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Comment by finnish-food | Hacker News Reader

“ living in the Golden era.”

If you actually lived in a Golden Era entertainment would be free, quality, and meant to enrich the people instead of advertise and moralize to them.

I really don’t understand how a DVD collection is an “essential service” either. Or why you would effectively choose not to look at your watching statistics and then simply buy the media you watch the most.

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/134503468553

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/285243804109

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/145050977289

Why not just buy what you like?

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Is this a serious question? Why am I not buying DVDs on eBay?

At least ask why I'm not pirating it 24/7 when I already have an Android box connected to my TV w/ Kodi installed with 3rd party pirate extensions which gives me up-to-date lists of every show/movie available on Netflix/Hulu/Disney/etc (including their trending and genre based lists) with each show being a single click backed via 10 different HTTP pirate streaming servers they index...with the alternative of another app which let's me search any torrent movie ever and stream them on demand via my Fibre internet connection.

I use Netflix etc because

a) the recommendation algorithms are better than any 3rd party service like Reelgood hopes to be even with OSS plugins that track my torrents

b) I live with 3 "normal" people in my house who don't care to navigate the imperfect UI of my Kodi streaming/torrent apps no matter how many times I tell them it's better and has everything they need and more for "free"

I just went under the hood in Plex and changed all the app icons and names to Netflix and my dumb family has no clue still.

Just fool the normal people into a better UX.

Clever but I answer enough tech questions in my day job, don't want to introduce more :)

Are you using Overseerr too? I wonder how discovery would work in your case, if people believe they are already on Netflix.

https://metamanager.wiki/en/latest/

https://www.rapidseedbox.com/blog/plex-meta-manager-guide#05

> If you actually lived in a Golden Era entertainment would be free

Who would foot the bill to produce this content? You suggest that content would be "free"... but free to who? The consumer, right? It certainly isn't possible to produce high quality films for free. People pour their blood, sweat and tears into these productions. Why should the fruits of their labors be given away for free? Would you wake up early every day and proceed to work eight hours for free?

When people talk about free healthcare, you understand what they mean, right? They're not enslaving doctors...

It's the same in this case.

So, like only have PBS? That could be better for society I guess, TV is a bit waste of time after all, but I think it won’t satisfy all current streaming service users.

>meant to enrich the people >not to moralize to them

I feel the current crop of writers employed by Disney, Netflix, Amazon etc. cannot tell the difference between these two.

No they cannot. And I am not just speaking in abstract terms, in the 1960s and 1970s (and even before) many shows were made that had a moral core but did not moralize at the audience.

Shows like Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, etc. which would question or discuss complex ideas without turning them into soap operas or basic dramas.

The only shows that I can think of like that now are Black Mirror or perhaps your odd HBO offering, but those are not shining examples, and often, even if they do discuss or engage with deeper concepts or ideas, it’s not handled in a way that allows for nuance. (Black Mirror is happy to be quite crass at moments, same with HBO and other “top-tier” shows.)

> Shows like Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, etc. which would question or discuss complex ideas without turning them into soap operas or basic dramas.

There's something in this. Tickbox diversity is a lazy solution that doesn't really satisfy people who want broader representation while at the same time causes the rightwing culture warriors to go increasingly berzerk. Writers need to get better at doing incidentally diverse shows, because "hello I'm a token look at me" is bad characterization. Or address it by commissioning a broader range of shows from different settings; not everything needs to be a flagship.

While at the same time there are still lots of odd misses (Ghost in the Shell 2017 managed to annoy almost everybody in this regard).

>Shows like Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, etc. which would question or discuss complex ideas without turning them into soap operas or basic dramas.

Your memory of these shows differs dramatically from my own. None of the ideas discussed in any of them were complex or nuanced, much less culturally transgressive (no, not even Star Trek) and they were often ham-fisted and moralizing. I mean Star Trek and Twilight Zone so much so they became tropes and subjects of parody.

The Expanse is pretty good .

> enrich the people instead of advertise and moralize to them

How does morality not enrich people? Isn't moral behaviour a good thing?

In my experiences, "morality" is used by other people in order to browbeat their choices into you, via peer pressure or shame.

Ethics, on the other hand, is a set of self-imposed rules or rules of a group that you wilfully accept and join.

I'd say the issues surrounding ethics and morality is that of consent and willful acceptance. I do not consider 'morality' itself to be ethical.

Convenience and discoverability?

Netflix does those worse than a 3rd party “recommend me similar movies” or even just IMDb lists.

I guess if you think it recommending you “MegaShark vs. Giant Octopus Cat”… because you liked Jaws is helpful? I think personally it is not.

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