Comment by Jean-Papoulos 4 days ago
Don't underestimate the human ability to "settle for less" if said less requires less effort from them. There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality ; Netflix is just easier. They will settle for the "easy" solution, which will be any one of the TikTok clones already existing (YT shorts, reels, whatever).
Netflix is not easier, but marketed heavily and competition is censored in search results. Some random pirating streaming site is unknown and probably not even easily discoverable on google (you have to use yandex for that).
I stick to pirating with adblockers because it is more convenient, there is a much bigger library of content and I don't have to share any personal info or pay for anything.
If you know the words “yandex” and “adblocker” you are already 90th percentile ability to pirate content
Netflix is absolutely easier to use than any form of pirating for the vast majority of their userbase.
Everyone in this thread talking about how people will “just get a VPN” to use TikTok have zero concept of the technical abilities of TikTok’s user base
What's amazing about this comment chain is that it's totally wrong. Netflix is missing tons of content, like older movies, and tries to replace them with store-brand "originals" that everyone knows are garbage or only have a couple seasons before being cut. It lost its most popular product, The Office. Netflix literally cannot serve the product its users want the most, so the "easiness" of using netflix to get that product is 0.
The particular shows don't matter to most of Netflix's customers. Piracy to them is someone in a dark room wearing a balaclava with a laughing ASCII skull on their laptop. The ones that care about "The Office" will either throw up their hands and watch whatever suggestion Netflix has for them, or they'll subscribe to Peacock.
Netflix has succeeded in diluting what product its users want from "The Office" to "something funny". Why hunt for one specific show when it will throw a million options at you?
Or piracy is a somewhat tech-savvy person searching "The Office 123movies 321 123" on Google, then trying on Bing cause Google hid some DCMA takedowns, giving up on 9 results that only pretend to work, then finally getting a working one. Except episode 2 is weirdly quieter than the others, episode 11 is missing, and the whole website disappears a month later.
This person may have also had uBlock Origin, or maybe they got duped into the fake uBlock that still shows ads, or Chrome disabled uBO.
Netflix's death has been greatly exaggerated on HN. It's not popular with us, and for good reasons, but it's ever more popular both in terms of subscribers and viewer hours. It's not the easiest to always get the exact and best content you want but it's the best to get okay content any time. The latter tends to drive the average user.
Convenience wins every time. Digital photos are lower quality but easy. MP3 is worse than CD quality but easy. Etc.
> There's a reason people pay for Netflix despite pirating proposing a higher level of quality; Netflix is just easier
I'm slightly annoyed how this comment completely ignores the moral and ethical reasons someone might want to avoid making an illegal copy of something while denying it's creators any compensation. I need more coffee.