> everything becomes Neflix where quality is trash, but hey actors were chosen by an algorithm

I always thought that the algorithm had some successes (at least "back in the day")

e.g. The myth is that House of Cards came out of Netflix realizing that there were a lot of fans of Kevin Spacey, people wanted a complex story line etc. [0]

More recently, I kind of agree that the "enshittification" is starting to kick in but not sure how much of that is monopoly vs oligopoly. Which is sad b/c the big data, when used correctly, DOES lead to "sleeper" hits with different story lines/plots, old actors in new roles etc. This in turn makes me wonder if things were better under the old advertising/commercial supported model where ratings led to more ads which led to better writing etc. In other words, the networks knew exactly what was bringing in the revenue so they sent dollars to those shows. With Netflix, you know what people are watching but not necessarily what brought them to Netflix in the first place.

0 - Good explanation of this here: https://filmmakermagazine.com/64544-house-of-cards-the-netfl...

I always assumed that enshittification was a consequence that {more volume} + {lower costs} was more profitable than {less volume} + {higher costs}.

Which is why you don't see it in growth companies (they have organic growth as they acquire customers), but you do see it once growth plateaus (financial optimization very quickly leads to "minimally-acceptable content for most-users").

The point is that 20 streaming services with all the shows would be _fine_. They could compete on UI, delivery and price, not on exclusive content.

Steam having every game is great for me. I am happy for loads of other game stores to exist and sell me stuff and store my saves and let me download infinitely etc.

I don't want no competition, I want no exclusive games and high fragmentation

The point is there isn't actually competition on the streaming services: there's competition between the media companies on the production of content, who then restrict the availability of said content to a subset of services. Instead of the situation with music where it's normal that an album is at the very least available on the big 3, if not many others. And there's generally not a shell game where things start and stop being available as well. An actually competitive market would separate the streaming services from the content production and the incentive would be for the content to be available on as many platforms as possible and the platforms would compete on quality and features instead of how much of a catalog they can license this month.

(similarly with steam: the blowback on epic was due to exclusive games, not the mere existence of it. Steam-exclusive games are also a problem, but generally one which comes naturally from its market position and not artificially through contracts)