nicetriangle

Yeah similar deal with me. J-Downloader > Plex is my go to now. It's pretty great. Can stream the stuff on my phone at the gym super easy.

They had me as a paying customer when the Premium Light tier was a thing and just offered ad free viewing at a reasonable price. Then they got rid of that plan at the very same time they rolled out this mission to beat ad blocking plugins. That's bad faith right there. My choice now is to get a plan at at least 50% more a month with added extra crap I didn't ask for and would never use (music, etc).

So I'm not their customer anymore.

These companies clearly won't be satisfied and I'm sure a ton of their customers will just keep forking over more and more money for worse and worse service, but I'm done. I'm pulling up stakes on all streaming video platforms. Good luck to them I guess.

Man all the recent news on Microsoft products is just god awful. Ads in the OS, forced updates, pestering people when they close apps to explain why, this. Fuck sake idk how people put up with it.

Yeah I feel like people are being surprisingly optimistic about this

Here in the Netherlands a ton of businesses use WhatsApp. You see it listed as a primary contact method on stationary, signs, vehicles, advertisements, etc all the time here.

It's probably a cash grab anyway

I see pros and cons to it. I really do not like having WhatsApp be the default text platform. Seems like a huge conflict of interest.

One thing the EU is a clear winner on now is plan pricing. It's insane how much cheaper cell service here than in the states.

oof

Even in non developing countries. Texting has historically been expensive and limited in a lot of the EU. My plan is still limited to something like 150 texts a month and I'd have to pay extra to work around that, but even if I did it wouldn't be worth the money because nobody uses text here.

Basically in a lot of Europe texting was or still is expensive and not unlimited and WhatsApp was a free alternative and Meta did not own it at the time.

So everyone was like well fuck texting and adopted apps like WhatsApp and then Meta bought WhatsApp. Now in these countries it's the defacto standard whether you like it or not. Businesses, people, and even sometimes government uses it as the default way to text. It sucks.

Name a better duo than Google and killing off products

https://killedbygoogle.com/

I've just taken the app off my phone and use adblock when I'm on the desktop browser version. I still need social media to post my work out there (I get clients that way), but I don't need to look at it 100 times a day.

It's honestly been a big quality of life improvement to take all my social media off my phone. Been a month or two now and I really miss it a lot less than I thought I would and who knows how much time I'm saving.