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 serve 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 (not within their 30 day or whatever window), knowing that might contribute to Netflix canceling a show that I fucking liked in the first place!
SO RELAXING GUYS!
So no, I don’t stream stuff anymore. I’m sick of paying for content that constantly gets canceled, and also experiencing stress while doing so.
Side note, the restaurant analogy is exactly why I hate the seemingly American style of service where the waiter asks how the food is halfway through.
I guess that’s a good analogy for how creepy surveillance capitalism is, it’s like a waiter judging and recording your every move and reaction throughout the entire meal.
American style of service where the waiter asks how the food is halfway through
So that’s what’s going on! I was wondering why people are doing that everywhere I eat out all of a sudden. Bloody annoying. Me with a mouth full of food having to force out a “yhh shh rlly gwwd tnnk yww”.
Gtfoutahurr
I just give them a thumbs up.
Just give them a thumbs up???
deleted by creator
Perfectly acceptable
just one of the many negatives of tip culture
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. Even the speed people eat DOES matter since restaraunts tend to be designed around each customer spending a certain amount of time dining. Too short and they will never order a dessert. Too long and they are costing you money while they nurse that coffee.
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.
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.
Sorry, but revolution is a far simpler way to stop corporate greed than trying to change everyone’s buying habits.
You first.
How about we do it together?
Well, beyond organized legal avenues: national & local elections, writing your representatives, protesting, marching, I see no real recourse against a corrupted and compromised government, and my government is corrupted and compromised top to bottom, side to side. No one gets a pass. Not this administration, and none in the past. So, no matter who sits in the seat of authority, you will always feel the effects of a corrupt and compromised government.
It is not I you have to convince. It is millions of apathetic citizens, blown around by blustering, deceptive political winds, without compass or direction. Beyond not feeding the machine more than you have to while still scratching out a life on this planet like everyone else is, it is hard to make inroads that stick. This machine turns slowly. You see, there are still a majority of people in my country that are comfortable. Comfortable people do not illicit change…uncomfortable people do, but here is no change without pain. Pain is something that the citizens in my country are unwilling to put up with to a better goal. They do not act with the long term in mind. Their future is tied to once every 4 years, never contemplating that the legislation passed today, will be with us for generations, if not longer.
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.
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).
That is a distinction without difference. It doesn’t matter what mechanism is used to collect those metrics. The fact is they are there
And, at a glance: Forgejo/Codeberg definitely has stars and watches and fork tracking as well
Which is all fundamentally the supply and demand aspects of consumerism. It is the idea that people can identify what there is a high demand for and work to provide a supply. Which is not at all a bad thing and extends far beyond capitalism.
But it goes back to the previous poster’s comments about how they don’t like that netflix analyzes everything they do and greenlights projects based on that. That extends FAR beyond netflix and well into even open source projects.
The reality is that you cannot escape consumerism in the modern world.
Didn’t downvote you but, I guess what I was leaning heavily on was ‘striving to be as self sufficient as humanly possible’. Sure, even though I grow my own food, garden crops, beef, chickens, goats, et al, I still have to buy things. I didn’t mean it like I had transcended commercial consuming. But, do I really need a iPhone 17 pro max as much as AT&T says I do? Do I really need the cutting edge computer when the 14 year old one I built serves me just fine for what I do? That kind of stuff that people just seem to be compelled to purchase.
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.
That was my polite way of ending the conversation, I disagreed with the person, but I got tired of arguing about the metaphore and burgers, etc with someone who was clearly not gonna let this go.
“I don’t like being watched while consuming anything, really.”
“Yeah, but bro, you’re too stupid to realize why they’re doing it, let me tell you why!”
exactly this. i say PIR - Private Information Retrieval
offline everything, no middlehands
condition “the industry” as these are called to change the RND departement - live without dependency on fuckers
What’s your take on scrobble services?
I don’t like that one monopoly company gets all the data and abuses the system with it even further.
I don’t really use them, so I don’t have much of an opinion, but I agree with your assessment.
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?
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.
This is why the seedbox SaaS market exists. Providing turn key hosted solutions, the only heavy lifting is the configuration which takes some reading to understand.
Check out the Servarr Wiki, Ombi, Syncthing as a starting point for media discovery and curration tooling.
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.
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.
My watch parties already basically dried up. The movie industry is crumbling in front of us for not being able to adapt to what their audience actually wants, and I end up just spending my time in other ways, because they’re offering me poor value and too much friction (VPNs and torrents) to get what I want, and that’s what my rant is. They’ll adapt or die. Right now, it’s looking like the movie industry will die. You’re making a lot of assumptions there about offloading my decision making to AI though…
People still have watchparties?
Some friends and I got together and watched Weapons for Halloween (on a friend’s jellyfin server) and we had a great time
You have to be really careful trying to buy physical copies nowadays, too, since bootlegs are absolutely everywhere. Especially on Ebay.
Oh, I forgot the other part of my rant when it comes to acquiring the content. Brick and mortar doesn’t carry Blu Rays anymore. Maybe Walmart does, but I don’t have one near me. Target and Best Buy stopped. I have a functional mall near me, but not one store in it sells movies, and when I asked, they looked at me like I had two heads.
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.
Netlix does livestreams for camgirls now?
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’m old enough to remember when this was a thing. TV didn’t have a remote, 3 main channels. That era.
The thing that hasn’t changed is people wanting to talk about their favorite media. What has is the arena. I don’t know irl people watching what I watch. So I end up talking with other fans on Discord or watching youtubers geek out like I am.
The trick is not falling for parasocial relationships with these people gathered around the virtual 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’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.
I’ve heard the older generations reminisce about ye olde monoculture
We old folks most often reminisce through very dark, rose colored glasses which often leave out important negative features of days past.
I miss the days of people having their own bespoke collection of their favorite movies and shows
I don’t miss the shelves to house all of it tho. Now, I have quite a collection of audio from my days of internet radio, that I ripped to flac a long time ago All of it sets on my shelf as a NAS.
I love her.
Can’t help it but think of a world with more ppl like her in it.
If you like her check out “Bread on Penguins” too. She was suggested to me because I watch Veronica and I really dig the way she does her videos too. She’s the complete opposite of the mainstream YouTubers and just a nice person who really enjoys Linux and making videos.
yea both are utterly cool
Any good links? I would love another subscription!
thanks!
How would I find new music?
NPR’s tiny desk
asking your friends and aquantances
listening to dj sets
rutracker
I ❤️ Tiny Desk.
Theses are great suggestions. Thank you.
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
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.
Just a general reminder to people that college stations still exist, blow most other stations out of the water if you want a better variety of music, and the one closest to you would love your support. And lots of them would also love volunteers from the community!
Excellent point! There are several in my locale, and they will play a ton of stuff that I am unfamiliar with, a lot of indie bands too which I have always had an affinity for. If I hear something that really resonates with me, I’ll go search it. Plus a lot of students that are in the broadcasting field of study, have their own shows which opens up so many avenues of exploration. I gave up on the commercial stations long ago. I just get tired of hearing the same repeat playlist every hour and they turn favorite songs into despised songs. Stairway To Heaven is a great Led Zep tune, but not every hour on the hour.
True. I remember the days of mixtapes, and then the advent of cd collections in your car of all the bootleg ‘mix tapes’. However, I still hold that if it weren’t for Shawn Fanning, among others, pushing the envelope, the music scene online would be quite different than it is now. Technology is like that…double edged sword and all that.
Aside from similar artists, I scrobble to Listenbrainz, which gives recommendations from similar artists and similar listeners.
I like this tool too: https://www.music-map.com/
Indeed! I lean heavily on similar users to me, finding unknown gems frequently!
Bandcamp? Listenbrainz? Last.fm?
Not by reading pitchfork or rolling stone. Those are only for people who hate music.
Back in the aughts I would find bands because they were an opener for another band I was seeing.
I saw Charley Crockett last summer and a guy named Drayton Farley opened for him. I’m not a huge Drayton Farley fan.
I saw Joshua Ray Walker open for Marcus King and didn’t even like his show but looked him up and found his recorded work to be incredible, THEN he found out he had cancer and that was part of why the live show was weak, nothing to do with his music, and says he is recovering now, but I felt so uncharitable thinking the show sucked when he was dealing with something so awful.
But anyway - I do use streaming but like you find bands other ways, opening acts, radio, sometimes Brooklyn Vegan, that site posts about bands I’ve never heard of, I listen and find stuff I like (and a lot I don’t).
I mean, it’s not like you would have known, but good on you for giving the guy a chance.
Oh, and speaking of Charley we were lucky enough to have the Charley Crockett/Leon Bridges show come through, holy crap, I’d seen both of them live before but getting TWO great performers in one night, wow. And that intersection between county and R&B is such pleasant music.
I wanted to go to that one too, but it didn’t work out.
I’ve been meeting my music discovery needs with a combination of community radio and bandcamp - plus just talking to friends, though your mileage may vary depending on your friends’ taste.
