Subscriptions are an overused pricing model. Businesses love subscriptions because they love recurring revenue. The desire for RR pushes businesses to pursue products the fit the revenue model rather than solving customer problems. Consumers notice their bills stacking up with subscriptions and start to question the value they're getting for their subscription fees.
4. Video game industry subscriptions (too many to dig into)
NYT's slavish devotion to a subscription model follows this pattern. They want to get subscriptions so they structure offerings to fit. Compare to a platform like Substack, where they offer a rich ecosystem with just a few different price models. I've believed for some time that news media like NYT overvalue their current offerings and need to innovate. Doesn't seem like they're interested.
Don't take my statement to claim all subscription offerings are bereft of value. Simply that there are so many lazy offerings that subscriptions are better as a signal of waste than value.
Influenced, but I've been considering it for about a year. As the parent poster mentioned, I too am finding very little of the Netflix content enjoyable. Ahead of my first viewing of He-Man I made some mental predictions of plot directions I wouldn't like that they might do. All of my predictions happened in the first episode so I cut the cord.
Long-term there was always going to be a marketplace process for piracy. As the pain/expense of legitimately acquiring content exceeds the pain/expense of acquiring it via other means, consumers will make choices that suit them. With Netflix we saw a sharp decline in the pain/expense for legitimacy so we saw a dip in piracy. Nothing magical about it
Conjecture: their content and suggestions are garbage because they aren't allowing the data to drive their decisions independent of their ideological or public perception concerns.
After He-Man released I ended my subscription, just shy of being a 10 year customer.
Those are still moves in the right direction. Requiring a cosigner for example brings in another party who can evaluate the situation and contribute to the decision to take out the loan vs. pursuing an alternative.
Your point about putting pressure on prices is what I would call ideal: anything that could help rein in spending and deliver value is better than what we have now.
> the blockchains are too inefficient to host it directly.
True, this needs to be addressed before I can get what I want. In the case of media it's got to be either on-chain or strongly coupled so that once published, an artifact remains available even if comparable artifacts are produced. It probably won't happen top-down, media giants are keen to keep their content in their walled gardens. Journalism might be a good fit to start with.
I've been wondering about this as well. So far there does not appear to be an accepted route to fixing this in BTC, but there are proposals. I've heard (unreliably) that there are already transactions out there containing snippets of data which can be composed into something but I have nothing concrete.
I'm most interested in the censorship or in more friendly terms, authenticity gains that blockchain can provide. In a world where works are being revised, "special edition"ed or straight removed from availability, I'm eager for blockchain technology to sidestep these dark patterns.
Stocks and bonds are still coupled to fiat currencies and will be directly impacted by their perceived deficiencies when compared to crypto.
Hard assets like real estate, land, gold don't fit that bill, but each of their own tradeoffs. Right now cryptocurrencies are making gains against those hard assets so they are more attractive. An investor may wish to diversify among some or all of these options.
Somewhat good advice, but with a caveat. While a good narrative is generally helpful, results still matter. Case in point, a team that ships quickly but also has crunch time can craft a story about heroic devs staying long hours to ship a product, but this is not better than doing things right the first time to avoid crunch
I can think of a few reasons competition can be beneficial.
1. Exert downward pressure on union fees
2. Offer alternatives in the case of union corruption
3. Offer alternatives in union priorities/mission
Also, I don't follow how competition in the two spaces, firms and unions, is necessarily different in kind. To the degree that competition "weakens" unions, the same should apply to firms.