It’s not just streaming services that have turned to shit. Society as a whole has been enshittified because shareholders and directors are chasing the dollar.

Reddit started charging out of their butt for API access, and had killed off 95% of third party apps in the process.

YouTube is downright unusable without a Premium subscription or uBlock Origin. Every content creator meanwhile risks demonetization if their videos are too kid-friendly or too inappropriate, and now have to fill half their videos with endorsements for shitty mobile games like Raid: Shadow Legends if they want to break even.

Porn sites are now astroturfed by e-girls shilling their $20/month OnlyFans pages.

Online dating apps are now a carbon copy of one another, are owned by an oligopoly of big corporations and charge you the same price of four WoW subscriptions for basic features like unlimited swipes, seeing who liked you, etc.

Even real life sucks now. Enjoy paying 70% of your monthly income to pay off some filthy rich landlord’s mortgage while the rich continue to snap up properties, all while the wealthy continue to brainwash sheep into voting against their best interests.

Love how it doesn’t mention the fact that services are getting objectively worse content as they stretch thin, are increasing their prices across the board, and cracking down on password sharing which was previously touted as a benefit.

The EUIPO speculates that financial pressures, like inflation, means that people have less money to spend on entertainment. This can be seen in the way that fewer people are signing up for Netflix or Amazon Prime – and some are even cancelling their subscriptions altogether.

Ah yes, that’s the only reason. Not that streaming services are offering less content and functionality for more money, that can’t be it.

2015: Share your Netflix between four people, everyone pays $4 per month, have access to 80% of all online content. The interface is shit but you keep up with it because it is cheap.

2023: You pay $20 for Netflix, pay $15 for Disney, pay $15 for Hulu, pay $10 for Amazon Prime, $15 for Discovery, $15 for Paramount, $15 for Youtube, have access to 50% of all online content. The interface is still shit and you wonder why you pay for that shit.

Joe Average: 🏴‍☠️😎🏴‍☠️😎🏴‍☠️😎🏴‍☠️😎🏴‍☠️😎🏴‍☠️ and the interface is easier than ever.

My 2013 Highest-End Smart-TV barely works with Youtube and no longer with anything else. But Burning Series still works marvellous. Another thing: “Consuming” pirated content is not “illegal” in Germany. It is a violation of private property which the rights owner can sue in a civil court. But as long as you don’t use P2P services where you also upload - which would indeed be a fellony - he can not detect what you do and can not take any action against you - so One-Click-Hosters and Warez-Streaming is totally safe. And if the rights owner could find out about you he could at most send you a cease-and-desist-order with a one-time-fee of at max $100 because it is a minor incident. As far as I know there was never a user of Warez-Streaming who paid anything.

The only bad thing: DNS is nowadays filtered at the big Telcos and Providers which means I have to change the DNS inside my Routers to Cloudflare and Google. Which are a lot faster anyway.

It’s worth noting that although piracy is up, the rates are still far lower than they were 20, 10 or even five years ago. Whether people continue to access content illegally remains to be seen – hopefully this is just a ‘blip’ and rates of theft begin to fall again as the economy recovers.

I can’t be bothered to pull back all the layers of naive optimism in just these two sentences.