I think the issue is that Netflix always had a lot of debt and thought they could grow a lot more. They had a really solid income, then suddenly their catalog was shrinking thanks to the million other streaming services while they simultaneously started declining in subscriptions right when the cost of debt skyrocketed (even if some of their debt is still at lower rates).
Not that I'm cheering on the price increase by any means, nor am I currently a subscriber. Still though in some way I can see why they're doing it and have a feeling we're just at the tip of the iceberg in how bad tech corporate services are going to get for a bit.
On an unrelated note, VPNs and/or I2P are cool things to check out.
Edit:
One thing too to bring up is that password sharing may still be a breeze. If you set up a VPN - not a commercial one but you setup yourseld on either on a VPS or on your home network - as long as anybody is on it they'll look like they're from the same household.
My understanding is that they mostly haven't, with a couple exceptions like a few ISPs offering to priorities to pings for gaming (as FeelThePower mentioned), throttle certain protocols (e.g. Torrenting), or refuse to carry traffic for certain sites (e.g. Kiwi Farms). All of this would be prevented under net neutrality.
As far as I'm aware though, an extremely overwhelmingly portion of traffic (like you'd have to do a lot of digging to find an example otherwise) already adheres to net neutrality since it's pretty pointless for a company to spend resources and goodwill to mess with traffic.
I don't think too much will change. It is nice in the sense it will prevent an ISP from doing things against specific sites, although like mentioned above most of the protections are theoretical ATM.
I'm not on IOS, but I've heard Brave browser on IOS has adblock so that might be a way to avoid ads. Sites like various Invidious instances run in any browser would also be a way to dodge ads.
Any browser that accepts plugins would also work, but I'm not sure if they exsist or not.
Unfortunately there's ads in Firefox too, and they're opt out instead of opt in. I'm certainly not a fan of it, but outside of LibreWolf until servo becomes a thing I think should be right but we're stuck choosing lesser of multiple evils.
I'm not quite sure social media accounts and the Nobel Prize make a good comparison. I get what you're saying about the exclusivity idea, but in my mind "exclusive" social media can't really be that much of a draw if there's a million alternatives and it doesn't bring anything new to the table (it's not decentralized or federated if you need approval from a central authority).
I do find it a bit funny that their adblock-block is to my knowledge just client side JavaScript. Ya' know, the kinda stuff adblock is built to cutout.
Unless they're going to be splicing up videos to put the ads into the same file (which would be astronomically resource intensive) or only allow YouTube in app and in seriously locked down Web-Environtment-Integrity browsers it'll be impossible prevent a device from running or not running code as the user see's fit.
YT isn't going to drop premium any time soon. Subscriptions are astronomically more revenue generating then ads, and given YT was always operating at a loss until they stopped reporting revenue altogether premium will probably be the only route to scrape by.
Not to say they can't enshittify it by raising prices and adding restrictions, but I can't see them doing anything but trying to force more people to it.
I paid for it for a bit a while back, and it was decent. Of course free tools give considerably better features (adblock, sponsor block, DRM free downloads, better privacy). That and personally not wanting to financially support YT for a variety of reasons has kept me away from it for a long time.
They usually drop in price. They were just selling the 6a for $200 like a month ago, so given a bit of time you can get a good deal on the second-to-latest generation.
We're seeing this all over the tech and tech adjacent space. Can't grow forever at a loss, especially not with increased interest rates and a potential economic downturn.
My guess, if you want to have decent services we're going to end up needing to pick few (or a suite of the basics) to pay for on a monthly basic and cut out all the "free" stuff that is/will get enshittified.
Only in the most remote deserts, wilderness areas and oceans can you find a sky as dark as our ancestors knew them.
It varies depending on what country your in, but I don't think people realize how little of a percentage densly populated areas make up of the world. If you're in the US unless you're in a place like NY City a 20-45 min drive can get you to a place zero light minus occasional blinks from cell towers/planes/sattalites - and there will also probably be public land there you can go on for free.
And hey, look, the fact stuff like sattalites are interfering with observing the sky isn't great, but if that sattalite is used for powering agricultural equipment and gathering agricultural data that keeps a billion people from starving to death I'd say that's a worthy trade off.
Like a life saving drug with side effects, there's always trade offs as technology and society advance. And mitigating side effects when possible are great, but I thinks it's important we don't act like the side effects are occurring in a vacuum, and I would rather live now than in the past without the tech we have now.
My guess is it would be considered a general purpose computer, assuming it runs standard Win/Linux and can run any software even if it's specs and shape are geared towards games.
By the way, the US prison population today is higher than the Gulag population of the entire Soviet Union at its peak.
Well being worked to death and/or being strait up shot tends to keep those numbers down. And how many of those "hoarders" were quite literally starving but they had a tiny bit on hand? And how many more were in there for "anti-soviet behavior" instead of anything related to hoarding or destroying food.
"Gulags" is not a gotcha
Gulags, concentration camps and the like are definitely a "gotcha" as much as a "gatcha" can exist.
The Australian Retailers Association said one in every four of these shoplifting incidents involved "abuse or assault" against workers.
In an ongoing trial, staff at 30 Coles stores across Australia are being fitted with cameras to only be turned on in "threatening situations".
The title sounds misleading, from the text of the article it's more of a panic button to alert emergency services than it is passive monitoring of employees or customers.
My 2c would be yes only if you're specifically seeking out the bleeding edge and don't mind or enjoy doing the neccesary tinkering.
Alsp you have time in between now and a re-install I'd highly recommended trying to do you're day to day stuff in an Arch VM for a bit and see if it works for you.
(OP: Sorry, paywall, can't find another source yet. Someone got an archive?)
Quick tip: disabling JavaScript will get you past the paywall. Ublock Origin can disable JavaScript on a temp/permanent bases for specific websites, and I always set news websites to JavaScript off or else they're a real pain to read.
I think the issue is that Netflix always had a lot of debt and thought they could grow a lot more. They had a really solid income, then suddenly their catalog was shrinking thanks to the million other streaming services while they simultaneously started declining in subscriptions right when the cost of debt skyrocketed (even if some of their debt is still at lower rates).
Not that I'm cheering on the price increase by any means, nor am I currently a subscriber. Still though in some way I can see why they're doing it and have a feeling we're just at the tip of the iceberg in how bad tech corporate services are going to get for a bit.
On an unrelated note, VPNs and/or I2P are cool things to check out.
Edit: One thing too to bring up is that password sharing may still be a breeze. If you set up a VPN - not a commercial one but you setup yourseld on either on a VPS or on your home network - as long as anybody is on it they'll look like they're from the same household.