if I designed, or had a very good human designer design, an entire well-crafted design system and design language in Figma but feed it to AI to help turn it into static assets?
What if all I used AI for was to more quickly drive tedious work, like mass-change colors, preview variants, or export assets?
Is it the replacement of the creative aspects of a craft with AI when I lose your interest, or is it the moment I utilize it at all?
You don’t get it do you?
The content is wrong and this aesthetic means: you cannot trust this.
As someone who makes a living making website I wouldn’t have expected the tide to turn so fast.
Clients now hire me to absolutely NOT have this aesthetic
> I’m not meaning to be abrasive here, but these comments are also getting old and tired.
I always check the comment section first because I do not wish to engage with slop content.
> The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
Can you trust AI content at face value? No you can't. AI has been shown time and time again to just hallucinate shit out of thin air.
And that is why I want to avoid interacting with any kind of GenAI/LLM/... garbage. I always find the need to second-check whatever I'm reading and it is highly annoying.
Another issue is that "This site was made with AI" just doesn't really add much to the conversation. There will very likely come a time soon when 95-99% of the sites that make the HN front page will be AI-assisted or AI-generated. What are these people going to do? Comment "This site was made with AI" on every single article? Why not just add a disclaimer to the top of HN that says "Most of these articles are made with AI" so the commenters don't have to log in just to tell us each and every time?
I used to get downvoted when I complained that a site uses 6 point font, or when it renders all of its text in a small 5cm vertical strip down the middle of the page, or when it didn't work without JavaScript... and all my other personal bug-a-boos. I stopped because I realized those comments add nothing to the conversation.
As long as these comments come up, people haven't given up against this flood. It's a good sign. Also consider cause and effect. These comments only exist because of AI content.
> Using AI to spit out cookie cutter layouts is fine, offloading your thinking onto AI is not something I support.
This is the core of the problem, I have absolutely no confidence that any of the specific number figures or parameters listed anywhere in the website are factual. For all I know they're AI hallucinations. Or wildly out of date based on the final training date of some model. It absolutely does not look like data that somebody collected "by hand" and verified as true.
1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me.
2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't).
With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'll gladly pay for them and download them(last purchase from a few weeks ago). If not - pirating it is.
They do seem to make it easy to push people over any moral objection to piracy. Often more because of fragmentation than price, but pushing the price makes it easier. And the platforms (Jellyfin as one example) make sharing what you have with family/friends easier now also.
I don't have a great view, though, whether this is even visible to the streaming platforms. I suspect they don't really lose much notable revenue from piracy anymore. While it's matured some recently, it's not as easy as "download limewire".
I'm not fully convinced here. Objectively it's a lot easier than it was 15 years ago and that is partially because now more people have the skills to expand the ecosystem and the resources to focus on creature comforts. Since 2022 and the last 2 years more than ever, I decided to cut ties to all cloud providers and host everything myself for 4 reasons:
1. I have 0 trust in software companies to have the ability to protect my data, even if they have the best intentions. Partially because of 2
2. AI: everything has to be fed into it, whatever it spits out is treated as gospel by most tech companies and people that 10 years ago were taught to question everything.
3. Price.
4. It is actually easy to setup and if you put in some real thinking into it, it becomes both secure and easy to pass around. Jellyfin is a good example. I installed wireguard on my mum's computer, "double click this, click this button, open your browser, click on this icon" and she has access to my library.
Part of the reason for the overinflated prices and budget cuts in those exact companies is this exact thing: many people got fed up with minor convenience at an ever-increasing price and "amazon for this, netflix for that". Many of us grew up pirating because we had no other choice. Now we do have a choice but instead of a decent trade-off in price-vs-convenience, we got a price to pay and ultimately a ton of inconvenience.
I meant "easy for a non technical person to use". Things like limewire were dead easy back in the beginning. The isps were not paying attention, so you did not need a VPN, there was no setup or anything it worked right after you downloaded it. So it spread in a socially viral like way very quickly. And was being used by fairly non-technical people without assistance.
Jokes aside, luckily for me, I live in a country where torrenting isn't illegal at all and frankly, everyone working for the public sector is too incompetent to do anything about it, even if it were. For example, I know a guy who was taken for investigation cause something dodgy happened from his IP (he hosted a tor exit node) and the investigators had their brains blown when he showed them that tor exit nodes were public information cause they had no idea. At that moment he said "guys, are my taxes seriously going towards your salaries?". At that point they just gave up and send him off.
We noticed this also for the online software services that we use. Many of them increased in price, which I can understand with rising costs. However, a large number of them also have/introduced a 'hostile' structure that force you into paying through the nose. Case in point was the timesheet software that we used:
* They increased the cost of all price tiers.
* They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more.
* And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing.
This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore.
You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...
To play devil's advocate a bit: running software isn't free. If you're paying for an online service, the hosting cost to the company does scale per-seat. It's easy to say that the company only paid the cost of development once (and even then, more users = more development demand), but you're not a user of a single unit of developed software.
For streaming services, I think the development-hosting needle swings way towards hosting. Streaming video is the vast majority of their costs and efforts, so scaling prices per-user is the only sensible option. The "software" of those services is bad and interchangeable, and not what anyone wants or is paying for in the first place.
That may be the case but they are getting so aggressive that I am constantly having to reconfirm devices within my own home. Luckily I just run my own server now but we have HBO for free with my cell plan so that’s the ones subscription we still have. I have to do email 2FA probably every 4th or 5th time we open it because it’s on “too many devices.”
Taking Netflix as example - it has been going downhill steadily, they have a habit of canceling good shows after one or two seasons etc. It is no wonder users get annoyed when they have to pay more over time, and get less for their money. Increasing prices is never going to be popular even when it is justified, but users are more likely to tolerate if the price increase comes with better features or at minimum, no drop in features/quality.
Another egregious thing these subscriptions do is all kinds of dark patterns. Making it super easy to subscribe but super hard to cancel, not informing before charging (how hard can it be to send an email "upcoming charge next week"), showing ads in supposedly "ad-free" services etc. All this just add to the frustration which leads users to cancel.
To play devil's advocate against your DA argument: the guy you're replying to already knows the costs of 6 seats. He said he built his own software to replace it.
He knows better than you do what he had to replace, because he did exactly that.
Still a great ecosystem and value for dollar overall! That's one reason why prices have gone up.
No long-term contracts, no additional hardware needed, no hidden fees. Still the option to not see ads for most of the services. You can freely jump from service to services.
Plenty of promos out there still, too: for example, I get $10 back per month on an ad-free Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle through my credit card. That plan costs me about $31/month: $31 doesn't buy me a meal out with my family, it doesn't buy me a single football ticket, it might get me into one movie with the family if I do some cheap matinee (not counting gas to drive up and snacks).
If you go to a restaurant for a meal, you own nothing after that, but you can be happy. If you go to an entertainment park, you own nothing after that for your ticket, but you can be happy.
Making customer happy is an extraordinary valuable service one can provide, and that doesn't have to require connection with materially owning anything.
Nope, not a Netflix exec. One would imagine if I was, I'd have used Netflix as my example.
I dunno about you, but in my lifetime, if I would have invested in owning VHS, DVD, or HD-DVD, that would not have paid off for me. (I might have owned a lot, but I wouldn't have been happy.)
I guess Blu-Ray has stuck around, but I find that I don't rewatch a ton of movies anyways. I've never felt comfortable buying digital video because I never liked the idea of buying into an ecosystem.
And...discs aren't cheap anyways? Just did a random search - Tron: Legacy (a movie that's been out for awhile, I like, I would re-watch) costs $27.99 to buy a physical copy. So again: $28 to acquire one movie; $31 for me to watch that movie or hundreds of others I want within the course of a month.
Thanks for making me think of this, it's another bullet in support of what I was saying before.
Exactly, what we have now is vastly better than whatever existed before (in terms of convenience and price). Watch when I want, what I want, how I want, and never pay for anything I don't want and never see ads and never have to go somewhere to get it.
I especially like not paying for sports to watch the few shows/movies I like.
Some people who like to (legally) own media might be disappointed, though.
As someone who loves buying music - yeah, I hear that.
I just never really felt like the incentives were quite the same to purchase movies. They've always been constrained by their formats/vendors in a way that was never as true for music, they've always cost more, I don't rewatch movies as much as I'll re-listen to albums, and I think the...I dunno...nature, telos of movies lends itself better to ephemeral access.
Prime's app is ridiculously bad imo. I'm not sure why that is, but everything is slower and takes more clicks and digging than similar apps on the same device. There are also significantly more ads than on Disney+ or Netflix ad tiers.
I find that Netflix and Paramount+ are the American services that offer the best app experience on my (very low-end) smart TV.
I haven't actually paid for Apple TV in some time but I remember thinking it had the worst interface of any streamer I've tried. Impossible to know which show card you had selected.
I like occasionally watching movies. I will rarely watch a movie twice. Streaming would be the best option for me, but I will not subscribe to more than one service. Get your shit together. Do cross licensing. Split production from distribution. Until then I will not be paying for any streaming service.
Why would streaming be the best option for you to watch a movie once? You have long been able to rent movies with just a few clicks from many sellers. Maybe Netflix is the only one where you have to subscribe for a month to watch a movie.
Mostly mediocre to bad entertainment and distractions anyways.
I'm not a fan of the "binge watch chowder" of the last 15 years and much rather extend my collection of actually worthwhile UHD BluRay movies to watch deliberately every other Sunday night or so.
I buy CDs, DVDs and BluRays second hand. You can get pretty good deals because there's still people who sell their entire collection because "everything is available through streaming now!". I just hope there will be much more people who sell their old stuff in order to pay for those rising subscriptions prices.
Surely the cost of storage has not gone up. And the cost of sending the 0’s and 1’s hasn’t gone up either.
Are movie studios demanding vastly more money from the streaming services for the movie and TV content? Maybe the costs to make new movies and tv shows have gone up substantially but has licensing costs for the old movies and shows gone up too?
Are these extra costs just going to the streamers to run up profit? Genuinely curious about the economics here. I know the streaming business is highly competitive so I don’t think it’s just rent seeking so wonder what else is going on.
I cancelled majority of my services for this exact reason. I was a member of netflix since 2015, when I checked my credit card bill last month and saw the charge I really had to question if it was even worth it at this point.
meh, a good number of these had just hit the market in 2021 and clearly had unsustainable prices to drive market penetration.
You can also see the "follow the leader" effect with prices converging around $20. If I had to guess I'd say the next 5+ years we'll see tighter price competition, probably companies following Netflix's pricing hikes and that prices will creep up to 24.99
Price increases are tolerated if the value increases. Even rent-seeking is tolerated if the value is relatively stable. But what we have here is value proposition decreasing from fragmentation and shallow content and increasingly intrusive targeted ads while the prices keep going up.
One of the highest-value streaming subscriptions you can get is PBS Passport. You get it with a $60 donation to either a PBS TV or NPR radio station. The donation is tax-deductible and the PBS subscription is rich with high-quality content for both adults and children.
I've gotten it many years, but rarely watched it, because my login keeps "expiring" on Roku. If I don't watch it for, say, a month, I'll need to log in again. It's terribly inconvenient.
The last PBS produced video I watched (it was on yt) was on the current super El Nino, totally cool. But somehow they managed to segue into more than a few minutes of "Remind white people of what happened 300 years ago" right in the middle of it.
No thanks. I'm here for science, and if your writers are mostly people primarily concerned with making sure they bow at the alter in every single video, I'm 100% out. It's like watching a cooking video produced by a Christian group that works Jesus into chopping carrots.
Its the exact same with NPR as well. There's actually a nice podcast that breaks down their ideological capture and downfall over the years. Its called All Things Reconsidered.
It's funny because I had the exact experience with NPR/member station. I listened to it daily every morning about 15 years ago because my job at the time was perfect for it. Then I changed careers and couldn't listen for a long time.
Five or so years ago I was excited to have a new job that would allow me to listen again and I didn't last a week...
I think you're talking about "Weathered." About 150 years ago about 8m people died in India, because during an El Nino drought and famine British companies continued exporting food from India.
I guess you could call that "white people guilt" but you could also say that it's valuable context that the impacts of climate change can be exasperated by economic and national policies.
The "Remind white people of what happened 300 years ago" in question is an explainer on how a 19th century Super El Nino wiped out over 3% of the world's population, mostly in Asia, despite the fact that these regions had experienced famines and droughts at numerous points in their prior history. The video then asks the question, "Why was this so much more deadly?"
The explanation posits that this was only possible due to the multiplier of the rapidly expanding British empire. It is not posited as British/white people are bad, it is posited as society, politics and trade creating a multiplier effect. The whole point of this section in the video is to setup the final chapter of the video, asking the question, "Could this happen again?", which feels like a valid question given that society, politics, and trade have exponentially evolved since the 19th century.
This section of the video is portrayed so agnostically that I felt compelled to reply to your vague criticism.
Here is the video linked to the timestamp of the aforementioned section, which is only around 2 minutes long, so others can pass their own judgement: https://youtu.be/69o-8Mtd3Kc&t=330
Not sure how you can be here for the science if you're not willing to be here for the history.
That sounds like the alcohol permit loophole. Instead of getting a permit to sell alcohol, just buy this $10 pack of peanuts and it comes with a free beer. This is known to come with hefty fines btw.
That said, If the gift is insubstantial in value it’s allowable. Or they’re supposed to give you a statement of the value and you have to deduct the donation less value amount. My thought is maybe the content is or will be free and the app is just a convenient portal to consume it. So one would claim it’s rather insubstantial. But to be honest, no auditor would really dig too deep into a donation to PBS.
Several of these services launched around 2021 with introductory pricing, which is necessary for attracting new users to a new service.
Most people I know don’t subscribe to every service and then leave it that way. They might have Spotify and 1-3 video streaming services at a time. They cancel one and start a different one when they want to watching something new.
Corollary to that is the then-newish services had less content now.
A higher price alone for the same "tier" does not necessarily mean less value.
I'd want to also estimate the overall quantity and quality offered for the higher price. Obviously, quality is subjective, but for each of those services, does a e.g., 43% increase in cost come with a greater or less than 43% increase in available selection? Does it have more or less higher/lower-rated or more/less watched content? More/fewer shows that are truncated after the first one or two seasons?
Notice this increase didn’t reflect in significant higher salaries for the people working in these companies (not the executives) nor more hiring, quite the opposite, more lay offs. This small indicator tells really what’s going on in the economy, more profit to the corps but people still are getting poorer, same thing applies btw to other domains like groceries or other goods or even housing. It’s a wealth distribution problem, it’s not AI, not supply chain shortages, not immigrants, non of these distractions that get pushed around, since covid, these companies and the ones who pull the strings in nations, they discovered and tested something that can easily manipulate the public and make them ok with worse living conditions: fear! If you scare the public enough about a topic and play the fear mongering tactics rights, you have a golden key to control the public: covid, wars, immigrants, protect the kids, AGI, etc etc are all topic of manipulations, follow the money and the people behind them.
The title kind of buries important details about the distribution of these costs and their changes.
For example, Apple TV+ went from $4.99 per month to $14.99 per month, a +200% change, while YouTube Premium went from $11.99 to $15.99, a +33% change.
So services like Apple TV+ are skewing this increase a lot while services like YouTube Premium have remained relatively low. Similarly, Apple TV+ starting at $4.99 per month was clearly a very low price to start (which can probably be mostly attributed to the service's lack of content at that point). It's now at a "normal" price.
Just the same, saying something like something "costs $702/year more" without a point of reference is bad data presentation. The 2021 cost for all of these services was $1,150.92, for a +61% change. I'm not saying that's not substantial, but this kind of information is necessary for these figures to not just be rage bait.
And, of course, if you're simultaneously paying for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium, and Spotify every month, then you're either (a) really into consuming this kind of content and are a "premium subscriber" in the sense that these costs ought to be justified or (b) very bad with managing your time and finances. I suspect normal users subscribe to one or two of these at a time and are probably willing to switch around as prices change, content gets released/pulled, etc. A better analysis would try to do some investigation into this dynamic, since it will probably reveal that people are able to navigate dynamic service subscriptions well enough that they aren't actually experiencing a straight-up +61% increase in costs since 2021.
All of this is to say that this "analysis" barely even qualifies as a valid first-pass at understanding this kind of data. It's literally something that Claude probably churned out in 20 minutes. Everyone can be dissatisfied with the value they get from these streaming services, but this kind of post only helps to muddy the conversation.
The title means exactly what it says and the expanded details are nearly as close to the top of the article and as clearly presented as possible. Why does every article on HN need to find some excuse to make a complaint about the title?
But because it's just looking at the data in the most literal way possible it doesn't factor that in and instead says buying Disney+ and Hulu Premium would be $18.99 each.
Or c) family bundled consumption. Mom likes netflix, dad needs live tv, kids are into youtube, and everyone likes hbo.
Its hard to cancel a subscription when you know it brings joy to an infirmed parent. Youre effectively locked into paying whatever, like $350/mo for xfinity tv simply because thats the only UI they can handle on an old remote.
There’s also c) you just aren’t price sensitive to the changes and find it overall rather immaterial d) can recall how expensive and crappy cable/satellite tv was, still see this as a good deal e) have many people in your household with different media preferences and cost per capita is pretty low
Also you should consider the base period timing is when many of the big movers were in a rollout of their application and thus the price was either artificially low and/or represented a severely limited offering compared to their current offering.
> And, of course, if you're simultaneously paying for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium, and Spotify every month, then you're either (a) really into consuming this kind of content and are a "premium subscriber" in the sense that these costs ought to be justified or (b) very bad with managing your time and finances. I suspect normal users subscribe to one or two of these at a time and are probably willing to switch around as prices change, content gets released/pulled, etc.
Or you're the type of person that watches one or two shows on each of these services that in the days of yesteryear would have all been on Netflix, but since every company that owns a production studio decided to launch their own streaming service now means you need 25 subscriptions to keep up with the handful of decent shows with reasonable production budgets so you aren't stuck otherwise just consuming slop. Given the consolidation in industry, it's even more insult to injury as there's now only a handful of companies that collectively have /multiple/ streaming services per company each with a different fee because our current timeline is one of absolutely egregious extractive behavior and rent-seeking with no compensating controls.
The raise is even worse if you look further back than 2021. Netflix was 7.99 for ages, while the "floor" in 2021 is 13.99. Against the original baseline, the new 19.99 price is not a +43% but a +150%.
Most importantly 13.99 already in 2021 bought LESS than 7.99 or 8.99 bought until a while before. Thanks to the fragmentation, the catalogue was way larger before, and as of 2022 ads were introduced to further insult the customer.
They always try to milk people. It is the same scheme:
1) offer services at comparatively high quality (or at the least not too low in quality) at a fairly cheap price, ideally flat rate
2) lateron increase it to milk the cash cows
3) profit
There was a ~18 month period of time where prices went up 50-100% at stores like CVS and Walgreens. The large subscription price increases are merely matching the real inflation explosion we're seeing from the debasement of the USD due to extreme budget deficits and massive over-spending. Gold also has been correctly reflecting that procession for many years now.
Which is to say it's not the streaming prices, it's everything (except for maybe televisions, for now we get to keep our cheapish 50-80" TVs).
saying "the exact same products" when the products in question are constantly expanding (and occasionally contracting) libraries of video content is definitely "a move"
[OP] honestlyranked | 23 hours ago
The streaming number surprised me. Nine services, flagship tiers:
March 2021: $95.91/month. Today: $154.41/month. That's +61%, or $702 more per year for the same nine subscriptions.
Per service since 2021-03: Apple TV+ +200%, Disney+ +138%, Peacock +100%, Hulu +58%, Netflix +43%, Paramount+ +40%, YouTube Premium +33%, Spotify +30%, HBO Max +23%. 75 documented increases across 11 services, every one linked to the announcement or report that covered it. The most recent was Apple TV+, $12.99 to $14.99 on 28 August.
Two services are tracked but deliberately left out of that basket: YouTube TV (a live-TV bundle, $35 to $82.99 since 2017 — the steepest riser I have, but it is a cable replacement, not an on-demand subscription) and Prime Video (an add-on to a Prime membership, not standalone). Putting either in would have made the headline bigger and the comparison worse.
One methodology note, because I got this wrong first: my initial version summed each service's launch price, which gave a bigger, better headline. But those launches span 2010 to 2021, so that basket never existed — nobody could have bought it. Recomputing from March 2021, the first month all nine existed, gives the smaller +61% figure. I'd rather publish the smaller true one.
Same thing happened with the ad tiers. I expected to find ad-free plans being hiked faster to push people toward advertising. Disney+ fits — ad-free +73% vs ad-supported +50% over the same window. Netflix doesn't: it raised both by exactly 29%. What did happen at both is the cash gap widened — Netflix $8.50 to $11.00/month, Disney+ $3 to $7/month.
The daily side covers hosting, VPN, antivirus and SaaS: 42 of 75 tracked plans renew above their advertised price, averaging +196%. The extreme is IONOS at +1,300% ($1/mo advertised, $14/mo at renewal). 9 providers never raise renewal prices at all — two of them, Mullvad and Windscribe, run no affiliate programme, so nobody has a commercial reason to mention them.
Data is CC BY 4.0: https://honestlyranked.com/data/renewal-prices.csv
Method: https://honestlyranked.com/methodology/
Limits, stated up front: I measure published pricing only — I don't test the products and make no claim about quality. Prices are read from one fixed location (Pakistan), which is stated on the site; for most of these the price is global, but where a provider geo-prices, my figure describes that vantage point. Streaming histories are curated from primary sources rather than scraped, which is how they go back further than my own tracking.
Happy to talk about the scraping side — Cloudflare, JS-rendered prices, A/B-tested prices, and providers who publish no renewal figure at all.
walrus01 | 22 hours ago
baggachipz | 21 hours ago
codingdave | 21 hours ago
ivanjermakov | 23 hours ago
iso1631 | 23 hours ago
Seems that streamers have a long way to go before they extract all that money.
MYEUHD | 23 hours ago
pbmonster | 22 hours ago
Inflation is multiplicative, so: 1.277 * 1.26 = 1.61 giving us the 61% subscriptions went up.
rcxdude | 22 hours ago
OtherShrezzing | 22 hours ago
I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions.
I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.
lotsofpulp | 22 hours ago
palebluedot | 21 hours ago
dantillberg | 22 hours ago
MisterMunchkin | 21 hours ago
ChrisRR | 21 hours ago
mbeavitt | 23 hours ago
In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).
footy | 23 hours ago
The Library does DVD rentals too, I check it out every couple of months.
It's even better in Toronto, Bay Street Video is an institution.
0xEF | 22 hours ago
More importantly, it does not solve the problem of ownership. We don't own a rented disc just as much as we don't own a DRM-controlled digital purchase that can only be accessed via the subscription portal it was purchased on.
musha68k | 21 hours ago
throwaway_ab | 23 hours ago
hypfer | 23 hours ago
not-so-darkstar | 23 hours ago
I think it's the look of the page: dark background and bright colours with an halo.
koe123 | 23 hours ago
acd | 23 hours ago
swingboy | 23 hours ago
whstl | 23 hours ago
anonym29 | 22 hours ago
Fun fact: pirates are more likely than the average person to purchase media.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170916165525/https://www.ofcom...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/anoth...
0xEF | 22 hours ago
I promote this because not only does it restore some mastery* over your media, it keeps these discs out of landfills and oceans, where they will linger in a shredded state.
*we are, of course, still subject to any anti-piracy measures and non-removeable advertisements on the disc, which admittedly seems quaint by today's DRM standards, but I ccannot rightly say "complete" mastery over your media, here.
iso1631 | 22 hours ago
immibis2 | 22 hours ago
whstl | 20 hours ago
thfuran | 23 hours ago
bossyTeacher | 23 hours ago
itake | 22 hours ago
2/ consume free streaming (tt, ig, YouTube, etc)
Just don’t watch movies at home.
wccrawford | 22 hours ago
They seem to have gotten away with it so far, so there's no legal protection for "buying" digital at the moment.
f6v | 21 hours ago
Amorymeltzer | 22 hours ago
mystifyingpoi | 22 hours ago
NoMoreNicksLeft | 19 hours ago
tjpnz | 22 hours ago
BrissyCoder | 22 hours ago
SwamyM | 21 hours ago
voganmother42 | 21 hours ago
machomaster | 20 hours ago
asimovDev | 22 hours ago
tjpnz | 21 hours ago
boxed | 22 hours ago
immibis2 | 22 hours ago
boxed | 19 hours ago
immibis2 | 18 hours ago
vehemenz | 22 hours ago
boxed | 19 hours ago
OroPla | 22 hours ago
It is way cheaper long term.
sdcfgy | 22 hours ago
posh_somme | 22 hours ago
bigblind | 22 hours ago
heaney-555 | 22 hours ago
How few songs do you listen to, and movies/shows do you watch, for this to possibly be true?
fdgfikgfv | 22 hours ago
rgavuliak | 22 hours ago
dgellow | 20 hours ago
Also, the company has a pretty terrible leadership: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-...
DontchaKnowit | 20 hours ago
I never listen to basically anything spotify recommends me, just songs from bands I already know and love. And if I were to purchase the whole discography of the breadth of music I listen to it would cost the down payment on my house
dgellow | 20 hours ago
dofm | 20 hours ago
In one single afternoon Amazon Music served up loads of niche old favourites I had not thought to search for, introduced me to a couple of artists I would not have known existed otherwise, and probably rescued my failing love of music.
I now play a game with it and pick somewhat diametrically opposed aspects of my music tastes in quick succession— Superorganism, Cardiacs, Gavin Bryars, Nanci Griffith, Vivaldi, Anouskha Shankar, say — and then see what it comes up with. Invariably one of the recommendations will be something I already adore and one will change my life.
I stumbled into the Chris Thile multiverse this way, for instance.
mrweasel | 22 hours ago
Music I don't get, you can't even buy a single CD for the price of a streaming music subscription, unless you buy used, in which case you can get as many as 10 CDs per month.
Video streaming and it's licensing model is horribly horribly broken, there's no reason why I should have three to five subscriptions just so HBO and Netflix can produce yet another drawn out true crime show about someone how got lost half way around the world in 1983.
eptcyka | 22 hours ago
heaney-555 | 22 hours ago
Right, so then how you really access most of your your music is through advertising or ad-blocking, not CDs.
rovr138 | 22 hours ago
happymellon | 21 hours ago
eptcyka | an hour ago
tobinfekkes | 22 hours ago
This is not that unusual. I also have never had any of these, or any other, streaming services. It's been wonderful.
heaney-555 | 22 hours ago
If the answer is "I pirate stuff", that's fine. But just be honest about it.
bigstrat2003 | 18 hours ago
If you are someone who wants to frequently listen to new music, then sure, Spotify is cheaper than constantly buying new albums. But I at least don't do that; I listen to the same music I listened to as a teenager and I pick up 0-1 new albums per year. So again, no real advantage to using Spotify.
icantevenhold | 22 hours ago
As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.
Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.
Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex
z3t4 | 22 hours ago
ChrisRR | 21 hours ago
psp99 | 20 hours ago
icantevenhold | 16 hours ago
Besides being a plight for culture and enemies of artists Spotify is quite a bad collection too.
icantevenhold | 16 hours ago
But you are right that many of the my dads CDs cant be found on streaming services.
People don’t even realise what they lost, but then again they probably don’t care either way
sneak | 21 hours ago
2OEH8eoCRo0 | 20 hours ago
nater5000 | 20 hours ago
You know computers have the ability to compress videos, right?
>Do I really need 4k HDR to enjoy Seinfeld?
No, but the difference between 480p and even 1080p is pretty significant and definitely makes the viewing experience just generally more enjoyable. But that's just Seinfeld, where you can basically close your eyes and guess what is being shown 90% of the time with great accuracy. Where this doesn't work is with movies/shows/etc. where the visual component is important. If you go to a LotR watch party and bring a 480p rip and expect people to watch that, then you might need to get your eyes checked.
2OEH8eoCRo0 | 20 hours ago
tripleee | 19 hours ago
abootstrapper | 20 hours ago
bigstrat2003 | 18 hours ago
sejje | 18 hours ago
icantevenhold | 16 hours ago
beej71 | 19 hours ago
Plus no more buffering or streaming artifacts.
OroPla | 19 hours ago
Unfortunately, though, very few DVDs are 576p.
bookofjoe | 19 hours ago
Percent of non-HN users who've ever ripped a CD: Negligible
icantevenhold | 17 hours ago
ak6te | 15 hours ago
anticorporate | 22 hours ago
Personally, I also listen to a lot of ad-free college radio and watch a lot of online videos. Depending on what type of entertainment you enjoy, it's really not hard to pay next to nothing for it without compromising.
matkoniecz | 22 hours ago
rovr138 | 22 hours ago
LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, mp3 players, etc.
You didn't have the whole world at your hands. You had to pick what to listen to, what to buy, what to carry.
Yes, it's nice having the world available, but also, it's nice being able to sometimes think, ponder, make a decision, and explore that decision.
Based on all the responses, people need to learn to make a decision and live with it for a bit.
- Picked a song and it's not the perfect one? meh, okay. - Also learn to be in the quiet. Oh, the song is not meh, but bad? Turn it off. It's okay. - learn to read a book
newsy-combi | 22 hours ago
dijit | 22 hours ago
Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13
There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.
So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.
zeroonetwothree | 21 hours ago
dijit | 19 hours ago
So I can't really speak to anything else than that. That's my usage pattern, yours may be different.
I keep yearly playlists (starting 2023) where I add songs I like and each one is only about 30 songs on average, so that somewhat matches the aggregate number over a decade..
I guess I stick to the things I like and find things I like in DJ sets or on the Gym radio- I'm not investigating new music through subscription services.
OGWhales | 20 hours ago
TaLiTr | 19 hours ago
> buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.
Sure. And when I had Spotify I added about that to my liked songs every month.
> There is a compounding effect
That doesn't sound compounding, it sounds like a linear increase of 13 per month.
> for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
Yes, that is the advantage of Spotify and other steaming services. I can listen to dozens of new songs a day, picking out my favorites while being exposed to new music allowing me to find more that I like. And if I don't like it, meh, didn't cost me anything.
A library of 300 songs is tiny. I guess you don't listen to much music? Back before I lived in the city 300 songs would have lasted a week, I'd statistically hear a repeat on the drive home on the first day.
dijit | 19 hours ago
Right now I'm listening to trace classics from 2000 :)
hokkos | 12 hours ago
bambax | 21 hours ago
MSFT_Edging | 21 hours ago
Until Sam Altman disrupted the entire computer economy, HDDs were cheap and when you replace your desktop, the old one becomes a server.
myrmidon | 21 hours ago
So if you watch <2 seasons per month on average, you already come out ahead, and this is assuming only a single subscription.
People tend to wastly overpay for subscriptions because they end up underutilized and are typically never cancelled quickly enough because people are lazy.
names_are_hard | 19 hours ago
myrmidon | 19 hours ago
I mean obviously there are people that consume a lot more movie entertainment than the average, but I'm personally getting nowhere close to 70 seasons per year.
Bingewatching occasionally might not be enough to economically justify your subscriptions.
sejje | 18 hours ago
names_are_hard | 15 hours ago
throwthrowuknow | 20 hours ago
Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.
voidhorse | 20 hours ago
OroPla | 15 hours ago
Similarly, as you age you'll have less time spending on entertainment. The initial investment might be higher, but it will eventually be cheaper. And you'll curate more instead of mindlessly watching whatever crap there is.
Don't just look at the next decade. Look at the entire rest of your life and keep in mind that inflation made a thirty cent school meal go up to five dollar over the course of someone's life. Your money will continue to lose value, so you'll have to pay more and more for streaming. And you can never stop without losing access to everything and being left with nothing.
pixel_popping | 22 hours ago
What you are doing is practically the same equivalent as downloading torrents, how do you have "more guarantees" than just downloading?
PS: I'm saying this because what you are doing is already illegal so there is virtually no difference.
amenghra | 22 hours ago
footy | 19 hours ago
I own many of my favourites in this way.
bigstrat2003 | 18 hours ago
amelius | 22 hours ago
Pavilion2095 | 22 hours ago
ChrisRR | 21 hours ago
I run linux too but I'm not going to pretend like my choice to run a niche setup means I'm entitled to pirate content because they don't 100% support it
amelius | 21 hours ago
ChrisRR | 59 minutes ago
Pavilion2095 | 21 hours ago
ndriscoll | 19 hours ago
Surely we are all entitled to do anything that does not affect others by default?
throwatdem12311 | 21 hours ago
I only buy things that I’m really motivated to watch and play, and it makes it much more fulfilling as a result. Netflix turns watching a movie into something that just feels as hollow as doomscrolling Facebook.
ChrisRR | 21 hours ago
I would think this is only true if you watch a small number of shows and rewatch them often
bakies | 21 hours ago
wiether | 16 hours ago
I bought some complete series in DVD in the past but, even putting aside the inconvenience of having to manage discs in the player, there's the quality issue.
I got my 1080p copies on the high seas and that's just a whole different experience.
basscomm | 15 hours ago
There's _a lot_ of stuff that has only ever been available in SD (or equivalent). Some of it was shot on film that could maybe be remastered, but that costs money. Some of the older/less popular stuff wouldn't be profitable if it was remastered (assuming remastering is even possible).
> even putting aside the inconvenience of having to manage discs in the player
You're allowed to rip media that you bought
sejje | 18 hours ago
They all have piles of audiobooks, audio cds, dvds, a blu-rays for $1-$2 each. Sometimes big boxes at yard sales for a few bucks.
segmondy | 20 hours ago
you can stream for free/cheap if you lookout for deals.
Aurornis | 20 hours ago
Buying CDs would be so much more expensive than my Spotify subscription with the variety of music I listen to.
Another helpful element of the streaming services is no incremental cost to try out a new movie or series. I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it.
I will listen to 20 or more new bands each week on Spotify. It’s how I discover new music.
For someone who only listens to a small number of the same CDs over and over it might be cheaper, but it’s not a generally true statement.
OroPla | 20 hours ago
Streaming could be an acceptable compromise if it was $10 a year for everything in existence, but the catalogues are splintered across multiple services and even when you combine them all there are plenty of things not available.
Nicook | 19 hours ago
sejje | 18 hours ago
OroPla | 16 hours ago
ryanchants | 20 hours ago
IMO, that can also be a problem. When I was young and buying CDs, occasionally you would buy one you didn't like at first. But since you had spent money on it, you'd listen to it. And I discovered some good music that way.
Same thing with movies and tv shows. Sometimes it takes a bit to get going, or I 'm in the wrong mindset for it, but repeated viewing or just sticking with it gets me through that.
jerf | 20 hours ago
You're probably objecting to the fact that you don't have 30 years, which is correct, but is also the point of the "long term" part of the comment. Someone who listens to stuff that is on the streaming services and is literally constantly switching between artists and who doesn't mind if some stuff disappears from the services sometimes and so on and so on is perfect for the streaming services, yes. However, the more of those clauses aren't true, the less obviously advantageous the streaming services are, and I don't think most people are sitting down every week and sampling a dozen brand new artists. A lot of people could, with just a bit of care to buy things frugally and used, build a CD collection with $14/month faster than they will want new music.
It can help to jump start a bit and not compare this to building a new collection from scratch. It also helps that such a jump started collection can start by buying the cheap stuff that fills out collections quickly.
On the plus side, the "cosmic jukebox" seems to have mostly worked out for music streaming and most stuff is available from most services, which is a huge point in favor of the music streaming services. In my opinion for movies and TV shows that can be legally acquired (putting aside piracy for the moment) the analysis tips much more heavily in the direction of just building your own collection. I don't even know what it would cost you to buy a month's worth of access to, let's say, 80% of my movie & TV collection (since I have stuff that is just plain not available on streaming at all). They're so fragmented it's insane. And with my rate of consumption of TV, oh, call it $50/month just for a nice round number, that's way more than I'm spending on building out the collection anyhow. Maybe if Hollywood would hire more writers who have taken and passed Writing 101 my consumption rate would increase, but that's not the current situation.
Aurornis | 18 hours ago
If going to physical stores, sifting through bargain bins, accepting whatever nobody else wanted, spending the time to physically rip the CD, and hoping that second hand bargain disc wasn’t scratched is your idea of a good time then that’s great for you.
I will pay $4680 over 30 years of my life to not have to deal with that and to be able to listen to anything I want whenever I want without having to manage a library or streaming setup.
That honestly sounds like a bargain when I consider the time saved over 30 years!
OroPla | 17 hours ago
BizarroLand | 17 hours ago
When you own 3 albums, you'll listen to them more often. You will put more effort into memorizing them. You'll listen to the tracks that were not designed to be radio hits by a committee but were instead the songs the band came up with on their own.
You get way more out of your investment when you invest mentally and emotionally into the full spectrum of their music.
This guy is talking about finding 20 new bands a month. He's not getting anything out of it other than a mild dopamine hit, and he thinks he's somehow cool for that?
It's like being a connoisseur of children's cereal and never having home cooked steak and eggs for breakfast. It's like bragging about your weight loss journey because you started smoking crack.
ak6te | 15 hours ago
BizarroLand | 10 hours ago
Friends might mention a band they enjoy, or you might hear a snippet on a video and look into it. Movie soundtracks occasionally have great music from well-established bands I've never heard of.
And you can go to live shows and check out local artists, buy their merch if they're any good.
Streaming is not the only way. Never has been, and never will be.
As far as your first question, is that a good thing, it's entirely subjective. But listening to a full album when you only "like" one song on it will expose you to new music, and might broaden your horizons or help you develop taste.
davkan | 5 hours ago
Or if you’re ripping your CDs and listening via apps you can just scrobble and get algo recommendations still while owning your music and without a monthly fee.
jerf | 15 hours ago
And amplifying that, we see more and more "built for streaming" music, which is not the sort of music I want to listen to. I have phrased that carefully; it is a personal opinion and I won't criticize anyone who discovers that actually, yes, generic AI rock that is pumped out by the hour is something they find some use for. I could see someone who wouldn't want to "listen" to that with intentionality finding it useful to code to or as background noise in their life or something. But it's not what I want, and unless the streaming services do something about it it is what is going to dominate their platforms over time.
I don't go in for super deep relationships with the musicians, reading about their histories and stuff, but I do enjoy the way that the music I like most on first listen often pales quickly and the tracks that I initially didn't like very well become my favorites.
boringg | 20 hours ago
Anyways Spotify is just a platform/gatekeeper for record labels to push their products and theres no way that spotify prices ever become static. They will need to continue to push more products through the model to continue to grow and pay for company especially as all the other players have wizened up.
FWIW if you lapse in payment they kill all your downloaded content immediately. Super annoying service. I get why but like 10 days after probably about 10 years of subscription seems like a real jerk move. Even content that wasn't theirs and was mine -- they wiped it. You own nothing.
port11 | 17 hours ago
If I enjoy an album, I’ll listen to it some 15-20 times before picking favourite songs or simply moving on. What you’re describing sounds more like consuming albums, not enjoying them. My 2 cents :)
Aurornis | 17 hours ago
If you’re thinking albums and hi-fi setups, it would be a lot!
A valuable part of streaming services is the recommendation engine. Spotify generates a new playlist called Discover Weekly that has songs and bands loosely related to what I’ve been listening to. I turn it on while I do yardwork. If I like something I pause and add it to a playlist.
It also has options to continue playing related music when your playlist runs out. You can also enable a mode that mixes suggestions in between songs in your playlist to mix it up.
I’ve discovered a lot of new music this way. It’s probably great for small bands who have good music but lack a marketing budget to get it out there.
dgellow | 20 hours ago
bookofjoe | 19 hours ago
dgellow | 19 hours ago
bookofjoe | 12 hours ago
JKCalhoun | 52 minutes ago
ok123456 | 19 hours ago
It is way cheaper long term.
tuna74 | 19 hours ago
ok123456 | 14 hours ago
upboundspiral | 14 hours ago
I get it, the big brands etc aren't very palatable. And some things get lost with no way to purchase because the companies don't care. But for things that are readily available I find it just as easy to buy if for a few bucks on ebay / local library sale / etc.
ok123456 | 14 hours ago
I'm not participating in the part of the relationship that normalizes destroying general-purpose computing. They want us dead.
swed420 | 11 hours ago
Plus the collection can be inherited by somebody later. If they don't want it, it could be re-sold at second-hand prices.
TazeTSchnitzel | 22 hours ago
polarbearballs | 22 hours ago
matja | 22 hours ago
walrus01 | 22 hours ago
Brendinooo | 22 hours ago
Did you gatekeep people who built sites with FrontPage as well?
TazeTSchnitzel | 12 hours ago
I don't think it's even gatekeeping. You could copy-paste two tables and write two sentences into a Word document and export to HTML, one of the laziest possible ways to produce a website, and it'd still be less off-putting because it doesn't have the association with slop content.
nottorp | 22 hours ago
"nine streaming subscriptions".
No one sane will do nine streaming subscriptions. The market is insane in itself for assuming that.
bnastic | 22 hours ago
That's four. I don't want any of them.
Three I have to take due to kids' nagging, the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.
jaffa2 | 22 hours ago
Bring some sanity back to the world.
mystifyingpoi | 22 hours ago
eptcyka | 22 hours ago
jbs789 | 22 hours ago
nottorp | 21 hours ago
However, the same aim could be achieved by just setting a formula in law. 1 pound per british citizen, or 0.0001% of the average income per citizen last year. Numbers pulled out of ass as i have no idea what an UK tv license costs. As long as they make the formula extremely hard to change, it will work.
zelos | 21 hours ago
If they could find a way to fund Radio 4 without it I'd be in favour of scrapping the fee.
nottorp | 21 hours ago
amiga386 | 21 hours ago
Some countries (like Finland or Switzerland) require you to pay it even if you don't own a TV. It's really just a tax.
The reasoning for it not being a tax is that the public service broadcaster should have political independence from the government. Most people don't want their country to have a "government mouthpiece" state broadcaster, and it is much easier for the government to tell the broadcaster what to do and say by fucking with its funding if it's directly funded from the treasury.
Other countries do the same thing with a different trick, such as inserting it into your electricity bill.
The UK is a powerhouse in media production, part of that is due to the BBC funding all sorts of productions, both the visible (actors, etc.) and the invisble (camera operators, set designers, costumers, writers, directors...).
It has also been clear for centuries that private media, historically just the newspapers, but now TV channels, film studios, etc., have been disastrous, as their private owners either focus on profitability and pump out scandal and lurid stories, or if they've made their millions some other way, they run a paper in order to pump out biased propaganda. So a state-funded but not state-controlled broadcaster is an ideal thing to have.
jbs789 | 19 hours ago
Feel like this should be in their letters rather than (or in addition to) the threat of legal action.
amiga386 | 19 hours ago
It could be worse, though, Crapita also run the civil service pension system and have completely fucked it up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yg54750gdo
LandR | 20 hours ago
I get a letter every month from the licencing people, it just goes in the bin. I've had 1 visit, he asked to come in, I said no. That was basically the end of it.
(For the record, I have a TV but I currently have no way to watch live TV on it, so why should I have a licence! I don't use their service)
vjvjvjvjghv | 22 hours ago
FinnLobsien | 22 hours ago
subtlejellyfish | 20 hours ago
Some of it is a function of my household's love of sports, and their fragmentation across the services. Some of its just sheer laziness to pick one and stick with it or rotate the subscriptions.
I don't think I could realistically drop lower than 3 on this list though: Spotify gets used constantly. One TV/Video streaming service. My wife would likely divorce me if I cancelled YouTube Premium.
sdcfgy | 22 hours ago
vehemenz | 22 hours ago
LightBug1 | 22 hours ago
Pay some portion of that over the years and end up owning ... absolutely nothing.
ahmedfromtunis | 22 hours ago
Otherwise this is akin to comparing speed of 2 objects in a relativistic setting without stating the frame of reference.
Side note: I don't know why, but the existence of a "cite this" section on this page made me sad.
bko | 22 hours ago
Inflation isn't some force of nature that needs to be accounted for like the curvature of the earth.
consensus1 | 21 hours ago
astura | 22 hours ago
I am probably an outlier but I don't honestly know how much someone can watch on theses services to be always subscribed, I subscribe to watch something and unsubscribe after a month or two because that's when I'm well and done. My husband had some free three months of Disney+ and I don't think either of us watched a single thing on there in that three months. Tubi has better content than Disney+.
jbs789 | 22 hours ago
The relevant comparison would be your individual wages.
vehemenz | 22 hours ago
dingaling | 21 hours ago
ahmedfromtunis | 21 hours ago
HDThoreaun | 17 hours ago
CPLX | 22 hours ago
That's like saying your snow report for skiing should be adjusted for weather.
_vertigo | 19 hours ago
Pavilion2095 | 22 hours ago
crumby | 22 hours ago
stego-tech | 22 hours ago
To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points.
From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.
ericpauley | 22 hours ago
crims0n | 22 hours ago
Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.
consensus1 | 21 hours ago
Forgeties79 | 20 hours ago
Armchair theories on paramount and peacock, so take with a mountain of salt:
Paramount will probably stay in the red because they are overly-catering to conservatives (a little too much emphasis on baby boomers as well), narrowing their potential audience.
Peacock just doesn’t have enough going for it period. Weak library and not a real first tier consideration for folks
delegate | 22 hours ago
nekusar | 22 hours ago
And whatever leftover storage you have.
And PIA or Proton for a port forwardable VPN.
And https://github.com/halcyon-video/halcyon-video for that real Blockbuster experience.
ozgung | 22 hours ago
Tepix | 22 hours ago
walrus01 | 22 hours ago
The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.
walrus01 | 22 hours ago
98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar.
Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. "
I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.
jbs789 | 22 hours ago
walrus01 | 22 hours ago
zrail | 21 hours ago
https://www.pangram.com/
walrus01 | 21 hours ago
Or since a lot of vibe coded static sites are just plain html, cs, js, a first try attempt via wget to mirror the first 500KB of the site and then analyze it.
_joel | 21 hours ago
koito17 | 21 hours ago
That style is still rare enough that I prefer it over OP's "we installed shadcn + Tailwind and look like every seed-stage startup SaaS from 2024" style.
runarberg | 19 hours ago
Use proven traditional statistical methods like supervised learning for this. You can use traditional (not large) language models to tokenize the content and then a supervised learning trained on the most popular models to detect if those models generated the content.
Retr0id | 22 hours ago
password4321 | 21 hours ago
The level of phoning in the complete lack of any work beyond the absolute bare minimum is the most frustrating aspect to me.
walrus01 | 21 hours ago
dkarl | 21 hours ago
jcalx | 21 hours ago
dgellow | 20 hours ago
Larrikin | 20 hours ago
dgellow | 19 hours ago
I don’t believe that at all, and it’s not implied in my comments. What I’m saying is that the value isn’t in the style, that part can also be replicated. It’s not in the content, that can be replicated. It’s the same for >90% of startup ideas people come up with when discovering agent coding. You were able to create a cool SaaS project in a weekend? Congrats. Any other dev can point their LLM to your website/app and make a clone in even less time. The safe ones have a high barrier of entry, such as hardware, or similar, but the vast majority is trivially cloneable.
I don’t know what that will result in. I assume we will be chasing more human experiences, but I have no idea.
00ze | 21 hours ago
Software dev has never been a hard job
It's been so paint by numbers for years now for me it's incredibly boring mind numbing dead end toil
dgellow | 20 hours ago
elif | 21 hours ago
If it's readable and aesthetic, it is perfectly serviceable for the purpose of reading a post.
Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles, so most of what's going on is actually your feelings about AI taking primacy.
smaudet | 20 hours ago
Apologism at best. People have been bemoaning this issue for a while now..., pre-AI even.
First time I'm seeing this defended from an "oh you're just anti AI" perspective (which, ironically, is exactly the sort of bare minimum a couple comments over was bemoaning)
chaostheory | 19 hours ago
If you don’t like it and you feel it doesn’t bring value to HN, flag it.
blitzar | 21 hours ago
walrus01 | 21 hours ago
BarryMilo | 21 hours ago
boringg | 20 hours ago
bensyverson | 21 hours ago
ticulatedspline | 21 hours ago
I think it's less of a distinct aesthetic rather than having "Tells" in the template that you might be sensitive to for having worked with it.
I've seen word documents that the first time I saw them I thought nothing of it. Wasn't until I had ChatGPT work on something later and noticed it's exact use of particular fonts and colors that I realized the other was AI generated.
There was nothing materially wrong with the documents, but after seeing the connection you can't unsee it. It's not really a new or AI specific phenomenon either, any template can trigger it. like how every RPG maker game looks the same, or every substack blogs all are samey, even on custom domains.
subtlejellyfish | 21 hours ago
Every medium, livejournal, blogger, etc page in the look nearly exactly the same. Or Twitter Bootstrap sites.
I'll give them some credit here: its at least been worked into a terse format unlike a lot of the docs I get from people who seem to think AI's ability to add verbosity is somehow a virtue.
echelon | 21 hours ago
I'm excited by that.
And even LLM design tropes are better than seeing the same platform design on every page. The same Instagram, Reddit, X pages over and over and over forever. It's monotonous design. Platforms suck in more ways than that, though - you're forced into their constraints, algo bait, spam, hyper-drama, Reddit mods, contrarian view downvoting, etc.
It feels like we're entering the 90's - 2008 era again. The indie web. Microformats and self-distribution and hacking and remixing.
shevy-java | 19 hours ago
LLM is just AI slop spam. To even want to compare it to geocities is weird. Have you been around back then actually?
To claim LLMs are similar to an independent web is also weird.
binary0010 | 19 hours ago
An llm making the exact same layouts for everyone with obviously zero input from anyone who cares seems absolutely nothing like the old geocities days.
faefox | 18 hours ago
semilin | 19 hours ago
hallole | 21 hours ago
Even the URL captures the ubiquitous "honestly / genuinely / let me be up front" verbal tick that Claude can't resist. That is, "Rashid" likely couldn't even be bothered to come up with his own website name. I hate it.
sixtyj | 20 hours ago
Design is a question of taste, I am not commenting it.
But yes, you are right that we get tired of these sites as they are indistinguishable.
Have anyone tried to print or switch page to browser’s reader mode? Here starts hell :)
aba_cz | 20 hours ago
bocytron | 20 hours ago
oefrha | 19 hours ago
dylan604 | 19 hours ago
duckmysick | 20 hours ago
I deleted the stylesheet, removed the duplicate FAQ section, and reworded a few sentences.
dofm | 20 hours ago
truthnukerino | 20 hours ago
colingauvin | 20 hours ago
dylan604 | 20 hours ago
traviswingo | 20 hours ago
And it’s not even relevant to what’s actually on the site linked.
Who cares if the site is LLM generated? Did you care before when you saw the same Wordpress theme repeatedly, or Bootstrap layouts?
The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
Edit to clarify: I read the comment as the issue being the look and feel of the site being AI generated - as in, “this website looks AI generated. It sucks.” NOT the content itself being AI generated.
Using AI to spit out cookie cutter layouts is fine, offloading your thinking onto AI is not something I support.
My stance: An AI generated website with the authors original thoughts is fine to me. I don’t care what it looks like, as long as it serves its purpose.
ragall | 20 hours ago
Good people do.
Arubis | 19 hours ago
Different people have different feelings. Bucketing into binary "good" and "not good" based on whether they have the exact same framing as you do is dehumanizing. Stop it. Respect other people.
There is space for nuance:
If you're spitting out raw LLM output and not looking at or reading it and requiring other people to use it as-is, while representing it as your own original work, you are treating your own time and attention as more valuable than that of others. You can expect a reaction based on this.
If you're blanket-dismissing someone else's work because they used one or more specific tools, regardless of how much of their own time and attention they put into it before sharing it in a place where you were able to see it -- or perhaps you're doing that dismissal without even seeing it -- you are treating their time and attention as superficial and a rounding error compared with their choice of tools. You can expect a reaction based on this.
In between, there is a _whole_ lot of room for different take and opinions, and we're collectively figuring out what's acceptable and what isn't. We'll never fully get there and that is Okay. But we can at least try to calibrate on "are we treating other people respectfully" instead of a shitty proxy for it.
Nicook | 19 hours ago
MarcelOlsz | 19 hours ago
ragall | 18 hours ago
Different people have different feelings about what we know call "the Holocaust". They're not equally worthy.
Arubis | 18 hours ago
Don’t weaken how awful the Holocaust was.
ragall | 16 hours ago
976157424477 | 19 hours ago
anthonypasq | 18 hours ago
afavour | 19 hours ago
Me. Because if there's no human checking the content I don't actually have a reliable signal that what I'm reading is true.
I'm not a subject matter expert here but I know that list includes Disney+ at $18.99 and Hulu at $18.99... but Disney and Hulu bundled together is $19.99. From the exact source the site cites:
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/23/disney-plus-price-incre...
A human doing the research would likely have picked up on that. An LLM that just reads everything literally does not.
MattDaEskimo | 19 hours ago
In either case it's important to verify information, and LLMs are increasingly more capable of fact-checking.
afavour | 19 hours ago
bookofjoe | 19 hours ago
IAmBroom | 19 hours ago
goodmythical | 19 hours ago
There are and were entire sites and networks dedicated to conspiracy and disinformation. Hell, people have been payed to spread disinformation. People have done it deliberately for the lolz.
It has alway been possibly to get your nonsense enrgaved upon the web in an afternoon. That it now takes less time is irrelevant. You should have been checking your sources then, and you should be checking your sources now.
Authors of the past would often not provide sources, so if you were interested you'd have to track them down. This is also true today.
That an LLM is in the loop is no different, in kind, from the old copy-pasta and network driven spread of misinformation. The problem was never the tools (ah, damn, now anyone who knows [html] can just lie on the internet)(ah, damn now anyone who knows [prompting] can just lie on the internet).
The problem isn't the tools, it's the users unwillingness and or reluctance to develop critical reading and thinking skills. If you're using "Not an LLM" as a proxy for "gains reliability in my mind" then you're being lazy. It is just as easy to lie without an LLM.
throw10920 | 19 hours ago
Lots of people. Even on HN, which is wildly unrepresentative of the US as a whole, comments that "this site was AI-generated" are commonly upvoted to the top because people do care.
That includes me. If it's AI-generated, I don't care about it - if it wasn't worth their time to write, it's not worth my time to read. I can generate it myself.
> The content is what’s interesting
If it's generated, the odds of it being wrong are far higher, because people who publish generated content are far less likely to care about quality or correctness.
dkh | 19 hours ago
What if all I used AI for was to more quickly drive tedious work, like mass-change colors, preview variants, or export assets?
Is it the replacement of the creative aspects of a craft with AI when I lose your interest, or is it the moment I utilize it at all?
beej71 | 19 hours ago
homeonthemtn | 19 hours ago
camillomiller | 19 hours ago
mschuster91 | 19 hours ago
I always check the comment section first because I do not wish to engage with slop content.
> The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
Can you trust AI content at face value? No you can't. AI has been shown time and time again to just hallucinate shit out of thin air.
And that is why I want to avoid interacting with any kind of GenAI/LLM/... garbage. I always find the need to second-check whatever I'm reading and it is highly annoying.
goodmythical | 19 hours ago
ryandrake | 19 hours ago
I used to get downvoted when I complained that a site uses 6 point font, or when it renders all of its text in a small 5cm vertical strip down the middle of the page, or when it didn't work without JavaScript... and all my other personal bug-a-boos. I stopped because I realized those comments add nothing to the conversation.
"This is AI" similarly adds nothing.
lolakutty | 19 hours ago
This is a proxy for "the author didn't give a shit"..Not always, but often.
emsign | 19 hours ago
walrus01 | 18 hours ago
This is the core of the problem, I have absolutely no confidence that any of the specific number figures or parameters listed anywhere in the website are factual. For all I know they're AI hallucinations. Or wildly out of date based on the final training date of some model. It absolutely does not look like data that somebody collected "by hand" and verified as true.
dismalaf | 19 hours ago
Versus the same WP template or the same Jekyll template?
I agree though, using an LLM to do the same old is a waste.
kelseyfrog | 18 hours ago
Contact the owner and send the message there instead. https://honestlyranked.com/contact/
axegon_ | 22 hours ago
1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me.
2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't).
With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'll gladly pay for them and download them(last purchase from a few weeks ago). If not - pirating it is.
tyingq | 21 hours ago
I don't have a great view, though, whether this is even visible to the streaming platforms. I suspect they don't really lose much notable revenue from piracy anymore. While it's matured some recently, it's not as easy as "download limewire".
axegon_ | 21 hours ago
1. I have 0 trust in software companies to have the ability to protect my data, even if they have the best intentions. Partially because of 2
2. AI: everything has to be fed into it, whatever it spits out is treated as gospel by most tech companies and people that 10 years ago were taught to question everything.
3. Price.
4. It is actually easy to setup and if you put in some real thinking into it, it becomes both secure and easy to pass around. Jellyfin is a good example. I installed wireguard on my mum's computer, "double click this, click this button, open your browser, click on this icon" and she has access to my library.
Part of the reason for the overinflated prices and budget cuts in those exact companies is this exact thing: many people got fed up with minor convenience at an ever-increasing price and "amazon for this, netflix for that". Many of us grew up pirating because we had no other choice. Now we do have a choice but instead of a decent trade-off in price-vs-convenience, we got a price to pay and ultimately a ton of inconvenience.
tyingq | 15 hours ago
axegon_ | an hour ago
Jokes aside, luckily for me, I live in a country where torrenting isn't illegal at all and frankly, everyone working for the public sector is too incompetent to do anything about it, even if it were. For example, I know a guy who was taken for investigation cause something dodgy happened from his IP (he hosted a tor exit node) and the investigators had their brains blown when he showed them that tor exit nodes were public information cause they had no idea. At that moment he said "guys, are my taxes seriously going towards your salaries?". At that point they just gave up and send him off.
Lerc | 22 hours ago
Is that number really correct?
It seems remarkably coincidental how close $1,852.92 is to
$1,150.92 * 1.10^5 ($1,853.56)
It's pretty much a match accounting for kibblesworth effects.
boonzeet | 20 hours ago
Both figures can be arrived to by taking the monthly total and multiplying it by 12.
Lerc | 16 hours ago
abejora | 22 hours ago
* They increased the cost of all price tiers.
* They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more.
* And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing.
This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore.
You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...
ivanbakel | 22 hours ago
For streaming services, I think the development-hosting needle swings way towards hosting. Streaming video is the vast majority of their costs and efforts, so scaling prices per-user is the only sensible option. The "software" of those services is bad and interchangeable, and not what anyone wants or is paying for in the first place.
Forgeties79 | 20 hours ago
akudha | 20 hours ago
Another egregious thing these subscriptions do is all kinds of dark patterns. Making it super easy to subscribe but super hard to cancel, not informing before charging (how hard can it be to send an email "upcoming charge next week"), showing ads in supposedly "ad-free" services etc. All this just add to the frustration which leads users to cancel.
sejje | 17 hours ago
He knows better than you do what he had to replace, because he did exactly that.
matthiaswh | 22 hours ago
ShinyLeftPad | 20 hours ago
Maybe it's one of the many ways we finance all those datacenters. Sure Netflix doesn't directly own datacenters but the logic works by proxy.
Brendinooo | 22 hours ago
No long-term contracts, no additional hardware needed, no hidden fees. Still the option to not see ads for most of the services. You can freely jump from service to services.
Plenty of promos out there still, too: for example, I get $10 back per month on an ad-free Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle through my credit card. That plan costs me about $31/month: $31 doesn't buy me a meal out with my family, it doesn't buy me a single football ticket, it might get me into one movie with the family if I do some cheap matinee (not counting gas to drive up and snacks).
library8848 | 22 hours ago
Are you a netflix exec by any chance?
upsuper | 22 hours ago
If you go to a restaurant for a meal, you own nothing after that, but you can be happy. If you go to an entertainment park, you own nothing after that for your ticket, but you can be happy.
Making customer happy is an extraordinary valuable service one can provide, and that doesn't have to require connection with materially owning anything.
Brendinooo | 21 hours ago
I dunno about you, but in my lifetime, if I would have invested in owning VHS, DVD, or HD-DVD, that would not have paid off for me. (I might have owned a lot, but I wouldn't have been happy.)
I guess Blu-Ray has stuck around, but I find that I don't rewatch a ton of movies anyways. I've never felt comfortable buying digital video because I never liked the idea of buying into an ecosystem.
And...discs aren't cheap anyways? Just did a random search - Tron: Legacy (a movie that's been out for awhile, I like, I would re-watch) costs $27.99 to buy a physical copy. So again: $28 to acquire one movie; $31 for me to watch that movie or hundreds of others I want within the course of a month.
Thanks for making me think of this, it's another bullet in support of what I was saying before.
lotsofpulp | 22 hours ago
I especially like not paying for sports to watch the few shows/movies I like.
Some people who like to (legally) own media might be disappointed, though.
Brendinooo | 20 hours ago
I just never really felt like the incentives were quite the same to purchase movies. They've always been constrained by their formats/vendors in a way that was never as true for music, they've always cost more, I don't rewatch movies as much as I'll re-listen to albums, and I think the...I dunno...nature, telos of movies lends itself better to ephemeral access.
monomial | 22 hours ago
grandwizardmarv | 21 hours ago
pepitodelospalo | 20 hours ago
timpera | 19 hours ago
I find that Netflix and Paramount+ are the American services that offer the best app experience on my (very low-end) smart TV.
nosioptar | 19 hours ago
tripleee | 19 hours ago
footy | 19 hours ago
mococa | 22 hours ago
I love music and used to have Spotify, but I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog.
Now I buy online or rip my CDs, it’s much better and works offline.
mulhoon | 22 hours ago
walrus01 | 21 hours ago
https://cololocation.com/
newsy-combi | 21 hours ago
BadBadJellyBean | 22 hours ago
lotsofpulp | 21 hours ago
no-name-here | 20 hours ago
A Netflix account costs $9 with ads or $20 without, so I guess it depends on whether you watch more or fewer films than that per month?
nosioptar | 19 hours ago
musha68k | 21 hours ago
I'm not a fan of the "binge watch chowder" of the last 15 years and much rather extend my collection of actually worthwhile UHD BluRay movies to watch deliberately every other Sunday night or so.
emsign | 19 hours ago
pprotas | 21 hours ago
newsclues | 21 hours ago
ViktorRay | 21 hours ago
Surely the cost of storage has not gone up. And the cost of sending the 0’s and 1’s hasn’t gone up either.
Are movie studios demanding vastly more money from the streaming services for the movie and TV content? Maybe the costs to make new movies and tv shows have gone up substantially but has licensing costs for the old movies and shows gone up too?
Are these extra costs just going to the streamers to run up profit? Genuinely curious about the economics here. I know the streaming business is highly competitive so I don’t think it’s just rent seeking so wonder what else is going on.
baggachipz | 21 hours ago
grandwizardmarv | 21 hours ago
rappatic | 21 hours ago
mdavid626 | 21 hours ago
sneak | 21 hours ago
Huge difference.
written-beyond | 21 hours ago
ticulatedspline | 21 hours ago
You can also see the "follow the leader" effect with prices converging around $20. If I had to guess I'd say the next 5+ years we'll see tighter price competition, probably companies following Netflix's pricing hikes and that prices will creep up to 24.99
zeroonetwothree | 21 hours ago
apercu | 20 hours ago
randusername | 20 hours ago
We traded one annoying cable company for dozens.
georgeecollins | 20 hours ago
What kind of person has all of these subscriptions? If you have YouTube TV and Spotify that is $22.
rythmshifter | 20 hours ago
amelius | 16 hours ago
robk3 | 20 hours ago
psim1 | 20 hours ago
BeetleB | 19 hours ago
Hope they fix(ed) it.
ravetcofx | 19 hours ago
robocat | 15 hours ago
See "Is Passport available outside of the U.S.?" section of: https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000096220-...
Some details that imply workarounds might be difficult (although I suggest instead better to Google for how to access):https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000096659-...
https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/5000694871-i...
BeetleB | 11 hours ago
This is not about being outside the US or using a VPN. This is about the pain of having to repeatedly log in.
robocat | 7 hours ago
WarmWash | 19 hours ago
No thanks. I'm here for science, and if your writers are mostly people primarily concerned with making sure they bow at the alter in every single video, I'm 100% out. It's like watching a cooking video produced by a Christian group that works Jesus into chopping carrots.
weberer | 19 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPvNucxB7TI&list=PLYNjnJFU-6...
WarmWash | 18 hours ago
clukic | 18 hours ago
I guess you could call that "white people guilt" but you could also say that it's valuable context that the impacts of climate change can be exasperated by economic and national policies.
triceratops | 15 hours ago
You mean "exacerbated".
avidruntime | 17 hours ago
The explanation posits that this was only possible due to the multiplier of the rapidly expanding British empire. It is not posited as British/white people are bad, it is posited as society, politics and trade creating a multiplier effect. The whole point of this section in the video is to setup the final chapter of the video, asking the question, "Could this happen again?", which feels like a valid question given that society, politics, and trade have exponentially evolved since the 19th century.
This section of the video is portrayed so agnostically that I felt compelled to reply to your vague criticism.
Here is the video linked to the timestamp of the aforementioned section, which is only around 2 minutes long, so others can pass their own judgement: https://youtu.be/69o-8Mtd3Kc&t=330
Not sure how you can be here for the science if you're not willing to be here for the history.
qmmmur | 17 hours ago
WarmWash | 16 hours ago
You can't be here for the food, if you aren't also here for christ.
At least the Jesus of today is the same Jesus as 150 years ago too.
psim1 | 17 hours ago
triceratops | 15 hours ago
1. 1877 was less than 150 years ago, not 300.
2. That year had the strongest El Nino in recorded history.
3. Talking about why so many people died - political and economic mismanagement, essentially - is valid.
Do you feel personally guilty about colonialism?
If yes, you shouldn't. It's not your fault.
If no, then why do you care about someone reciting relevant facts?
BeetleB | 19 hours ago
Is it? One of the requirements is "No goods or services were given for this donation."
psim1 | 19 hours ago
Or maybe they're lying, but I'm going with what the receipt says.
conductr | 18 hours ago
That said, If the gift is insubstantial in value it’s allowable. Or they’re supposed to give you a statement of the value and you have to deduct the donation less value amount. My thought is maybe the content is or will be free and the app is just a convenient portal to consume it. So one would claim it’s rather insubstantial. But to be honest, no auditor would really dig too deep into a donation to PBS.
BobaFloutist | 18 hours ago
mikestew | 18 hours ago
Aurornis | 20 hours ago
Most people I know don’t subscribe to every service and then leave it that way. They might have Spotify and 1-3 video streaming services at a time. They cancel one and start a different one when they want to watching something new.
toss1 | 18 hours ago
A higher price alone for the same "tier" does not necessarily mean less value.
I'd want to also estimate the overall quantity and quality offered for the higher price. Obviously, quality is subjective, but for each of those services, does a e.g., 43% increase in cost come with a greater or less than 43% increase in available selection? Does it have more or less higher/lower-rated or more/less watched content? More/fewer shows that are truncated after the first one or two seasons?
tamimio | 20 hours ago
nater5000 | 20 hours ago
For example, Apple TV+ went from $4.99 per month to $14.99 per month, a +200% change, while YouTube Premium went from $11.99 to $15.99, a +33% change.
So services like Apple TV+ are skewing this increase a lot while services like YouTube Premium have remained relatively low. Similarly, Apple TV+ starting at $4.99 per month was clearly a very low price to start (which can probably be mostly attributed to the service's lack of content at that point). It's now at a "normal" price.
Just the same, saying something like something "costs $702/year more" without a point of reference is bad data presentation. The 2021 cost for all of these services was $1,150.92, for a +61% change. I'm not saying that's not substantial, but this kind of information is necessary for these figures to not just be rage bait.
And, of course, if you're simultaneously paying for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium, and Spotify every month, then you're either (a) really into consuming this kind of content and are a "premium subscriber" in the sense that these costs ought to be justified or (b) very bad with managing your time and finances. I suspect normal users subscribe to one or two of these at a time and are probably willing to switch around as prices change, content gets released/pulled, etc. A better analysis would try to do some investigation into this dynamic, since it will probably reveal that people are able to navigate dynamic service subscriptions well enough that they aren't actually experiencing a straight-up +61% increase in costs since 2021.
All of this is to say that this "analysis" barely even qualifies as a valid first-pass at understanding this kind of data. It's literally something that Claude probably churned out in 20 minutes. Everyone can be dissatisfied with the value they get from these streaming services, but this kind of post only helps to muddy the conversation.
ArnoVW | 19 hours ago
Even if you watch « only » 5 shows, if they are on five different services then that means 5 subscriptions.
Or you spend time planning and organizing subscriptions.
.. or you just download them.
xboxnolifes | 19 hours ago
afavour | 19 hours ago
Another example: Disney+ and Hulu are available bundled together for $19.99 a month, something the site's own sources state:
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/23/disney-plus-price-incre...
But because it's just looking at the data in the most literal way possible it doesn't factor that in and instead says buying Disney+ and Hulu Premium would be $18.99 each.
jeffbee | 19 hours ago
chaostheory | 19 hours ago
tmpz22 | 19 hours ago
Its hard to cancel a subscription when you know it brings joy to an infirmed parent. Youre effectively locked into paying whatever, like $350/mo for xfinity tv simply because thats the only UI they can handle on an old remote.
conductr | 19 hours ago
Also you should consider the base period timing is when many of the big movers were in a rollout of their application and thus the price was either artificially low and/or represented a severely limited offering compared to their current offering.
tristor | 18 hours ago
Or you're the type of person that watches one or two shows on each of these services that in the days of yesteryear would have all been on Netflix, but since every company that owns a production studio decided to launch their own streaming service now means you need 25 subscriptions to keep up with the handful of decent shows with reasonable production budgets so you aren't stuck otherwise just consuming slop. Given the consolidation in industry, it's even more insult to injury as there's now only a handful of companies that collectively have /multiple/ streaming services per company each with a different fee because our current timeline is one of absolutely egregious extractive behavior and rent-seeking with no compensating controls.
maxglute | 19 hours ago
gruturo | 19 hours ago
Most importantly 13.99 already in 2021 bought LESS than 7.99 or 8.99 bought until a while before. Thanks to the fragmentation, the catalogue was way larger before, and as of 2022 ads were introduced to further insult the customer.
High seas it is.
shevy-java | 19 hours ago
1) offer services at comparatively high quality (or at the least not too low in quality) at a fairly cheap price, ideally flat rate 2) lateron increase it to milk the cash cows 3) profit
e12e | 19 hours ago
adventured | 19 hours ago
Which is to say it's not the streaming prices, it's everything (except for maybe televisions, for now we get to keep our cheapish 50-80" TVs).
0gs | 16 hours ago
miguelfrreg | 2 hours ago
Threads like this are most of the reason