nerdrage 's BestNetTech Comments

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  • On the post: After Bleeding TV Subscribers For Years, Cable Giants Now Losing Broadband Customers To Home 5G, Community-Owned Fiber

    nerdrage ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2024 @ 09:09am

    Can't wait till this comes to my neighborhood. Till then I can fend off Comcrap by telling them to lower my price or I switch to T-Mobile which I can't actually get at my address but some poor CS rep in Mumbai doesn't know that, right? Comcrap has dug itself into a hole pissing off customers with their bullshit. When those customers have a way out, they kick Comcrap to the curb with gusto. Doesn't matter if Comcrap even offers a better deal. They are done.

  • On the post: ExTwitter Makes It Official: Blocks Are No Longer Blocks

    nerdrage ( profile ), 18 Oct, 2024 @ 09:39am

    just stop using Twitter

    Why would anyone but Musk's pathetic fascist minions even use that dumpster fire? Get off all social media while you're at it. Toxic swill. At best, it's just a way for corporations to foist advertising on you, and that's at BEST. Musk is showing how much worse it can get.

  • On the post: New FTC Rules Make It Easier To Cancel Services, Punish Companies For Being Annoying Little Shits About It

    nerdrage ( profile ), 17 Oct, 2024 @ 10:44am

    good

    I haven't personally suffered from this. The streamers (Netflix, Max, etc) all seem to be kosher in letting me cancel quickly & easily & come back the same way. Mubi was a bit sketchy but I don't bother with them much. Now the FTC or FCC needs to start going after Comcast, Spectrum etc for their practice of jacking up rates 100% just because they feel like it. How about letting us click a button and go back to our original rate without needing to argue with some customer service rep reading from a script. Might as well be talking to a chatbot. Oh yeah and make sure their sites/apps work. Making it deliberately difficult or impossible to access those sites is another of their BS tactics.

  • On the post: Amazon Ratchets Up Enshittifying Prime Video After Public Shrugs At Initial Ads

    nerdrage ( profile ), 08 Oct, 2024 @ 09:00am

    Amazon has lost me anyway

    Having to pay to remove ads was too much. I'm dropping my Prime membership. From now on I'll wait for a big enough order to accumulate to qualify for free shipping and every year or so, check out their video on the ad free tier.

  • On the post: CNN Seems To Think Annoying Paywalls Will Save It From Irrelevance

    nerdrage ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2024 @ 09:05am

    you're right in a way

    What side is MSM being one sided on? Right or left? The answer is: both. People don't want news. They want their comforting echo chambers. CNN doesn't provide that. The notion that people want "world class journalism" and are willing to pay for it is farcical. People want sensationalistic schlock, whether it's pet-eating Haitians or students cosplaying Hamas.

  • On the post: CNN Seems To Think Annoying Paywalls Will Save It From Irrelevance

    nerdrage ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2024 @ 09:02am

    is there an audience for "world class journalism"? anyway

    The issue is, everyone is used to getting news for free. I doubt there's a huge demand for "world class journalism" when the dominant way people get news is social media and YouTube - any old nonsense from any old source, the more sensationalistic the better. What people are willing to pay for: bias confirmation. That's why frightened old people pay for Fox News.

  • On the post: Twitter’s Pre-Musk Plans Mirrored Elon’s Vision—Until He Abandoned, Trashed Or Ignored Them

    nerdrage ( profile ), 18 Sep, 2024 @ 10:00am

    he probably loves Elon Musk

    If Musk were sane and intelligent, then there would be a lot less fodder to write about him.

  • On the post: Twitter’s Pre-Musk Plans Mirrored Elon’s Vision—Until He Abandoned, Trashed Or Ignored Them

    nerdrage ( profile ), 18 Sep, 2024 @ 09:15am

    he wants to "solve" social media?

    Someone tell this halfwit that social media has already been solved. It's a platform for delivering a product (users) to a customer (advertisers). That's it. That's the whole thing. Not hard to comprehend unless you're being deliberately obtuse. Maybe Musk disliked that and wanted to invent a form of social media where the users would also be the customers? First off, you'd have to give up the idea of large network effects because a paywall would run off at least 90% of the audience. Why would people pay? If they were really committed to some narrow interest or point of view, such as, if Twitter truly became a fascist bar with an entrance fee, so the fascists could yell at each other.

  • On the post: Want Access To Every NFL Game? It’ll Cost You, Thanks To Fractured Streaming Deals

    nerdrage ( profile ), 07 Sep, 2024 @ 09:31am

    it was bound to happen

    12 years ago I dumped cable and switched to Netflix. Way cheaper, no ads back then, and I didn't have to subsidize sports I never watched. Since then Netflix quality has fallen off a cliff so I just rotate among the many competitors that Netflix's existence inspired. That means the sports viewers have to pay the whole cost of sports with no subsidy from the 50% or more of people who don't care about sports. If sports fans don't like this, then they need to boycott sports entirely. Believe me, the price will come down in a hurry. There's no reason why it needs to cost an exorbitant price to film a bunch of grown men chasing a little ball around a field. It's not like they're creating CGI dragons. Sports should be far cheaper than glitzy Hollywood entertainments yet it ends up being far more expensive on streaming, what gives? Customers that allow themselves to be reamed, that's what.

  • On the post: Elon’s Eager Twitter Funders Are Losing Faith, As Stakes Are Effectively Worthless

    nerdrage ( profile ), 07 Sep, 2024 @ 09:19am

    so the investors were just as clueless as Musk?

    What did being woke ever to do with Twitter's problems? Twitter's customers are advertisers! Did the advertisers complain about Twitter being woke? Not as much as they complain about their ads being placed next to Nazi content. The stupid investors didn't understand Twitter's business model any more than Musk did. Good lord. What a bunch of stupid people who deserve to lose all their money. How do such stupid people get so much money to begin with (other than the way Musk did, inheriting it.)

  • On the post: New Trump Book Threatens To Jail Zuckerberg, Putting Zuck’s Groveling Letter In New Light

    nerdrage ( profile ), 31 Aug, 2024 @ 08:54am

    yeesh

    Musk may be a total asshat but at least he has a spine.

  • On the post: The Harris-Walz Tech Policy Platform… Is Still Bad

    nerdrage ( profile ), 22 Aug, 2024 @ 10:42am

    their first job

    First, they need to work on broadband access for all. Stop letting Comcast, Spectrum etc rake in huge profits off something that should be a utility at this point. No American should be so poor that they can't afford broadband.

  • On the post: Like Clockwork, Paramount/CBS Cuts 18% Of Workforce After Skydance Merger

    nerdrage ( profile ), 12 Aug, 2024 @ 08:56am

    they're still figuring out whether Paramount has a business

    Netflix changed the entertainment business. They offered people a better deal vs expensive, impossible-to-cancel cable. Streaming is (still) much cheaper and easy to cancel so you can hammer down your costs by simply churning. This yanks a lot of money out of the once-fat entertainment ecosystem and there isn't room for all the incumbent companies to survive. Especially since opportunistic tech companies have jumped in and stole plenty of former customers. It's far from clear Paramount (or Warners) can adjust in time to find a niche to live in. Layoffs and mergers are just symptoms of that struggle. Even with the Ellison billions bo burn through, odds are that this effort will fail unless they have some fundamentally new idea, not just here's a streaming service and there's some theatrical movies.

  • On the post: Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ All Jack Up Prices As Streaming Enshittification Continues

    nerdrage ( profile ), 09 Aug, 2024 @ 07:52am

    ironic

    Yet the streaming services are so bare of anything worth watching, I'm starting to realize that churning one a time isn't going to work. I'll have to start building in times when I subscribe to nothing, just to give them more time to make anything worth watching. Netflix has been a one-month-per-year subscription but now I wonder if I should give them 18 months. The rest are trending that way too. I can switch to Hoopla & Kanopy during the down times. I never get thru my quotas anyway.

  • On the post: Jim Jordan Demands Advertisers Explain Why They Don’t Advertise On MAGA Media Sites

    nerdrage ( profile ), 05 Aug, 2024 @ 05:26pm

    it's not even the First Amendment

    Choosing not to advertise means choosing not to spend money. Since when does a business have the right to demand that anyone give it money? This isn't a First Amendment issue, it's so basic that I'm not sure it has a name except, it's my money and it's your job to convince me to give it to you, not my job to explain why I don't think you're worth giving money to. Jesus.

  • On the post: Court: Your 1st Amendment Rights End Where A Cop’s Horse’s Ears Begin

    nerdrage ( profile ), 02 Aug, 2024 @ 09:15am

    I dunno about this one, I might have to side with the cops due to the perps sounding like complete jerks. Entertaining story anyway.

  • On the post: Making Money By Understanding The Difference Between Analog & Digital

    nerdrage ( profile ), 01 Aug, 2024 @ 10:03am

    I still have a couple print magazine subscriptions. I like to take them to the gym. Print has better resolution than any digital screen (300 dpi vs 96 dpi). If I leave the magazine behind or drop it in the toilet, no big deal. I can read it in the sauna without it going kablooey from the heat and it never runs out of juice. Sometimes old tech is better tech.

  • On the post: New Zealand Joins Australia In Denying Geographical Indicator Trademark For ‘Basmati Rice’

    nerdrage ( profile ), 19 Jul, 2024 @ 09:42am

    Try basmati rice from India and compare it to basmati rice from Pakistan or Nepal. Can you tell the difference? If not, this is a lot of fuss over nothing. Anyway didn't Pakistan used to BE India? You can't blame the rice for that.

  • On the post: Bumbling Time Warner CEO David Zaslav: What U.S. Media REALLY Needs Is More Mindless Consolidation And Deregulation

    nerdrage ( profile ), 15 Jul, 2024 @ 09:32am

    I don't get this guy

    Who is still out there to be consolidated? Paramount's being bought by Skydance so that gives them some breathing room till Ellison realizes he can't turn it around. Comcast seems determined to slog forward with their streaming efforts. Of the rest, Max looks wobbly but the others seem okay. The paying customers will decide how many big streamers they want, and the rest will fall away. 4-5 majors and that doesn't include Paramount+ or Peacock unless they manage to knock off one of the others to make room.

  • On the post: Streaming’s Slow Enshittification Continues As Netflix Kicks Users Off Cheapest Ad-Free Tiers

    nerdrage ( profile ), 10 Jul, 2024 @ 08:45am

    Nice of Netflix to make it so easy to cancel by hardly making anything worth watching anymore. Amazing they can be so arrogant when they've suffered a huge decline in quality. Not that they were ever very good but at least they had something.

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