No thanks. I'm here for science, and if your writers are mostly people primarily concerned with making sure they bow at the alter in every single video, I'm 100% out. It's like watching a cooking video produced by a Christian group that works Jesus into chopping carrots.
I guess you could call that "white people guilt" but you could also say that it's valuable context that the impacts of climate change can be exasperated by economic and national policies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPvNucxB7TI&list=PLYNjnJFU-6...
Hope they fix(ed) it.
Is it? One of the requirements is "No goods or services were given for this donation."
Or maybe they're lying, but I'm going with what the receipt says.
That said, If the gift is insubstantial in value it’s allowable. Or they’re supposed to give you a statement of the value and you have to deduct the donation less value amount. My thought is maybe the content is or will be free and the app is just a convenient portal to consume it. So one would claim it’s rather insubstantial. But to be honest, no auditor would really dig too deep into a donation to PBS.
For example, Apple TV+ went from $4.99 per month to $14.99 per month, a +200% change, while YouTube Premium went from $11.99 to $15.99, a +33% change.
So services like Apple TV+ are skewing this increase a lot while services like YouTube Premium have remained relatively low. Similarly, Apple TV+ starting at $4.99 per month was clearly a very low price to start (which can probably be mostly attributed to the service's lack of content at that point). It's now at a "normal" price.
Just the same, saying something like something "costs $702/year more" without a point of reference is bad data presentation. The 2021 cost for all of these services was $1,150.92, for a +61% change. I'm not saying that's not substantial, but this kind of information is necessary for these figures to not just be rage bait.
And, of course, if you're simultaneously paying for Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Peacock, YouTube Premium, and Spotify every month, then you're either (a) really into consuming this kind of content and are a "premium subscriber" in the sense that these costs ought to be justified or (b) very bad with managing your time and finances. I suspect normal users subscribe to one or two of these at a time and are probably willing to switch around as prices change, content gets released/pulled, etc. A better analysis would try to do some investigation into this dynamic, since it will probably reveal that people are able to navigate dynamic service subscriptions well enough that they aren't actually experiencing a straight-up +61% increase in costs since 2021.
All of this is to say that this "analysis" barely even qualifies as a valid first-pass at understanding this kind of data. It's literally something that Claude probably churned out in 20 minutes. Everyone can be dissatisfied with the value they get from these streaming services, but this kind of post only helps to muddy the conversation.
Also you should consider the base period timing is when many of the big movers were in a rollout of their application and thus the price was either artificially low and/or represented a severely limited offering compared to their current offering.
Another example: Disney+ and Hulu are available bundled together for $19.99 a month, something the site's own sources state:
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/23/disney-plus-price-incre...
But because it's just looking at the data in the most literal way possible it doesn't factor that in and instead says buying Disney+ and Hulu Premium would be $18.99 each.
Even if you watch « only » 5 shows, if they are on five different services then that means 5 subscriptions.
Or you spend time planning and organizing subscriptions.
.. or you just download them.
Its hard to cancel a subscription when you know it brings joy to an infirmed parent. Youre effectively locked into paying whatever, like $350/mo for xfinity tv simply because thats the only UI they can handle on an old remote.
It is way cheaper long term.
Buying CDs would be so much more expensive than my Spotify subscription with the variety of music I listen to.
Another helpful element of the streaming services is no incremental cost to try out a new movie or series. I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it.
I will listen to 20 or more new bands each week on Spotify. It’s how I discover new music.
For someone who only listens to a small number of the same CDs over and over it might be cheaper, but it’s not a generally true statement.
You're probably objecting to the fact that you don't have 30 years, which is correct, but is also the point of the "long term" part of the comment. Someone who listens to stuff that is on the streaming services and is literally constantly switching between artists and who doesn't mind if some stuff disappears from the services sometimes and so on and so on is perfect for the streaming services, yes. However, the more of those clauses aren't true, the less obviously advantageous the streaming services are, and I don't think most people are sitting down every week and sampling a dozen brand new artists. A lot of people could, with just a bit of care to buy things frugally and used, build a CD collection with $14/month faster than they will want new music.
It can help to jump start a bit and not compare this to building a new collection from scratch. It also helps that such a jump started collection can start by buying the cheap stuff that fills out collections quickly.
On the plus side, the "cosmic jukebox" seems to have mostly worked out for music streaming and most stuff is available from most services, which is a huge point in favor of the music streaming services. In my opinion for movies and TV shows that can be legally acquired (putting aside piracy for the moment) the analysis tips much more heavily in the direction of just building your own collection. I don't even know what it would cost you to buy a month's worth of access to, let's say, 80% of my movie & TV collection (since I have stuff that is just plain not available on streaming at all). They're so fragmented it's insane. And with my rate of consumption of TV, oh, call it $50/month just for a nice round number, that's way more than I'm spending on building out the collection anyhow. Maybe if Hollywood would hire more writers who have taken and passed Writing 101 my consumption rate would increase, but that's not the current situation.
IMO, that can also be a problem. When I was young and buying CDs, occasionally you would buy one you didn't like at first. But since you had spent money on it, you'd listen to it. And I discovered some good music that way.
Same thing with movies and tv shows. Sometimes it takes a bit to get going, or I 'm in the wrong mindset for it, but repeated viewing or just sticking with it gets me through that.
Streaming could be an acceptable compromise if it was $10 a year for everything in existence, but the catalogues are splintered across multiple services and even when you combine them all there are plenty of things not available.
Anyways Spotify is just a platform/gatekeeper for record labels to push their products and theres no way that spotify prices ever become static. They will need to continue to push more products through the model to continue to grow and pay for company especially as all the other players have wizened up.
FWIW if you lapse in payment they kill all your downloaded content immediately. Super annoying service. I get why but like 10 days after probably about 10 years of subscription seems like a real jerk move. Even content that wasn't theirs and was mine -- they wiped it. You own nothing.
How few songs do you listen to, and movies/shows do you watch, for this to possibly be true?
As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.
Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.
Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex
Percent of non-HN users who've ever ripped a CD: Negligible
Plus no more buffering or streaming artifacts.
Unfortunately, though, very few DVDs are 576p.
You know computers have the ability to compress videos, right?
>Do I really need 4k HDR to enjoy Seinfeld?
No, but the difference between 480p and even 1080p is pretty significant and definitely makes the viewing experience just generally more enjoyable. But that's just Seinfeld, where you can basically close your eyes and guess what is being shown 90% of the time with great accuracy. Where this doesn't work is with movies/shows/etc. where the visual component is important. If you go to a LotR watch party and bring a 480p rip and expect people to watch that, then you might need to get your eyes checked.
Personally, I also listen to a lot of ad-free college radio and watch a lot of online videos. Depending on what type of entertainment you enjoy, it's really not hard to pay next to nothing for it without compromising.
Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.
Right, so then how you really access most of your your music is through advertising or ad-blocking, not CDs.
So if you watch <2 seasons per month on average, you already come out ahead, and this is assuming only a single subscription.
People tend to wastly overpay for subscriptions because they end up underutilized and are typically never cancelled quickly enough because people are lazy.
I mean obviously there are people that consume a lot more movie entertainment than the average, but I'm personally getting nowhere close to 70 seasons per year.
Bingewatching occasionally might not be enough to economically justify your subscriptions.
Music I don't get, you can't even buy a single CD for the price of a streaming music subscription, unless you buy used, in which case you can get as many as 10 CDs per month.
Video streaming and it's licensing model is horribly horribly broken, there's no reason why I should have three to five subscriptions just so HBO and Netflix can produce yet another drawn out true crime show about someone how got lost half way around the world in 1983.
Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13
There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.
So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.
So I can't really speak to anything else than that. That's my usage pattern, yours may be different.
I keep yearly playlists (starting 2023) where I add songs I like and each one is only about 30 songs on average, so that somewhat matches the aggregate number over a decade..
I guess I stick to the things I like and find things I like in DJ sets or on the Gym radio- I'm not investigating new music through subscription services.
> buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.
Sure. And when I had Spotify I added about that to my liked songs every month.
> There is a compounding effect
That doesn't sound compounding, it sounds like a linear increase of 13 per month.
> for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
Yes, that is the advantage of Spotify and other steaming services. I can listen to dozens of new songs a day, picking out my favorites while being exposed to new music allowing me to find more that I like. And if I don't like it, meh, didn't cost me anything.
A library of 300 songs is tiny. I guess you don't listen to much music? Back before I lived in the city 300 songs would have lasted a week, I'd statistically hear a repeat on the drive home on the first day.
Right now I'm listening to trace classics from 2000 :)
This is not that unusual. I also have never had any of these, or any other, streaming services. It's been wonderful.
If the answer is "I pirate stuff", that's fine. But just be honest about it.
LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, mp3 players, etc.
You didn't have the whole world at your hands. You had to pick what to listen to, what to buy, what to carry.
Yes, it's nice having the world available, but also, it's nice being able to sometimes think, ponder, make a decision, and explore that decision.
Based on all the responses, people need to learn to make a decision and live with it for a bit.
- Picked a song and it's not the perfect one? meh, okay. - Also learn to be in the quiet. Oh, the song is not meh, but bad? Turn it off. It's okay. - learn to read a book
Until Sam Altman disrupted the entire computer economy, HDDs were cheap and when you replace your desktop, the old one becomes a server.
In one single afternoon Amazon Music served up loads of niche old favourites I had not thought to search for, introduced me to a couple of artists I would not have known existed otherwise, and probably rescued my failing love of music.
I now play a game with it and pick somewhat diametrically opposed aspects of my music tastes in quick succession— Superorganism, Cardiacs, Gavin Bryars, Nanci Griffith, Vivaldi, Anouskha Shankar, say — and then see what it comes up with. Invariably one of the recommendations will be something I already adore and one will change my life.
I stumbled into the Chris Thile multiverse this way, for instance.
Also, the company has a pretty terrible leadership: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-...
I never listen to basically anything spotify recommends me, just songs from bands I already know and love. And if I were to purchase the whole discography of the breadth of music I listen to it would cost the down payment on my house
I would think this is only true if you watch a small number of shows and rewatch them often
I run linux too but I'm not going to pretend like my choice to run a niche setup means I'm entitled to pirate content because they don't 100% support it
Surely we are all entitled to do anything that does not affect others by default?
you can stream for free/cheap if you lookout for deals.
I only buy things that I’m really motivated to watch and play, and it makes it much more fulfilling as a result. Netflix turns watching a movie into something that just feels as hollow as doomscrolling Facebook.
What you are doing is practically the same equivalent as downloading torrents, how do you have "more guarantees" than just downloading?
PS: I'm saying this because what you are doing is already illegal so there is virtually no difference.
* They increased the cost of all price tiers.
* They moved features from lower tiers to higher tiers, forcing you to pay more.
* And this all was leveraged via "per seat" pricing. So a modest increase in price quickly becomes a lot, simply because of the multiplicative nature of per-seat pricing.
This per-seat pricing is especially absurd to us. To run the software it makes little difference whether there are 3 users or 6 users, yet the total cost of those 3 additional users was an additional 500 dollars! This got so out of hand that we decided to build our own timesheet software, which we now happily use. I have always seen software as the promise that you only need to build it once, and can reuse and leverage it many times over to reduce your costs. However, this does NOT seem to be the case anymore.
You see the same in streaming services: limits on the amount of devices you can have in your family, moving features into higher cost tiers, and so on...
For streaming services, I think the development-hosting needle swings way towards hosting. Streaming video is the vast majority of their costs and efforts, so scaling prices per-user is the only sensible option. The "software" of those services is bad and interchangeable, and not what anyone wants or is paying for in the first place.
Another egregious thing these subscriptions do is all kinds of dark patterns. Making it super easy to subscribe but super hard to cancel, not informing before charging (how hard can it be to send an email "upcoming charge next week"), showing ads in supposedly "ad-free" services etc. All this just add to the frustration which leads users to cancel.
Maybe it's one of the many ways we finance all those datacenters. Sure Netflix doesn't directly own datacenters but the logic works by proxy.
Point being, the introductory prices for these services were always unsustainable.
Armchair theories on paramount and peacock, so take with a mountain of salt:
Paramount will probably stay in the red because they are overly-catering to conservatives (a little too much emphasis on baby boomers as well), narrowing their potential audience.
Peacock just doesn’t have enough going for it period. Weak library and not a real first tier consideration for folks
Otherwise this is akin to comparing speed of 2 objects in a relativistic setting without stating the frame of reference.
Side note: I don't know why, but the existence of a "cite this" section on this page made me sad.
The relevant comparison would be your individual wages.
That's like saying your snow report for skiing should be adjusted for weather.
I am probably an outlier but I don't honestly know how much someone can watch on theses services to be always subscribed, I subscribe to watch something and unsubscribe after a month or two because that's when I'm well and done. My husband had some free three months of Disney+ and I don't think either of us watched a single thing on there in that three months. Tubi has better content than Disney+.
Inflation isn't some force of nature that needs to be accounted for like the curvature of the earth.
Seems that streamers have a long way to go before they extract all that money.
I subscribe to YouTube and my partner subscribes to Prime. We have a joint cable-like tv package too, and one of us pays for Disney Plus. In the past we’d have been consolidated into one cable subscription consumption, but now we appear in the stats as lots of distinct consumptions.
I think all-in, streamers plus other subscription based entertainment services are nearer to the $140 figure per household than the individual figures describe.
Inflation is multiplicative, so: 1.277 * 1.26 = 1.61 giving us the 61% subscriptions went up.
We traded one annoying cable company for dozens.
What kind of person has all of these subscriptions? If you have YouTube TV and Spotify that is $22.
I find that Netflix and Paramount+ are the American services that offer the best app experience on my (very low-end) smart TV.
A Netflix account costs $9 with ads or $20 without, so I guess it depends on whether you watch more or fewer films than that per month?
Most importantly 13.99 already in 2021 bought LESS than 7.99 or 8.99 bought until a while before. Thanks to the fragmentation, the catalogue was way larger before, and as of 2022 ads were introduced to further insult the customer.
High seas it is.
"nine streaming subscriptions".
No one sane will do nine streaming subscriptions. The market is insane in itself for assuming that.
Some of it is a function of my household's love of sports, and their fragmentation across the services. Some of its just sheer laziness to pick one and stick with it or rotate the subscriptions.
I don't think I could realistically drop lower than 3 on this list though: Spotify gets used constantly. One TV/Video streaming service. My wife would likely divorce me if I cancelled YouTube Premium.
That's four. I don't want any of them.
Three I have to take due to kids' nagging, the fourth I have to take due to state apparatus' nagging and legal threats.
I get a letter every month from the licencing people, it just goes in the bin. I've had 1 visit, he asked to come in, I said no. That was basically the end of it.
(For the record, I have a TV but I currently have no way to watch live TV on it, so why should I have a licence! I don't use their service)
Some countries (like Finland or Switzerland) require you to pay it even if you don't own a TV. It's really just a tax.
The reasoning for it not being a tax is that the public service broadcaster should have political independence from the government. Most people don't want their country to have a "government mouthpiece" state broadcaster, and it is much easier for the government to tell the broadcaster what to do and say by fucking with its funding if it's directly funded from the treasury.
Other countries do the same thing with a different trick, such as inserting it into your electricity bill.
The UK is a powerhouse in media production, part of that is due to the BBC funding all sorts of productions, both the visible (actors, etc.) and the invisble (camera operators, set designers, costumers, writers, directors...).
It has also been clear for centuries that private media, historically just the newspapers, but now TV channels, film studios, etc., have been disastrous, as their private owners either focus on profitability and pump out scandal and lurid stories, or if they've made their millions some other way, they run a paper in order to pump out biased propaganda. So a state-funded but not state-controlled broadcaster is an ideal thing to have.
Feel like this should be in their letters rather than (or in addition to) the threat of legal action.
It could be worse, though, Crapita also run the civil service pension system and have completely fucked it up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yg54750gdo
However, the same aim could be achieved by just setting a formula in law. 1 pound per british citizen, or 0.0001% of the average income per citizen last year. Numbers pulled out of ass as i have no idea what an UK tv license costs. As long as they make the formula extremely hard to change, it will work.
If they could find a way to fund Radio 4 without it I'd be in favour of scrapping the fee.
In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).
The Library does DVD rentals too, I check it out every couple of months.
It's even better in Toronto, Bay Street Video is an institution.
More importantly, it does not solve the problem of ownership. We don't own a rented disc just as much as we don't own a DRM-controlled digital purchase that can only be accessed via the subscription portal it was purchased on.
Most people I know don’t subscribe to every service and then leave it that way. They might have Spotify and 1-3 video streaming services at a time. They cancel one and start a different one when they want to watching something new.
I love music and used to have Spotify, but I started to notice they started to remove tracks or entire albums from the catalog.
Now I buy online or rip my CDs, it’s much better and works offline.
Is that number really correct?
It seems remarkably coincidental how close $1,852.92 is to
$1,150.92 * 1.10^5 ($1,853.56)
It's pretty much a match accounting for kibblesworth effects.
Both figures can be arrived to by taking the monthly total and multiplying it by 12.
Did you gatekeep people who built sites with FrontPage as well?
Which is to say it's not the streaming prices, it's everything (except for maybe televisions, for now we get to keep our cheapish 50-80" TVs).
I promote this because not only does it restore some mastery* over your media, it keeps these discs out of landfills and oceans, where they will linger in a shredded state.
*we are, of course, still subject to any anti-piracy measures and non-removeable advertisements on the disc, which admittedly seems quaint by today's DRM standards, but I ccannot rightly say "complete" mastery over your media, here.
Fun fact: pirates are more likely than the average person to purchase media.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170916165525/https://www.ofcom...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110727/16233815292/anoth...
They seem to have gotten away with it so far, so there's no legal protection for "buying" digital at the moment.
2/ consume free streaming (tt, ig, YouTube, etc)
Just don’t watch movies at home.
1) offer services at comparatively high quality (or at the least not too low in quality) at a fairly cheap price, ideally flat rate 2) lateron increase it to milk the cash cows 3) profit
You can also see the "follow the leader" effect with prices converging around $20. If I had to guess I'd say the next 5+ years we'll see tighter price competition, probably companies following Netflix's pricing hikes and that prices will creep up to 24.99
I think it's the look of the page: dark background and bright colours with an halo.
I'm not a fan of the "binge watch chowder" of the last 15 years and much rather extend my collection of actually worthwhile UHD BluRay movies to watch deliberately every other Sunday night or so.
Huge difference.
To truly contextualize it, we need to understand the total value (library sizes, removed/lost media, household/account sharing costs) relative to its price, and relative to background inflation. We need to understand relative to costs (labor, infrastructure, royalties), to profits, and how industry consolidation has or has not affected these data points.
From my own understanding of the wider context, there’s a significant attribution of costs to naked greed and profit extraction rather than overall value. With job displacement due to AI (despite union contracts), the tearing down of series or films due to CEO preference (looking at you, Zaslav), the overlap of libraries (Hulu and Disney are increasingly the same thing; Hulu/Disney/Peacock are the same thing as Hulu alone was just seven years ago), the punitive measures against account sharing, and with the forcing of advertisements onto previously ad-free platforms or pricing tiers, the overall cost relative to societal value has decreased while value to executives and shareholders has increased, and that’s the real takeaway.
The main thing to worry about is using a bittorrent client that knows to 'stop' immediately if it's no longer on the VPN.
And whatever leftover storage you have.
And PIA or Proton for a port forwardable VPN.
And https://github.com/halcyon-video/halcyon-video for that real Blockbuster experience.
Surely the cost of storage has not gone up. And the cost of sending the 0’s and 1’s hasn’t gone up either.
Are movie studios demanding vastly more money from the streaming services for the movie and TV content? Maybe the costs to make new movies and tv shows have gone up substantially but has licensing costs for the old movies and shows gone up too?
Are these extra costs just going to the streamers to run up profit? Genuinely curious about the economics here. I know the streaming business is highly competitive so I don’t think it’s just rent seeking so wonder what else is going on.
98% of the time when I see one of these it's a bunch of "content" generated by Claude or similar.
Quoting the site: "Written by Rashid N. Rashid N is the editor of HonestlyRanked. He reviews every figure this site publishes against its source before it goes out, and has never accepted a free account, a review unit, or payment for placement. Rashid N is a pen name; see our methodology page. "
I would bet good money that "Rashid N. Rashid N" is busy being a meat-puppet for an LLM to produce plausible sounding content. To exactly what end, I'm not sure.
And it’s not even relevant to what’s actually on the site linked.
Who cares if the site is LLM generated? Did you care before when you saw the same Wordpress theme repeatedly, or Bootstrap layouts?
The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
Edit to clarify: I read the comment as the issue being the look and feel of the site being AI generated - as in, “this website looks AI generated. It sucks.” NOT the content itself being AI generated.
Using AI to spit out cookie cutter layouts is fine, offloading your thinking onto AI is not something I support.
My stance: An AI generated website with the authors original thoughts is fine to me. I don’t care what it looks like, as long as it serves its purpose.
Lots of people. Even on HN, which is wildly unrepresentative of the US as a whole, comments that "this site was AI-generated" are commonly upvoted to the top because people do care.
That includes me. If it's AI-generated, I don't care about it - if it wasn't worth their time to write, it's not worth my time to read. I can generate it myself.
> The content is what’s interesting
If it's generated, the odds of it being wrong are far higher, because people who publish generated content are far less likely to care about quality or correctness.
What if all I used AI for was to more quickly drive tedious work, like mass-change colors, preview variants, or export assets?
Is it the replacement of the creative aspects of a craft with AI when I lose your interest, or is it the moment I utilize it at all?
Me. Because if there's no human checking the content I don't actually have a reliable signal that what I'm reading is true.
I'm not a subject matter expert here but I know that list includes Disney+ at $18.99 and Hulu at $18.99... but Disney and Hulu bundled together is $19.99. From the exact source the site cites:
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/23/disney-plus-price-incre...
A human doing the research would likely have picked up on that. An LLM that just reads everything literally does not.
In either case it's important to verify information, and LLMs are increasingly more capable of fact-checking.
There are and were entire sites and networks dedicated to conspiracy and disinformation. Hell, people have been payed to spread disinformation. People have done it deliberately for the lolz.
It has alway been possibly to get your nonsense enrgaved upon the web in an afternoon. That it now takes less time is irrelevant. You should have been checking your sources then, and you should be checking your sources now.
Authors of the past would often not provide sources, so if you were interested you'd have to track them down. This is also true today.
That an LLM is in the loop is no different, in kind, from the old copy-pasta and network driven spread of misinformation. The problem was never the tools (ah, damn, now anyone who knows [html] can just lie on the internet)(ah, damn now anyone who knows [prompting] can just lie on the internet).
The problem isn't the tools, it's the users unwillingness and or reluctance to develop critical reading and thinking skills. If you're using "Not an LLM" as a proxy for "gains reliability in my mind" then you're being lazy. It is just as easy to lie without an LLM.
This is the core of the problem, I have absolutely no confidence that any of the specific number figures or parameters listed anywhere in the website are factual. For all I know they're AI hallucinations. Or wildly out of date based on the final training date of some model. It absolutely does not look like data that somebody collected "by hand" and verified as true.
I used to get downvoted when I complained that a site uses 6 point font, or when it renders all of its text in a small 5cm vertical strip down the middle of the page, or when it didn't work without JavaScript... and all my other personal bug-a-boos. I stopped because I realized those comments add nothing to the conversation.
"This is AI" similarly adds nothing.
Good people do.
Different people have different feelings. Bucketing into binary "good" and "not good" based on whether they have the exact same framing as you do is dehumanizing. Stop it. Respect other people.
There is space for nuance:
If you're spitting out raw LLM output and not looking at or reading it and requiring other people to use it as-is, while representing it as your own original work, you are treating your own time and attention as more valuable than that of others. You can expect a reaction based on this.
If you're blanket-dismissing someone else's work because they used one or more specific tools, regardless of how much of their own time and attention they put into it before sharing it in a place where you were able to see it -- or perhaps you're doing that dismissal without even seeing it -- you are treating their time and attention as superficial and a rounding error compared with their choice of tools. You can expect a reaction based on this.
In between, there is a _whole_ lot of room for different take and opinions, and we're collectively figuring out what's acceptable and what isn't. We'll never fully get there and that is Okay. But we can at least try to calibrate on "are we treating other people respectfully" instead of a shitty proxy for it.
This is a proxy for "the author didn't give a shit"..Not always, but often.
I always check the comment section first because I do not wish to engage with slop content.
> The content is what’s interesting, and it is.
Can you trust AI content at face value? No you can't. AI has been shown time and time again to just hallucinate shit out of thin air.
And that is why I want to avoid interacting with any kind of GenAI/LLM/... garbage. I always find the need to second-check whatever I'm reading and it is highly annoying.
Every medium, livejournal, blogger, etc page in the look nearly exactly the same. Or Twitter Bootstrap sites.
I'll give them some credit here: its at least been worked into a terse format unlike a lot of the docs I get from people who seem to think AI's ability to add verbosity is somehow a virtue.
I'm excited by that.
And even LLM design tropes are better than seeing the same platform design on every page. The same Instagram, Reddit, X pages over and over and over forever. It's monotonous design. Platforms suck in more ways than that, though - you're forced into their constraints, algo bait, spam, hyper-drama, Reddit mods, contrarian view downvoting, etc.
It feels like we're entering the 90's - 2008 era again. The indie web. Microformats and self-distribution and hacking and remixing.
An llm making the exact same layouts for everyone with obviously zero input from anyone who cares seems absolutely nothing like the old geocities days.
LLM is just AI slop spam. To even want to compare it to geocities is weird. Have you been around back then actually?
To claim LLMs are similar to an independent web is also weird.
I deleted the stylesheet, removed the duplicate FAQ section, and reworded a few sentences.
The level of phoning in the complete lack of any work beyond the absolute bare minimum is the most frustrating aspect to me.
If it's readable and aesthetic, it is perfectly serviceable for the purpose of reading a post.
Consider that you probably didn't have such an intense response to WIX templates or substack articles, so most of what's going on is actually your feelings about AI taking primacy.
Apologism at best. People have been bemoaning this issue for a while now..., pre-AI even.
First time I'm seeing this defended from an "oh you're just anti AI" perspective (which, ironically, is exactly the sort of bare minimum a couple comments over was bemoaning)
If you don’t like it and you feel it doesn’t bring value to HN, flag it.
I don’t believe that at all, and it’s not implied in my comments. What I’m saying is that the value isn’t in the style, that part can also be replicated. It’s not in the content, that can be replicated. It’s the same for >90% of startup ideas people come up with when discovering agent coding. You were able to create a cool SaaS project in a weekend? Congrats. Any other dev can point their LLM to your website/app and make a clone in even less time. The safe ones have a high barrier of entry, such as hardware, or similar, but the vast majority is trivially cloneable.
I don’t know what that will result in. I assume we will be chasing more human experiences, but I have no idea.
Software dev has never been a hard job
It's been so paint by numbers for years now for me it's incredibly boring mind numbing dead end toil
That style is still rare enough that I prefer it over OP's "we installed shadcn + Tailwind and look like every seed-stage startup SaaS from 2024" style.
Or since a lot of vibe coded static sites are just plain html, cs, js, a first try attempt via wget to mirror the first 500KB of the site and then analyze it.
Use proven traditional statistical methods like supervised learning for this. You can use traditional (not large) language models to tokenize the content and then a supervised learning trained on the most popular models to detect if those models generated the content.
I think it's less of a distinct aesthetic rather than having "Tells" in the template that you might be sensitive to for having worked with it.
I've seen word documents that the first time I saw them I thought nothing of it. Wasn't until I had ChatGPT work on something later and noticed it's exact use of particular fonts and colors that I realized the other was AI generated.
There was nothing materially wrong with the documents, but after seeing the connection you can't unsee it. It's not really a new or AI specific phenomenon either, any template can trigger it. like how every RPG maker game looks the same, or every substack blogs all are samey, even on custom domains.
Design is a question of taste, I am not commenting it.
But yes, you are right that we get tired of these sites as they are indistinguishable.
Have anyone tried to print or switch page to browser’s reader mode? Here starts hell :)
Versus the same WP template or the same Jekyll template?
I agree though, using an LLM to do the same old is a waste.
Even the URL captures the ubiquitous "honestly / genuinely / let me be up front" verbal tick that Claude can't resist. That is, "Rashid" likely couldn't even be bothered to come up with his own website name. I hate it.
Pay some portion of that over the years and end up owning ... absolutely nothing.
The streaming number surprised me. Nine services, flagship tiers:
March 2021: $95.91/month. Today: $154.41/month. That's +61%, or $702 more per year for the same nine subscriptions.
Per service since 2021-03: Apple TV+ +200%, Disney+ +138%, Peacock +100%, Hulu +58%, Netflix +43%, Paramount+ +40%, YouTube Premium +33%, Spotify +30%, HBO Max +23%. 75 documented increases across 11 services, every one linked to the announcement or report that covered it. The most recent was Apple TV+, $12.99 to $14.99 on 28 August.
Two services are tracked but deliberately left out of that basket: YouTube TV (a live-TV bundle, $35 to $82.99 since 2017 — the steepest riser I have, but it is a cable replacement, not an on-demand subscription) and Prime Video (an add-on to a Prime membership, not standalone). Putting either in would have made the headline bigger and the comparison worse.
One methodology note, because I got this wrong first: my initial version summed each service's launch price, which gave a bigger, better headline. But those launches span 2010 to 2021, so that basket never existed — nobody could have bought it. Recomputing from March 2021, the first month all nine existed, gives the smaller +61% figure. I'd rather publish the smaller true one.
Same thing happened with the ad tiers. I expected to find ad-free plans being hiked faster to push people toward advertising. Disney+ fits — ad-free +73% vs ad-supported +50% over the same window. Netflix doesn't: it raised both by exactly 29%. What did happen at both is the cash gap widened — Netflix $8.50 to $11.00/month, Disney+ $3 to $7/month.
The daily side covers hosting, VPN, antivirus and SaaS: 42 of 75 tracked plans renew above their advertised price, averaging +196%. The extreme is IONOS at +1,300% ($1/mo advertised, $14/mo at renewal). 9 providers never raise renewal prices at all — two of them, Mullvad and Windscribe, run no affiliate programme, so nobody has a commercial reason to mention them.
Data is CC BY 4.0: https://honestlyranked.com/data/renewal-prices.csv
Method: https://honestlyranked.com/methodology/
Limits, stated up front: I measure published pricing only — I don't test the products and make no claim about quality. Prices are read from one fixed location (Pakistan), which is stated on the site; for most of these the price is global, but where a provider geo-prices, my figure describes that vantage point. Streaming histories are curated from primary sources rather than scraped, which is how they go back further than my own tracking.
Happy to talk about the scraping side — Cloudflare, JS-rendered prices, A/B-tested prices, and providers who publish no renewal figure at all.
1. Paying subscription for temporarily available content(i.e. pulled shows or music) is not viable for me.
2. They operate in a winner-takes-all model, so the movies/actors/producers/musicians(especially) get nothing out of me if they are not the most popular ones(which they aren't).
With that in mind - it's their choice. If the above-mentioned decide to sell digital copies, I'll gladly pay for them and download them(last purchase from a few weeks ago). If not - pirating it is.
I don't have a great view, though, whether this is even visible to the streaming platforms. I suspect they don't really lose much notable revenue from piracy anymore. While it's matured some recently, it's not as easy as "download limewire".
1. I have 0 trust in software companies to have the ability to protect my data, even if they have the best intentions. Partially because of 2
2. AI: everything has to be fed into it, whatever it spits out is treated as gospel by most tech companies and people that 10 years ago were taught to question everything.
3. Price.
4. It is actually easy to setup and if you put in some real thinking into it, it becomes both secure and easy to pass around. Jellyfin is a good example. I installed wireguard on my mum's computer, "double click this, click this button, open your browser, click on this icon" and she has access to my library.
Part of the reason for the overinflated prices and budget cuts in those exact companies is this exact thing: many people got fed up with minor convenience at an ever-increasing price and "amazon for this, netflix for that". Many of us grew up pirating because we had no other choice. Now we do have a choice but instead of a decent trade-off in price-vs-convenience, we got a price to pay and ultimately a ton of inconvenience.
No long-term contracts, no additional hardware needed, no hidden fees. Still the option to not see ads for most of the services. You can freely jump from service to services.
Plenty of promos out there still, too: for example, I get $10 back per month on an ad-free Disney/Hulu/ESPN bundle through my credit card. That plan costs me about $31/month: $31 doesn't buy me a meal out with my family, it doesn't buy me a single football ticket, it might get me into one movie with the family if I do some cheap matinee (not counting gas to drive up and snacks).
Are you a netflix exec by any chance?
I dunno about you, but in my lifetime, if I would have invested in owning VHS, DVD, or HD-DVD, that would not have paid off for me. (I might have owned a lot, but I wouldn't have been happy.)
I guess Blu-Ray has stuck around, but I find that I don't rewatch a ton of movies anyways. I've never felt comfortable buying digital video because I never liked the idea of buying into an ecosystem.
And...discs aren't cheap anyways? Just did a random search - Tron: Legacy (a movie that's been out for awhile, I like, I would re-watch) costs $27.99 to buy a physical copy. So again: $28 to acquire one movie; $31 for me to watch that movie or hundreds of others I want within the course of a month.
Thanks for making me think of this, it's another bullet in support of what I was saying before.
If you go to a restaurant for a meal, you own nothing after that, but you can be happy. If you go to an entertainment park, you own nothing after that for your ticket, but you can be happy.
Making customer happy is an extraordinary valuable service one can provide, and that doesn't have to require connection with materially owning anything.
I especially like not paying for sports to watch the few shows/movies I like.
Some people who like to (legally) own media might be disappointed, though.
I just never really felt like the incentives were quite the same to purchase movies. They've always been constrained by their formats/vendors in a way that was never as true for music, they've always cost more, I don't rewatch movies as much as I'll re-listen to albums, and I think the...I dunno...nature, telos of movies lends itself better to ephemeral access.