Tech’s broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap::Some tech is getting pricier and looking a lot like the older services it was supposed to beat. From video streaming to ride-hailing and cloud computing.
You say “broken promises” I say “the plan all along” and “bait and switch”.
Yep. The business model has always been “Lure them in and stifle competition with a low initial cost. Then when we have the market we can jack up the price.” Enshitification at its best.
A lot of these things were proudly unprofitable, which is basically their way of getting around anti-trust violations. If they had a revenue stream to make the business profitable (outside of investors handing them more cash) then they’d be hit with anti-trust lawsuits for offering services at a loss in order to drive the competition out of business. But instead they just convince investors to hang on long enough to achieve the same goal, then raise their prices when they’ve got too much power to fail.
Yarrrrr…shiver me timbers. Fly the Jolly Roger high matey, there be booty ta plunder!
Hello L4S!
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It’s your fault for believing the promises of a salesman. Tech bros are just industrial middlemen who pedel new technological solutions for problems that may or may not benefit from it, but that doesn’t matter to them, they’re just here to sell the tech. Thats how they get paid.
LONG LIVE PIRACY!!!🏴☠️🏴
The thing about unregulated capitalism is it will always fuck over society in favour of sociopaths. Unregulated capitalism rewards sociopaths because it focusses on profits above all else – shareholders get stupidly rich only if they don’t care about the damage done to workers and the public, sociopaths who don’t care about such damage can promise the highest profits, and that’s rewarded by a hyper-focus on the bottom line.
Unregulated capitalism rewards ruthless cost-cutting, treating people like robotic assets, slash-and-burn corporate policies, and a culture of near-slavery.
Adding new tech only makes inhumane policies easier to implement. It’s why people like Musk have more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes. When the goal is to maximise profits at all costs, of course the consumer will get fucked. That’s rather the point.
E: in short, prices will continue to increase as these people try to find the ceiling. Ps: there is no real ceiling.
The cloud was never cheap.
Where did you get such a weird idea?
Is this surprising? The prices were always going to adjust to the market. Any new cheap thing that undercuts the market will eventually become the market as it becomes mainstream, and prices will be increased to what the market will bear to maximize profits.
You are paying money for streaming movies? Why?
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
reminds me of when when banks introduced ATMs as a method to “reduce costs for the consumer” but it became a profit center, paid for by those same consumers. no consumers saved a dime
As far as Ubers, I’m happy to pay them as much as taxis in tips at least — the people driving them are hard working people who could use it.
But dang, there’s lots of streaming services. The new rise of piracy is not surprising.
I think it says something that people feel the need to subscribe to half a dozen services.
Never even mind piracy, people don’t need to be binging TV endlessly.
Hotels >>>>> Airb&Bs
I’ve seen some pretty shit hotels.
Remember when we could only watch what had recently been on TV and cable companies were trying to lock people in to specific cable boxes that couldn’t skip ads and we paid $120 per month for ad supported content and cable companies would attach random fees and everyone had to buy hundreds of channels to only watch 4?
And we’d build movie and music collections of physical media we had to keep in our homes and cars and we’d listen to the same three albums for months and if we were lucky enough to get a TV series box set, it’d set us back many hundreds of dollars and we’d have to remember which disc we were on and navigate arcane and slow menus?
And when we had questions, we had to find the answers ourselves by reading long form content and just be satisfied that there were many questions we couldn’t answer at all because the information wasn’t available?
Or when we wanted cabs, we’d not know how much a ride would cost until after we got to our destinations and they smelled like rotten farts and were covered in boogers and our only goal was to not touch anything and look out the window because what’s a smartphone?
And when we wanted to go somewhere, we had to ask for directions and use atlases to figure out how to get to the general area of the destination, then drive in circles, accidentally drive past a turn 5 times because the street we were supposed to turn onto had two different names and we had been given the wrong one?
I was there and anyone who pines for the old days can just go there. We have cable and encyclopedias and taxis and atlases. Go nuts.
We have all these conveniences now and somehow people are not happier. Maybe the improvements you showed weren’t improvements after all and society should have spent more time to focus on people instead of developing and selling the next great music platform.
You are missing the point when you tell people to go back to cable, encyclopedias etc. because it’s not about those things, it’s about escaping into an idealized past while being depressed in the present. They should have your sympathy.
Airbnb is worse than hotels
On the flip side, piracy has never been easier.
