How long is “forever”? When it comes to digital media, forever could be as close as a couple of months away.
Funimation, a Sony-owned streaming service for anime, recently announced that subscribers’ digital libraries on the platform will be unavailable after April 2. For years, Funimation had been telling subscribers that they could keep streaming these digital copies of purchased movies and shows, but qualifying it: “forever, but there are some restrictions.”
I firmly believe that in five or ten years (… if the world hasn’t ended by then) we’ll have a “leak” that will reveal the behind the scenes negotiations between reddit and the app makers. Because even as it was occurring there was a decent amount of back and forth until it became “Reddit are trying to kill me, your best friend, by charging me rates that I can’t afford”. And then all hell broke lose which led to all the “Well, fuck it, reddit doesn’t need you either” level responses.
Which gets back to: When you approach “enshittification” from an actively antagonistic stance? There is zero benefit in providing a middle ground. If you are “literally hitler” whether you are reasonable or not and being reasonable doesn’t even properly stem the bleeding? Why bother.
Its why the various youtube messes have actually gone “okay”. Yes, you have people like Rossman who make it their brand to basically say “Fuck this company and I am going to actively attack them and encourage you to drop them while relying on them for income”. But the vast majority of “voices” had to take a more nuanced stance because… they need youtube to exist to make money. Which means the vast majority of Voices tended to be “Okay, this is bullshit and youtube is kind of a hellscape with ads so I am not going to blame you for running an ad blocker… even though I literally need you to watch those ads so I can make rent. Also, I get a LOT more money from youtube premium viewers. Just saying…”
And that is why… Youtube Premium has a LOT of supporters (myself included). Because we watch a lot of youtube and can “justify” it. And youtube music is probably the second best service based on almost any metrics/feature requirements.
Maybe I am just old and grumpy. But I remember all the various webcomics and (what we would now call) blog sites that had variants of “Please for the love of god whitelist us in your adblocker. We need those ads to pay for server expenses. We go out of our way to curate good ads and if you see a bad one, let us know and we’ll remove it from the rotation within 24 hours. But please, let us keep drawing stupid shit” that were almost universally responded to with "too hard. Adblocker on