Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

> The funniest part though is that the market for it only exists due to the greed and stupidity of the legal "platforms". Many people would happily buy (as in pay once, play forever) films and TV shows, many others would find it reasonable to pay $20-50/month for a single streaming service covering 90% of the things you would want to watch.

I think a lot of people miss this. A lot of pirating declined when Netflix became popular. Then there were a ton of platforms and pirating came back. But I feel pirating is different now. It's because there's one compelling show on the small platforms and so those get pirated. A certain amount of centralization is good but too much makes it difficult.

View on HN

I jumped into the Netflix bandwagon and stopped using torrents few years back. Then I realized that Netflix has almost no content at all, and primarily interested in pushing "their content" onto the masses. Now I am back to torrents. One big difference is now it is harder to find torrents - earlier, it was easy to find one say for a Uruguayan movie from 2004; they are becoming quite rare now.

I think during the period in which you switched to Netflix, the remaining community moved to private trackers. If you are still looking for public trackers it will seem the community has died. The truth is probably the opposite, because since everyone moved to private, niche Uruguayan movies from 2004 have become much easier to find in much better quality.

Ok was not aware of that. Thanks for the tip.

> A certain amount of centralization is good but too much makes it difficult.

The Medelin drug cartel story. I wonder what monopolistic entities are working effectively yet we don't realize it.

I think natural monopolies are pretty common wherever there is a network effect. Depending on what you mean by effective, I'd say that Facebook has an effective monopoly. We could say oil or web hosting has a centralized oligopoly. I should refine my first comment by stating that there is a trend to centralization with markets that depend on network effects. This is simply because power in these markets isn't linear with respect to the number of users, but rather super-linear. Momentum is a key aspect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com