I have the lower sex drive in my relationships and experience a concomitant pressure to have sex when I don't want to. I'll often say yes to avoid a fight, avoid upsetting my partner or to stop them from nagging me. This has never seemed like a big deal to me although it is sometimes a nuisance. How does this square with your PoV? Is it rape? Maybe it doesn't count as "real" pressure?
I'm not trying to minimize the issue or trip you up here. There is obviously enough coercive and violent SA taking place for it to be a major social issue no matter how broad the definition is. I'm trying to figure out how pressure as a sufficient condition for rape squares with the lived experience of people like myself who do frequently feel pressure to have sex.
Your partner shouldn't be pressuring you into having sex; that's wrong of them, and you deserve better.
Coerced consent isn't consent [1]; the fact that there are different levels of violence and pressure involved in some cases of coercion doesn't mean that the less-obvious levels are okay.
If I took this attitude then I'd be excluding myself from relationships that are a net positive in my life. Mismatched sex drive is genuinely not a big deal for me. Often we're both on the same page and that's great. But when we're not, it's not a huge deal for me to have sex I don't want just to keep the peace. In my view, it's no different to other forms of compromise and sacrifice in relationships. Furthermore I think this is common in relationships. To maintain a stable relationship, low libido partners often do have to "make an effort" and manage some of the pressure that comes from dating a higher libido partner.
IMO in an ideal world there would never be any pressure or obligation associated with any interaction. But in the real world, "okay" must have a wide enough margin to include situations that aren't ideal but are limited in terms of harm caused and moral responsibility of participants. It can't be that I am a rape victim for not wanting to hurt my partners feelings by sexually rejecting them. Some pressure is surely okay.
IME this dividing line exists more in theory than practice. Maybe your partner feeling upset or rejected leads to a fight about something unrelated the next day. Or maybe it's easier to rebuff some nagging than to deal with an insecure partner who is good with boundaries but will still feel deeply bad about the rejection.
So-called "duty sex" has been recognized as a complex topic where consent is concerned. Surely this is a continuum rather than yes/no. I can't go around calling an ex-girlfriend a rapist because she nagged me for sex now and then.
Not going to play semantics here. There is definitely a different level of trauma for a person to experience for something they are physically forced or threatened by force to endure than something they are convinced to do even if they would have otherwise not. It's insulting to victims of the former to pretend otherwise.
Sure, there are different levels of trauma in different incidents.
That doesn't make the less-obviously traumatic incidents okay; they're still very bad.
> It's insulting to victims of the former to pretend otherwise.
There's nothing insulting to victims in acknowledging other victims. There is something extremely insulting to victims in refusing to acknowledge any harm to them if it doesn't meet your arbitrary standard for significance.
Me, I cancelled due to the low quality of their catalog. A decade or so ago, they had a really strong library of media. Now they don't. What they spend their money on, I find to be severely lacking.
They published some shareholder statement years back saying "The quality of the programming does not seem to correlate with how much most users consume".
So there you go. I found the same, 10 years back I would read about something amazing and critically acclaimed -- and they'd have it!
Now rarely do they. But, my wife and I still watch a lot of Netflix. It is the service which seems to have many things she wants to watch and a good amount of things we both want to watch.
Things only I want to watch I mostly find on Hulu and HBOMax. Or I have to watch them the old fashioned way because they are too obscure to be on a streaming platform.
> They published some shareholder statement years back saying "The quality of the programming does not seem to correlate with how much most users consume".
That's not particularly informative, though. It could be true right now. "Users" is not a group with a fixed population.
If they drive their content quality into the ground and hemorrhage users as a direct result, it would still be true that the quality of the content was uncorrelated with the amount that users consumed. Instead, quality of the content would correlate with number of users. But the users are always people who are willing to deal with whatever the current content is!
What's weird is that, as a flat-rate subscription service, they're already aware that increasing number of users is good, while increasing the amount of content that users consume is bad.
I noticed yesterday that nine of the top ten shows on US Netflix were squarely aimed at women; Better Call Saul was the exception and it was in last place.
Netflix is slowly turning into a weird mix of "high production quality Lifetime + HGTV" and imported dramas from places with strong media like Korea.
Same symptom happens with addiction: just because you see short term engagement because the product is designed to get users hooked, does not mean that they will not switch once better options are available. You can't retain long term loyalty with bad quality products - same thing happened with Facebook.
Yet another example of 'engagement' metrics ruining everything.
Lowering tye quality may not change viewership, hut it radically increases your likelihood to realise it's a pile of garbage one day and go climb a tree.
All this makes me realize that we have Netflix and haven't really watched or enjoyed it since, I think, the Expanse. I guess we watched the Squid Game, too, but I thought that was terrible. Like a low grade ripoff of an old (and much more intelligent) manga called The Liar Game.
Ironic that you complain about Squid Game being a rip off of Liar Game, when it's also derivative of another series, Kaiji.
Reminds me of that classic Steve Jobs line where he complains about Bill Gates ripping off his idea of creating a GUI for OSes, with Bill pointing out that they were both really just ripping off Xerox.
When it was on scifi the funding was done by splitting syndication rights with scifi, amazon and netflix
Scifi dropped out because they didn’t think enough people watched it, their inferior cable model has no way of collecting data on what actual humans do, and when they would do it especially by being limited in airings things at a set time
This effectively cancelled the show since it didn’t have funding
And then amazon/jeff bezos picked it up completely after a major fan campaign
Few months ago I rage quit Netflix because their shows would start autoplaying and nothing I did could disable that. I couldn't read one synopsis distraction free or browse without having to constantly click my GTV remote just to stop the friggin thing from playing. WTF! I'd like to think there were more like me who voted by cancelling their subscriptions. I hope PMs at Netflix who forced this onto their users lost their jobs.
Had done that (obviously), didn't work on Chromecast with GTV. Had called customer support and filed a technical ticket. Nothing happened. Too late now.
And to combine your observations with the parent of this sub thread: Netflix raised an insane amount of debt to fund all the projects a lot of people didn’t ever end up watching, and continued to keep raising subscription costs to cover the payments on that debt they raised. I don’t really know if it could’ve turned out differently after other media outlets decided they wanted to make their own exclusive streaming services.
Same here. There is literally nothing I want to see on Netflix since The Witcher season 2 ended. Same with Disney+. Oddly enough Amazon has the most compelling content, and I'd pay for Prime even if they didn't offer streaming, so it's essentially free for me.
Seems like most content is dubbed foreign stuff now days, which I’m not at all into watching. The only thing they have at the moment I watch is Ozark and that’s ending on the 29th.
Subtitled (not dubbed; dubbing is a sin) is the best. Then again, for me all Hollywood cinema is subtitled. I wouldn't have it any other way, I love hearing the original actors speaking.
I hear in some countries like Spain, dubbing is the norm. And they are quite proud of it. I find that puzzling.
In France the dubbing is very well done and some movies are even better when dubbed. I still watch movies in the original language with subtitles but some 90's movies like Back to the Future are even better dubbed in French. There are even YouTube channels dedicated to dubbed movies where they invite dubbing actors, etc.
9 of 10 times dubbing doesn't fit with natural situational space(echo, reverb, any time based post processing in general). It's almost always out of space, stands out for me annoyingly which I find breaking the immersion. I wonder french dubbing is different.
I found that as a result, dialog was clearer. I really hate how loud everything other than dialog is in most movies for the sake of 'immersion'. I eventually gave up and settled on using subtitles when I don't want to miss any parts of a conversation.
I will agree with you animation is a special case where it can happen. But in general and in my experience, it's not common even in this case.
Spanish dubs of animé are sometimes good. All English dubs I've heard are atrocious. I remember one of the first dubs that was lauded was the English dub of Princess Mononoke... and it's hilariously bad, even if it has big names doing the voices. The Japanese version is the best, but even the Spanish dub is better.
I think this both misses the point and is incredibly insightiful at the same time. A cover of a known song may be better (it happens!), but you'd never claim you heard the original song if all you listened to is the cover.
A dub is like a cover, agreed. Almost always, a terrible cover. I can always tell when I incorrectly set the language on Netflix to something other than the original -- you can immediately tell it's a dub because of the drop in voice acting quality. English dubs are particularly terrible, it's like the voice actors are emotionless drones, and when they try emotion, they use it in all the wrong places.
Besides, it's disrespectful. An actor/actress is not just their face and mannerisms. It's their voices, too. The voices are an essential part of their acting (if you are deaf, you can't help missing them, but if you are not, unless it's a scene without speech, you're missing a key ingredient). Saying "ok, I'll replace his voice with this other voice, and his face with with this other face I like better.. you know what? I'll just edit him out of the movie and replace him with this other actor I like better!" is way too scifi and post-cyberpunk dystopia for me. It's just disrespectful.
I cannot honestly say I watched a movie if I watched it dubbed. I watched a cover instead.
>but some 90's movies like Back to the Future are even better dubbed in French.
what do you mean by this, that the French language is so much better that it renders the movie better by using it? Or is it that the writers translating the English to French are better and make the movies more interesting by their choices?
>There are even YouTube channels dedicated to dubbed movies where they invite dubbing actors, etc.
Or is it that the dubbing actors are better speakers than the original actors, for example most actors when they do voiceovers suck because they aren't trained for it I guess, and maybe a dubbed actor is trained for it or... I guess I am just confused by how a dubbing could improve a really good movie although I might suppose it would be possible to improve a really bad movie in this way.
So how does this work?
If it is a replicable aesthetic phenomenon you might expect people to aesthetically choose to make movies in this way, to make better movies.
I despise subtitles, I watch films for the visual medium when I turn on subtitles they distract me from watching the actual film. I know I’m uncultured etc but I can’t help the way I feel about it.
I'm ok with turning off subtitles, but then I can only watch English language (or Spanish) films. Only subtitles let me watch French, Japanese, Korean, Italian, etc.
Dubbing is out of the question because I do not hate actors and cinema.
Sure. Normally I find quibbling annoying, but I hope you can understand why I want to highlight accessibility on a site that many of the world’s best software engineers frequent. I care about accessibility on all dimensions not just visual. At the end of the day accessible design is good design.
Actually dubbed content is one of the few areas where I would say Netflix has stolen a march on its competitors with some innovative practices.
Through Netflix I've been exposed to a huge back catalog of great content just because they were the first ones to invest in having it dubbed (I assume). Even though the dubbing is often pretty crude it's surprisingly watchable still and definitely better watching first tier dubbed content than second or third tier native language content.
You're not interested because of the dubbing? Then just switch to subtitles. Or do you not have the patience to put up with subtitles?
Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, there's considerable high-quality content coming out of other countries. I love that Netflix brings that to the U.S., otherwise I'd never know of it or be able to watch it.
It's funny because I used to sound just like you. But now I am much more sympathetic to the above comment. I spent a lot of my youth enjoying films by a bunch of foreign filmmakers including:
Ozu
Bergman
Fellini
Suzuki
Clouzot
Bresson
Kurosawa
Mizoguchi
Costa-Gavras
Herzog
Renoir
and on and on
I especially loved the films of Jean Pierre Melville, Masaki Kobayashi and Anrei Tarkovsky. And yet, when I am done with a long day of work and chores, I cannot stomach anything with subtitles. Exhaustion plays a part in it. It just feels like work after a long day. And I wouldn't want to have that experience of any of the movies I loved back then, seeing them as a chore to be tolerated.
As someone not from an English-speaking country, most of the things I watch anywhere are subtitled.
I'm really puzzled by people with no stomach for subtitles or who would only watch stuff in their native language. Subtitles + original language of other cultures is so much better.
Yeah this is it. At the end of the day I just want some background noise that’s entertaining not to have to focus entirely on what I’m watching. It’s rare that I have the time and energy to sit down and watch a show or movie just to take in the plot. That is usually reserved for the theater where I’m forced to not distract myself.
I have wached a bunch of stuff with subtitles, mostly anime. But more recently even movies, esp. recent movies(I find the sound balance off, effects are too loud and voices too soft).
That said, subtitles can be very distracting. You end up focusing on the word and missing things in the scene/shot as well as the background.
Also the subtitles are not always faithful to the dialog. A good example of this is watching One Piece in English w/ Subs on Netflix. The spoken dialog will be one thing, the written will be another. I have some Japanese knowledge and can tell you that the subs(and the dubs) definitely do not reflect the feeling in some scenes.
I agree neither dubs nor subtitles are 100% faithful to the original. By necessity, they cannot be. There's no such thing as a perfect translation even with books, but with TV/cinema you also have to keep the pace, which makes things doubly difficult.
Even then, just hearing the original language, even if you don't understand the words, conveys essential emotion. I like to hear the original voice actors, which are essential for the cartoon/anime (even more with live action movies, of course).
At the end of a long day of work and chores I cannot stomach a 90-120 minute film, regardless of what language it's in. I much prefer 30-60 minute content. At that length subtitles are much more digestible.
When I turn on subtitles I spend the whole time reading, so I’m not a fan of doing it that way. I’ve no doubt that the quality of the plot acting etc is great (I did watch squid games) but I only really watch TV at the end of the day and I’m usually browsing on my tablet as well.
Watch it with subtitles instead then—most non-English content has English subtitles in my experience. Many of many favorite shows of recent years have been non-English Netflix shows that I watch with subtitles: Fauda, Dogs of Berlin, A Very Secret Service, Lupin, etc.
$3500 for hosting on top of what they already paid for hosting for the current length of their plan, with 7 days notice to vacate otherwise. And then how much next week? The week after that?
How could anyone trust Vimeo as a provider for their business after this?
The amount almost doesn't matter (it's definitely on the high side compared to alternatives). They can definitely afford it if they have a reasonable budget. However, how Vimeo has treated them as a paying customer is terrible.
It's an ad supported video platform that will give data to google, advertise your competitors to your customers, distract your customers from your product by being an entertainment social network site, have relatively poor analytics, etc. It's a non-starter for many businesses.
But of course not using it only makes sense if you can monetize your videos yourself by selling it or another product.
When you upload on YT you are the product, YT sells you and your data and they profit. What vimeo is selling is hosting, saas, and bandwidth. They dont' profit at all except for what you pay them. vimeo comparatively to CDNs and SaaS hosting providers have a decent price. If you don't think so then hire someone to set up cloudflare stream and your own website.
Youtube is ad-supported. You can't upload videos more than 15 minutes long without letting Youtube put preroll and mid-roll ads all over them, and the only access-control method it supports is "unlisted", where anybody with the URL can see it.
Creators don't want to force their paying Patreon supporters to watch ads for content that they paid for, and that can be leaked to the whole world if somebody merely ctrl-vs a bit of text.
> the only access-control method it supports is "unlisted", where anybody with the URL can see it.
Google Workspace supports videos which are private to an organization, but it's annoying to use (you have to switch your active account to the Workspace one) and much, much more expensive than Vimeo's new pricing scheme if you used it just for private videos.
In the use case of this context, where the business (patreon creator) publishes a video, none of the viewers will be in a Workspace organisation, unfortunately.
I have many videos on YouTube, several over an hour long, and have only monetized one video with ads as an experiment. What do you mean you can’t upload videos without ads being put on them?
To add, this is why people serious about their business generally will enter into contracts with other businesses to ensure either side can't screw each other over. And it provides a clear transition plan if one party wants to leave.
What? Of course they would. Send salespeople over to your office to negotiate terms, probably not. Standard contract with clear statement of fees, durations, renewals, etc? Pretty much any subscription service will have that. VPS on an annual plan, for example.
You get it wrong, she consumed $2106 worth of service and has paid $200 so far, that is a fantastic deal for her. Vimeo then says that next year since she consumed so much she will have to pay $3100. Vimeo here takes the risk that she gets more popular and therefore will cost them even more, they have to take a premium cut to cover for that risk.
A regular hosting provider would just send her the $2106 bill, but she went to Vimeo to avoid surprise bills. But instead she has to deal with price hikes like this, note that it isn't a bill, she can just not pay for it and cancel the service, that is the product she paid for.
> You do realize that's ~60% of what they attempted to shake them down for, right?
Well, Cloudflare Stream is underlying tech, you would need to write some code on top of it anyway. 40% of premium does not sound like something unreasonable either.
I agree that treating existing customer like that is not a good thing. I just tried to understand whether that price is reasonable at all.
She was already a paying customer, willing to pay them the price they had set before (which might have been too low, but that's their fault then, not hers). So up until this point she was a paying and "legit" customer. And they didn't know if she would be willing to pay significantly more if they asked for that.
>"I was already paying $200 a year [...]. Her quoted price: $3,500 a year. She was given a week to upgrade her content, decrease her bandwidth usage, or leave Vimeo.
A week's notice for a 17.5x price hike you unilaterally declared? That's not what you should do to such a customer, ever. To me, that's either a shakedown, or a deliberate step to make her stop using the service, e.g. because such "small" account are no longer worth your time, or you try to be a b2b business now, and those "small" customers do not fit with that image, or whatever.
If something changed for vimeo that increased the their own expenditures over night, then I'd have a little more understanding for them. But that's not what they said or even hinted at happening.
> If you're not willing to pay for bandwidth you're not a legit customer.
If they're not willing to pay a hefty premium for it? I don't follow your comment, buddy. They're already a paying customer paying what was asked of them.
Why would you not just use Cloudfare Stream or another option and save roughly 40% of the cost?
If Vimeo has no value-add, then that's what people should be doing. It's not like Vimeo is a platform for content discovery like YouTube so it should be no problem for anyone to switch.
It's what everybody will start doing. This will be bane of Vimeo. You must realize most of the cinematographers or people in creative industry don't even know about alternatives. Vimeo had great MOAT exactly because they were "youtube for creatives".
Also services like cloudflare stream/bunnycdn stream/mux are fairly recent.
Another issue is reuploading of all the media. It's not that easy to switch. But people will flee to some other solutions.
It's basically a fact that she's underpaying for what she's using. That she gets no value out of the service isn't the fault of the service, she's just literally not using the service. Since that's the case she shouldn't use the service and use a different service that actually does what she wants and has the correct value proposition for her. It sounds like that's exactly what's happening and there's no problem anywhere. There's lots of comments here pitying vimeo for losing "customers" like her but err, vimeo's the one kicking her out. She gets on a service that's more appropriate for her, vimeo gets rid of a money losing customer. Everyone wins.
Tell that to Sunny Singh, the other Vimeo user who was featured in the Verge article, who did the math himself and had to admit that he was costing Vimeo $2500/yr.
If so, he is not saying that he is costing Vimeo $2500/year, he is saying what amount of bandwidth he has "consumed"/"produced" from Vimeo, which for sure doesn't cost Vimeo $2500/year, as otherwise they would be bankrupt by now. They pay static sums for the internet connection, no TB/$ crap that people using cloud are used to.
A customer shouldn't really need to concern themselves with the profitability of a service provider though. The price Vimeo demanding is reasonable - what's not reasonable is hiding that prices could increase, and being basically as opaque as possible about the conditions to trigger that increase and what the increased cost was.
Your comment is false. Singh did an analysis and used the analysis to negotiate to a $2,500/year rate. He didn't "admit" anything about what it could be costing Vimeo.
This also seems like a great way to get everyone to leave. If what I wanted was a B2B platform, I wouldn't choose one with a history of suddenly changing its policies and only giving one week to catch up.
In fact, it's often much more difficult for a larger business to move that quickly than an independent user.
"We want you to leave" is a pretty ok thing for them to say. "You have a week to leave" is not. It's sleazy and unprofessional, and it's a signal that it's best for anyone to avoid them in the future.
they probably don’t want to be known as forcing users out unilaterally, so a false offer becomes the diplomatic move, now backfiring from public exposure.
coupled with the "we are a B2B solution" statement, i think they're trying to shake down patreon, not the individual creators - it sounds like vimeo wants patreon to start sending them money.
The scenario with Channel 5 was even more silly, since Vimeo was just a service that Patreon was using. This not only looked like a shakedown, it was from a hosting platform the group wasn't even directly using.
Interesting. There's one Patreon I subscribe to that used Vimeo. I didn't realize it was what Patreon apparently exclusively used? This sounds like a BIG problem for Patreon, then.
Patreon video has 2 solutions, Vimeo, and URL. If you use vimeo you can upload videos to vimeo right through the patreon page (though that stopped working for me some while ago so I started just using vimeo directly). For the URL it doesn't want like, a link to a video file. That will result in the patreon page just having a download link. But if you provide it with basically the same thing vimeo does (a whole ass player through the page's meta information) it can embed the video just fine, same as Vimeo.
I had planned to switch off Vimeo anyway because of the weekly upload limit being so low for my tier (I could tier up but my patreon income is like, 7 dollars so it wouldn't really be worth it). And this is pretty much the motivation I need. It's something I had already messed around with, for the purposes of embedding a custom HLS livestream. And since the only real security Vimeo offers is an unlisted URL and a domain whitelist, my plan was to require actual Patreon Oauth to watch the videos.
As I understand it, Patreon creators explicitly sign up to a paid Vimeo account and link that with their Patreon account, and then can upload to Vimeo through the Patreon posting UI. E.g. the post says they "tried to log into my Vimeo account".
You misunderstood. The small b2b are the ones getting shook down. Small b2b content providers are getting hit with huge cost so they can buy time to migrate off
If you meant that Vimeo is shaking down small business clients, that might be true. But the way you phrased things it sounded like you were saying small business services in general are a shakedown, and Vimeo was just another example of this.
Unless it's completely dead, every pizza shop runs multiple orders at once and their drivers are in and out swiftly. The food stays fairly hot thanks to commercial heat bags.
For the delivery apps, the driver has to possibly wait in a line, check it out, then deliver the order a single order at a time.
Prior to the pandemic, I always advocated for a couple weeks worth of non-perishables to be at the ready. Storms can cause issues getting to stores (or shipments arriving), and illness can make it a pain to make a weekly run. Now my significant other is entirely on board.
When normal ingredients we used became unavailable, it caused us to continually try new things. I have to admit I was pretty surprised to see today's customers buy up the basic scratch ingredients like rabid consumers early in the pandemic. Flour, sugar, etc. were all a real pain to get a hold of.
I thought prices were increasing pretty steadily before the pandemic and now it's even worse. I can remember so many items being as cheap as 25 cents each during the 90s and into the 00s... now most of them at $1.50 each. Meanwhile, our state minimum wage has increased not nearly as much (but employers are having to offer closer and closer to double to rope in anyone).
> prices were increasing pretty steadily during the pandemic and now it's even worse. I can remember so many items being as cheap as 25 cents each during the 90s and into the 00s...
How long have you been having a pandemic for?
Joking aside (that sentence read a bit weirdly), I don't think you should compare what happened in the 90s with what happened since 2020-02. If inflation surpasses minimum wage in the long term, that's not the same as prices soaring because of supply chain changes. And for what it's worth, I've not noticed any price increases here between 2020-02 and last week. This is way too anecdotal and conflating different situations to be useful.
The data does, really - on an off-hand search I found this[1], though I'm sure many more could be found. The US has trailed the rest of the world for decades on wage growth and income equality.
That's great, they're just two items and a lot of people didn't routinely buy flour (or something like yeast). Meanwhile, everything else has gone up in addition. A number of produce items have increased 25-50% in the last year here.
Gotta love some of the people on HN. Maybe it's just the late night crowd?
