It literally never fails.

If you pay to avoid ads, you are merely letting them know that you have disposable income to spend on this sort of stuff. You're doing their job for them by segmenting yourself into the upper echelons of the market.

At some point, some shareholder value maximizing CEO is going to show up and notice how much money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to all of those people full of disposable income.

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bunderbunder 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is part of why last year I mostly switched to just borrowing DVDs from my public library. Avoiding ads by not paying seems to do the trick rather nicely. The quality and variety is better than what I can find on any one streaming service, too.

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jerf 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Every year it gets more and more important to learn how to not be sucked in by a small amount of convenience. "Capitalism" has figured out how to abuse your desire for maximum convenience. You need to figure out what your price is for it, and stick to it like glue.

The funny thing is the sooner you get off of some particular convenience treadmill the easier it is to stay off.

	▲	bunderbunder 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The funny thing is, it may be less convenient but it's also more enjoyable. Endlessly scrolling some algorithmic feed hunting for something to watch can be done without getting off the couch, but it isn't actually fun. Walking to the library with my family to return a stack of books and movies and check out some new stuff is one of the highlights of our weekend. For anyone who's wondering where to start, I'd like to suggest that your library probably has a copy of WALL-E.

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eecks 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why DVD and not Blu-Ray?

	▲	bunderbunder 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They've got those, too, but I didn't feel like paying extra for a Blu-Ray player.

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MarkWayneNewton 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The seas are always open, friend.

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jollyllama an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're not wrong. But the only solutions appear to be varying levels of being a free-rider, which means the thing you like probably gets deleted anyway when it's deemed unprofitable. The long-term solution is probably to only consume locally-made goods and content, public-domain content, or vintage goods.

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dwedge 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's interesting that I've seen this argument 4 times on hacker news, all in the past 2 weeks and never before. Really is quite a small bubble

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matheusmoreira 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've made this argument here on Hacker News dozens of times over many years now.

	▲	dwedge an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It could be my bias

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GuinansEyebrows 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

to what do you attribute the increase you've noticed?

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carlosjobim 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can cancel a subscription. That's how subscriptions work. That means that any future changes is not a concern for current offerings.

And I can't understand why hackers never acknowledge this.

I can put gas in the tank of my car. In the future, they might lower the quality of the gas - or even make it more expensive! That doesn't change anything about the gas that I will currently put in my car.

> you have disposable income to spend on this sort of stuff

Advertisers already know that a hundred percent of the population have $20 in disposable monthly income, because they can pay with credit. So they don't learn anything new.