alt Hacker NewsSomething I really dislike about modern consumer products is that companies simply don’t care if their decisions leave their customers embittered and feeling negatively about their decisions. It seems like that used to be a salient factor in how firms designed, sold and pitched their wares.
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It's the lack of competition. They know you're not going to stop paying them.
They've done the calculation. They'll lose X income because of subscribers who leave, and they'll get Y extra income from the ones who remain. If X < Y then implement policy.
It depends on the product though. The problem with streaming is that structurally, you have competition (other streaming services) but content wise not so much. If you want to watch Foundation, you need Apple tv. Netflix might have another good SciFi series, but it's not foundation... same for any other movie or series... in a way, people are more open to accept these terms because they want to watch their favorite show. So there is no real competition. And they get away with it because customers accept it.
I think this is the single biggest change making everything worse. Lots of businesses used to care about their own products, since quality and brand image seemed like obviously important things. As the machine ran, and we got better and better at collecting and analyzing data, it became clear that the customer's view of you and your product didn't matter as much as we thought, and in fact it matters less and less the more businesses converge on that idea. But businesses still mostly cared about their own products, because they are run by humans, who tend to care about what they make naturally. However, eventually market forces pushed out normal humans.