I’m one of those hipsters who doesn’t use streaming services.
I did, a while ago, but I quit using them because the experience is kind of awful, and I’m happier now for it. I collect physical media and watch it using Jellyfin on my Linux-based home theater PC, and I’m completely satisfied with how it works.
I’m making this video because I am really troubled by algorithmic helplessness, and I feel like corporate-centralized streaming media makes that worse. Maybe this video will encourage someone else to cut the cord and rediscover an appreciation for owning your media and being choosy about what to “watch next”. Or maybe I’m just wasting time. Who knows? I suppose, you know, you’re reading this description, right?
If you read the description, say “algorithmic helplessness sucks” in the comments. That’ll make me feel better.
The thing I hated about Netflix was the stress of knowing i was being watched with my viewing habits and that affected how they decided to cancel or continue shows.
Imagine being a customer at a restaurant and the chef is in the back watching you eat, saying things like:
“well, if he doesn’t eat the whole thing in less than 10 minutes that means he probably hated it and won’t continue to buy more burgers, so we should just remove it from the menu now and never server that burger again.”
Who the fuck wants to ‘relax’ and watch stuff when i know if I start watching something and stop after episode 1 because I liked it, realize my partner might also like it, and I wait 3 months to watch it together, knowing that might contribute to Netflix canceling a show that I fucking liked in the first place!
SO RELAXING GUYS!
I mean… that IS how restaurants work. If people don’t order the fish of the day then they buy fewer and fewer fishes until it is no longer a thing.
And similar happens with even buying blu-rays. If nobody bought Master and Commander in 4k then you can be sure that experiment would be over. Instead? That thing sold like toiler paper during COVID and we’ll likely see more “prestige” releases with a huge dose of FOMO.
As for up fronts versus long tails? Guess what is motivating all those revivals “nobody asked for”?
Don’t get me wrong. I vastly prefer to rip blu rays to my NAS and watch via plex. But the idea that you are somehow no longer part of the marketing cycle is just… wrong.
I’m commenting on literally being watched though, so let’s say you get up to go to the bathroom after your first bite the chef marks that as ‘didn’t like his burger’ because you took a bite (watched 1 episode) and didn’t continue to binge eat the burger (binge the whole season by the end of the month), BAM because you had a life event you couldn’t control, you now hate the burger and hate the show.
This is not a fun way to consume anything.
I mean… depending on how new an item is and what “tier” the restaurant is? They are 100% watching for stuff like that and probably making a note that you got up after eating only a quarter of your burger. Because if the burger were good, you would want to finish it. Is it too sloppy? Did you feel the need to wash your hands mid bite? Did it make you nauseous?
Same with taking out your phone. Does it look like you are telling a friend what a great burger you had? Or are you feeling bloated and trying to digest a bit before you eat more?
This level of market analysis is not at all new. Streaming services just have a much easier time automating it but… give it time until startups are selling cameras to monitor the dining area and automate analytics based on who ordered what and did what.
I guess I should put more mindfulness into how I’m consuming restaurant food then, lol either way I think we can put this hypothetical to bed.
Or you know, don’t? And just live your life.
Because it only matters at an aggregate level. The restaurant won’t change anything for one customer.
The only way to stop corporate greed is to stop consuming. Easy to say, hard to do, but not impossible. I’ve lived most of my life striving to be as self sufficient as humanly possible, and that has carried me over into self hosting.
Go hiking, exercise, play sports with your mates. Take up a physical hobby like blacksmithing, electronics even woodworking. Spend the weekends on small projects, DIY drones, a wooden sculpture, a small knife made from recycled corrugated steel. Join a volunteer group, do charity work, help out in the soup kitchen. Nowadays it’s easier than ever to not consume content.
Not the person you’re answering to, but: You say this as if everybody enjoys manual labor, sports and/or outdoor activities. None of the proposed activities elicits the least amount of interest for me, for example.
And many of those activities include consumption. If you’re doing more than casual hiking, you probably aren’t using second-hand shoes from the thrift store.
The point it being is that consumption plays a supportive role in the activity. Consumption is NOT the activity. You buy shoes to do the activity instead of you buy a movie to watch the movie.
More people should try barefoot hiking. I love it, but most people I know, they don’t even try it
Australia’s snake population thanks you for your marketing campaign.
People should go outside atleast. The sun is bright and beautiful, the skies blue, the beaches are warm and the ocean smells kinda salty.
Some people are out doors all day for work… They may not want their hobbies to reflect their work
Open source/selfhost projects 100% keep track of how many people star a repo, what MRs are submitted, and even usage/install data. And many of them are specifically designed to fulfill a role that industry standard tools aren’t (or are too expensive for) and… guess where the data on that comes from?
The reality is that you cannot escape consumerism in the modern world. You can pretend you are but… you aren’t. What you CAN do is focus on supporting tools and media that you want/approve of and making your own life better as a result.
And a big chunk of that involves actually thinking through consequences.
Open source/selfhost projects 100% keep track of how many people star a repo, what MRs are submitted, and even usage/install data.
I feel it is important to make a distinction here, though:
GitHub, the for-profit, non-FOSS, Microsoft-owned platform keeps track of the ‘stars of a repo’, not the open-source self-host projects themselves. Somebody hosts their repo forge on Codeberg, sr.ht, their own infrastructure or even GitLab? There’s generally very little to no algorithmic number-crunching involved. Same for MR/PRs.
Additionally - from my knowledge - very few fully FOSS programs have extensive usage/install telemetry, and even fewer opt-out versions. Tracking which couldn’t be disabled I’ve essentially never heard of in that space, because every time someone does go in that direction the public reaction is usually very strong (see e.g. Audacity).
This video was what convinced me to start up a Jellyfin server last month. It’s fantastic. The peace of mind knowing that I have all my media stored locally, forever, is so satisfying.
I mean, forever might be too strong of a word.
Well, how about “for as long as I maintain the hardware”?
Or you accidentally delete it and have no backups because “this would never happen to me” until it does.
Oh yeah, I feel sorry for all the Immich users who know it just won’t happen to them. Losing your movie collection sucks but you can download again, but personal photos deserve much better treatment. Though it sucks paying extra for cloud backup of your photos.
I’m all for this, but acquiring the media outside of streaming services in the first place is difficult, likely by design. There’s no GOG for movies and TV; there’s not even a Steam. My wife is basically permanently subscribed to Peacock because she loves Law and Order: SVU, to the point that she basically has the whole series on loop while she knits. I started looking this time last year into how to self-host all that, but I didn’t even get to the point of finding out what Jellyfin is before I realized that it was impossible to legally acquire all the seasons on Blu Ray or even DVD. They want me to either subscribe to Peacock or buy a “digital copy”, which is just rental streaming by another name. I’m not a skilled enough pirate to know that my ISP isn’t going to mind my activity, and being a skilled pirate isn’t even something I’m interested in being. Plus, my past experiences with piracy is that beggars can’t be choosers, and the bit rate could be awful, or it would have huge watermarks from whatever Canadian channel the pirate recorded from, and that’s not a great experience when it’s supposed to be a gift anyway.
Unlike the video author, I’m not even bothered by algorithmic recommendations for media. I actually like it. The main reason I want to self host my media is because I don’t watch so much of it that a subscription price makes sense very often. If my wife and I are just watching the same couple of things over and over again, why do I need a buffet of content I’m not going to watch at monthly subscription prices?
yeah okay well your watchparties are increasingly going to get worse until you too hit your threshold: such is the business.
the rest of the world uses a VPN like MullvadVPN and qBittorrent to “digitally back up media we’ve already bought”. without ads, in better quality, without telemetry, without serfdom-subscriptions. you may like AI offloading your decisionmaking, but keep doing it and you will be codependent on authority for choosing anything in life. what do you want in a cozy moment away from work? it frustrates me to read people are too anxioys to begin to do otherwise and accept the way things are. that’s a rant in return
have a nice day, i won’t make this into a chain of replies.
So bizarrely the best experience is to self host and pirate. That’s what you get when the entire entertainment industry is hostile to consumers.
When Netflix first became big, it was popular because it was a one-stop shop for almost all your content. It was like a big library of content in one place, you pay a reasonable monthly fee and it’s all there. Piracy dipped as a result.
Now all the content is fragmented into numerous walled gardens you have to pay separate fees to access. People can only consume the same amount but now they have to pay 4 or 5 fees as the content is spread out.
Unsurprisingly piracy is booming again.
I don’t even mind that there are so many different streaming services. It’s still a far better version of cable, where I can opt into ad-free for a few more dollars and sign up for or cancel a given service at will without having to have all of them. What sucks is when it’s the only legal distribution channel and I can’t make the choice that’s right for me based on my consumption, like buying just the movies and shows I want and playing them how I want. Demonstrated in the video, we still need what can most accurately be categorized as a workaround or a hack to even rip our own Blu Rays. All that plus the streaming services have raised their prices beyond the point where it’s an attractive deal.
Steam attempted to distribute movies between 2014 and 2019.
GOG gave up at the beginning of 2025.Yeah, I’m aware. This is a problem that the movie and TV industry don’t appear to be interested in solving. And they seemingly operate as a massive cartel, so one studio isn’t about to break out on its own and innovate with a DRM free movie store.
I miss the days of people having their own bespoke collection of their favorite movies and shows. Everything is homogenized now. At least when I pirate, I’m still building my own personal media library. And I never have to worry about the show I like being removed later.
But I’m not gonna lie. The quality drop off in content caused by streaming services I think is a bigger issue
Netflix activity tries to make content that’s not actually good enough to watch without browsing a phone. Second screen content, they call it. And I guarantee someone in a finance role realized they could make way more by doing just enough to keep people, rather than try to actively create amazing content, because it’s soo much cheaper to not pay for good writers, or good set designers or actors when you could just find someone who’s good enough. I think it’s because the money people spend is recurring, linked to the service as a whole, and not linked to the individual work… users have to vote by watching now, and some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen is also some of the least watched.
Everything is homogenized now
I’m interested to know what you mean by this, because if anything, I’ve heard the older generations reminisce about ye olde monoculture when there was only a handful of good shows on a handful of television channels, and everyone would tune in weekly to watch and then talk about the next day around the water cooler. I feel like streaming has led to things being more fragmented, both because you need to be subscribed to the one service that carries the show and because there’s so many more shows being made.
I feel like streaming has led to things being more fragmented, both because you need to be subscribed to the one service that carries the show and because there’s so many more shows being made.
I’m not who you were originally replying to, but I think two seemingly contradictory things can be true at once.
Yes, there is definitely more content nowadays, and less people watching the same things at the same time because of all of the variety of services and content and platforms, etc.
But that content tends to still be homogenous. The settings and costumes of the shows might be different, but most content cannot pass, for instance, the bechdel test.
For all of the emphasis on “eradicating woke” in the last few years, there really isn’t a whole lot of actual diversity in most media. I could probably only name a single show that expresses, for instance, communist ideas, and I think it was cancelled in recent years alongside scores of lgbtq characters in shows.
Plotlines are typical, production values are stepped up but there’s a large amount of, for instance, ideological consistency among all media produced nowadays.
If you’re looking for a variety of typical genre shows, yes, you’re spoiled for choice. But when you’re looking for something that breaks the mold even slightly there are really only a handful of things from which to choose.
And that’s leaving out how much derivative media exists. Vince Gilligan in recent interviews even lamented how he was one of only a few people that could get a new show with a new concept even started in the industry. Many shows are set in “universes” that are decades old. A lot of “new” movies are reboots or sequels of old movies.
There’s a thread of choiceless variety that used to apply mainly to things like groceries that has now infected much of media as well. Whole political movements now push to eradicate the little diversity (ideological and character identity based) that exists.
All of this leaves out what happened to music btw, which is becoming so algorithm-driven that it’s hard for those using streaming services to even tell if it was produced by a person.
I’ll just leave this here as well:
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/the-intellectual-situation/why-is-everything-so-ugly/
Edit: I realized after a while that the easiest way to summarize the homogeneity you see in modern media is that it is supply-side oriented. Shows, movies, and music are made (or not) primarily based upon how easily the corporate marketing apparatuses think they can shove it down the public’s throat.
how easily the corporate marketing apparatuses think they can shove it down the public’s throat.
Let’s also remark: USian public. Outside the States the reliance in stereotypes and too-pretty or too-token-minority is so obvious that it detracts from enjoyment.
Argentinian here. Lately I mostly consume British TV. It’s immeasurably better. People act and look as real people.
That’s also why I find USian remakes disgusting. They lose all distinctiveness. A blatant case was the police drama Broadchurch (UK original) vs Gracepoint (US remake). The only common cast member was David Tennant. The UK characters feel as real people. The US characters were obviously actors. Olivia Coleman was believable as a police officer in a small fishing town. Anna Gunn… wasn’t.
How would I find new music?
Aside from similar artists, I scrobble to Listenbrainz, which gives recommendations from similar artists and similar listeners.
Used to be we would share mixtapes… I really miss that. It was an intimate social interaction that we’ve entirely lost with modern streaming.
Yeah I share the sentiment, but I remember finding the songs for mixtapes on… the radio, where I didn’t really have a say on what’s playing. Algorithms can be a force for good sometimes.
but I remember finding the songs for mixtapes on… the radio
Back in the day, disk jockies would announce 'Alright, get your cassettes out, we’re going to play the entire Led Zep - Kashmir LP, usually late at night.
Used to be that disk jockeys also got to pick what they played to an extent. Now it’s all just predetermined lists nationwide brought to you by iHeartRadio. But yeah. Crazy to think how quickly things changed.
True. Most radio stations now get their playlists from corporate, like Clear Channel. So, both the radio station and the music industry are in cahoots. A pay to play scenario. Gone are the days of submitting an LP to a radio station for play consideration.
KEXP (a radio station and also online+YouTube) has opened my eyes to so many new artists. And also bandcamp has a very interesting related artists kinda feature
