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Comment by southernplaces7 | Hacker News Reader

Much like the phrase around crypto about "not your keys? not your crypto" goes, similar applies to all digital things: Not your local content? not your content"

Things like Kindle Unlimited (which at least say they're subscriptions to content access) digital streaming and so many other services that let you "buy" things that you don't keep on your own device in your own chosen format are all bullshit waiting to happen if you like to really own your digital stuff. Same for Google's News service. At least in this case Google offered downloadable PDFs for some editions.

That so many people fall for this only to be later surprised is almost laughable. What should anyone assume less from so many companies that take hostility to users as nearly a default position?

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I've been burned too many times by streaming services:

1. Removing entire series/movies

2. Removing specific episodes in a series

3. Making changes to content (e.g. Scrubs and its soundtrack)

4. Only having the inferior quality version of some content

5. And finally, to a lesser extent, just having bad metadata (Netflix in particular has listed episodes out of order)

I'm becoming more and more envious of those YouTubers with the wall of physical blurays and games as their backdrop.

>I'm becoming more and more envious of those YouTubers with the wall of physical blurays and games as their backdrop.

Going on a tangent here but your line reminded me. It's also a damn good idea to download any favorite YouTube videos for local storage and favorite YT videos with music at least as MP3 files. As with all things streaming, YouTube is constantly erasing all kinds of often excellent content, some of it to never be replaced because its creators stopped caring but left it up. Oops.

Streaming services refusing to let me watch episodes of shows like Always Sunny and the Simpsons for political reasons is my primary reason for supporting piracy. These companies care more about pushing an agenda than they do about their customers. Disney in particular is downright evil and I don't want to give them a single penny.

Yeah I spent a good 20 minutes looking for the first Lethal Weapon episode of Always Sunny on Hulu. Went through each season multiple times and finally had to look up what season it was in on Wikipedia. Didn’t realize they were going to just remove it from Hulu because black face.

Steam is the only "digital goods" platform that I meaningfully use and I'm still not entirely happy with that arrangement since, although their terms and conditions currently says they'll offer a DRM-free download if the service were to ever stop, they can change that fact at anytime and have quietly changed other things historically. I often buy older titles from sites like GOG if I just need the game files from some open-source reimplementation and don't need cloud saves or any other Steam features.

Valve was savvy enough to offer additional value and convenience with the platform (especially with all the Linux development they've contributed lately). The ability to easily play a large majority of my Windows games on Linux via Proton, sync those game files between systems automatically, and have built-in IM/VoIP/remote-access is almost worth the fact it might all disappear at a moments notice.

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