News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by cirno on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @02:21AM (#22942809)
> In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways.

They do. There's a popular website I won't name (----.-----) that has users provide their Patreon logins, and it goes and auto-scrapes all post content from people that login supports and mirrors it for free. Almost every artist with more than 100 subscribers is illegally shared there. It's really quite sleazy when you consider most of the artists let you see their entire catalog for a $1 or even $5 tier. Cheating someone out of thousands of hours of labor for $1 is particularly low.

I know it's the internet and you can't really stop piracy, but I'd like to see Patreon being proactive against a service that hurts both itself and its creators like that.

Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by tomp on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @03:49AM (#22943212)
Piracy has proven to be the best competition for shitty legacy content delivery methods. I wonder if we'd have Netflix without ThePirateBay. Fact is, people want to pay for content (not because it's "not cheating" or whatever, but because they genuinely want to support artists and want them to keep creating) but are unwilling to jump through hoops for that. It's on Patreon & co to improve their game.
Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by sschueller on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @07:10AM (#22944318)
Netflix's UI is total shit. It is as if they are purposefully trying to keep it that way to hide the fact that most of the movies they have are garbage and the only way to get people to watch those is to give them some odd "compatibility" with your taste rating.
Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by albertshin on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @07:36AM (#22944469)
I totally agree that they're anti-user. But they have a dilemma.

Imagine a nicely formatted table of Netflix movies and shows available in your country. New, potential users can quickly find out if it's worth signing up. Existing users can quickly realize that maybe the service is not worth it.

I also have a theory that if you're stuck looking for something to watch and you've already spent enough time on their platform, you might just settle on something.

They're trying to stay as the "first stop" of when you want to watch something, and the only way they can keep that position is purposefully being murky with their offerings because, yes, it's a 90% shitty collection.

Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by ChefboyOG on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @10:05AM (#22945666)
Netflix's UI, more specifically, is anti-Search.

Search is a binary proposition. Netflix either has the content you're searching for, or it does not. Because Netflix is optimizing for total time spent on platform, this is a bad proposition, from their perspective.

That's why the Netflix home screen has become a circus of autoplaying videos, "recommended for you" queues, and "watch it again." The goal, from a UX perspective, is to stimulate you into watching something you didn't come there wanting to watch.

Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by glennpratt on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @11:19AM (#22946480)
My family uses Netflix via Chromecast, so our UI is a phone or tablet app. Search is literally the second button after Home and works fine.

One consideration, maybe your TV app is the problem. Personally, this is why I don't use TV apps.

Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by vel0city on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @10:30AM (#22945933)
You say its anti-search, but its like three button presses on my Roku to get to the search menu which seems pretty fast and accurate. Its one click to get to the search box in the Windows app. I've never had a hard time trying to search for a specific title.
Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by tomp on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @10:57AM (#22946204)
Sure, but I'm more commenting on the ease of use. I mean we can debate it until heat death of the universe, but the fact is, my less computer-proficient family members ask me to download torrents for them, whereas they have no problem buying/watching films on Amazon/Netflix/etc.
Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by rechristened on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @12:24PM (#22947288)
Netflix's UX is better than any other their competitors.
Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by scott_s on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @08:10AM (#22944670)
Then pay to support a creator on patreon and consume their content elsewhere. (I don’t think this is ideal, but your summation made it sound like a false dichotomy.)
Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by tomp on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @10:55AM (#22946182)
I'm up for it, I support no (or very short) copyright, but let's be honest here - that's way more friction for end-users.
Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by scott_s on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @12:19PM (#22947211)
For what I support and consume, it's actually less. Personally, I'm happy just using Patreon as a way to pay the creators and consume their content elsewhere.

Some of the people I support make videos, and while they release them early on Patreon itself, they always eventually make it to YouTube. No matter what investment Patreon makes, it will never be as good as YouTube for watching videos. I could watch these videos early on Patreon, but I don't. Not because Patreon's video watching is bad (although it is), but because YouTube is the best platform for watching these kinds of videos. The same thing applies to podcasts (but with different apps, of course).

Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by andy_ppp on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @03:07AM (#22943010)
Yes, water marking downloads with account details and charging for this sort of thing would help put a stop to it...
Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by jermaustin1 on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @09:15AM (#22945181)
A PDF I bought on sellfy actually did this. It stuck my email address in the footer of every page.

That email was tied to a transaction in paypal, making it highly traceable back to myself. In 30 seconds, one could easily remove that from the PDF in Acrobat, but that doesn't mean there aren't other hidden watermarks in the file.

Re:Patreon lays off 13% of workforce by michaelt on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @10:59AM (#22946241)
> charging for this sort of thing

If there are zero hacked accounts ever, sure.

But charging someone $500 for actions a hacker took with their account would be.... very unusual.