Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
wpvip.com817 points by thm 6 hours ago
817 points by thm 6 hours ago
>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today
This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more.
Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we went with some of the best and did our own intensive testing and worked on latencies etc., I actually thought the final version was pretty good but our customers just hated it.
What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest
They don't use their own product, and they don't want their engineers to use their product either. They want velocity, and you can't have velocity if you're bogged down by doing end-to-end testing and finding friction and whatnot.
Its being pounded into their head almost daily (and from all directions) that AI is the future and the more AI the better. Their boss, the industry, other managers, heck probably even their children.
So any big AI initiative they are apart of had succeeded before it even starts!
The incentive to replace employees with ai systems?
VS. the inadequacy of ai systems (nondeterministic output, no reference with reality, unknown signal to noise ratio, low effort etc).
They care more about short term cost reduction than long term effects of upsetting customers. Even moreso if there is a lack of significant competition, as is often the case for companies doing this, since customers can't just easily switch to something else.
I think it is not cost reduction. AI is not cheap. I think it is mimetic and FOMO driven, they think the press release packed with em dashes will 10x their stock price or something.
it's cheaper than hiring/training/providing benefits and career growth to real humans, at least for now
They don't care. They have metrics to meet and don't care how. Full stop.
Have you seen "Severance"? It's a wonderful show that shows us a sick truth:
Many people are a different person at work. That different person is devoid of morals & ethics. They are machines intent on meeting metric targets. Nothing else, not managers, not employees, base people, just machines hitting targets they didn't decide on.
How could we possibly expect more?
I recommend everyone in this thread call OpenAI and talk that support agent. I had some issue and tried to trip it up, spoke naturally and ambiguously, and it actually did a pretty good job.
I feel like this is an example of Sturgeon's Law - almost every thread can be filled with complaints, because most everything is crap.
What's more interesting is the cases where it isn't. Those prove that the idea can be good, but it's obviously a lot more work than "have an LLM answer customer questions".
It's like how these automated call handlers that say "Just tell us what you need help with" and then no matter how you phrase the sentence it just doesn't understand what you mean. Great idea in theory, horrendous execution. Bonus points if it automatically disconnects after 3 attempts without finding the right magic word from its dictionary of options.
The answer I always give to "tell us what you need help with" is "representative" or "speak to a human". I despise the automated systems that respond to that with "before we can route you to a human, we need to know what you're calling about". Fortunately, some of those will take the continued statement of "representative" as a sign that they should give up and give you a human to talk to. Not all of them, though.
Have you encountered those voicemail AI customer service representatives? Those can't route you anywhere so you're stuck talking to a robot.
I was just trying to schedule my daughter's dentist appointment and had to spend 10 minutes talking to an AI when I could have found a time that worked in 30 seconds with a human. And at the end of the whole process, she got my daughter's name wrong. It was demoralizing.
Most phone systems will put you through to a human if you pound the 0 enough. The better ones will tell the rep that you did so and they know you are mad as hell and won’t take it anymore and you never have to make the case that they’re going to lose $100,000 NPV because they won’t give you a $500 resolution.
Some of them will also give up and escalate if you do a good enough Rahm Emanuel impression.
Oh fucking hell yes, how much I hate that shit. Bring back the "press 5 for XYZ" phone trees, I never have problems getting the systems to understand what I'm trying to indicate there.
I definitely prefer phone trees the ai agents. Something that has never made sense to me is why we even need most of the phone trees. Could they not just have separate numbers? Billing is X num. CS is Y num. Save the human species minutes for every fucking call.
I realize the decision makers have been prioritizing the opposite. Making calls take as long as possible but I have no idea what is incentivizing them to do that.
They're just filters to see if you actually need help. "They're willing to sit here for 4 minutes listening to prompts and hitting buttons, they must need help" because as we all know, in most cases it doesn't matter which sequence of numbers you press, the same person is going to answer the phone, or same group of people.
I would love to see an app/overlay that displays what each option is during the call. Some system where you don’t have to listen to the whole list of “press x for y”.
I have no idea how to go about implementing such a thing, but it would be cool if someone picked up the idea and ran with it.
Android does this fairly well for me - it will list out the options as they are spoken, and you can click on them directly to type the number. I believe (but haven't seen this recently) it will pre-render the options before they are read if it has knowledge of that phone tree.
But watch out, as our menu options have recently changed!
Good point, but seriously why are the menu options so frequently changing?? (or is that just more BS to delay you further)
Really? The modern ones I’ve run into lately are like 100x better than the old flows. “Press 1 for sales. Press 2 to know our hours. Press 3 if you have a ticket. Press 4 to hear our website address…”.
Of course nothing beats a human with real agency at the company but like, these modern agents could be 100x better than what airlines and internet service providers currently have.
It’s when they see the money they saved that quarter with layoffs. Then the next quarter customer satisfaction is down and they just don’t know why…
If an AI customer service agent disclosed what capabilities it has that go beyond what I can do by myself, that would be an immediate improvement.
The ever dreaded automated phone systems are more tolerable than the AI driven phone systems. The press 1 for... never tried to make you think someone was actually listening to you, yet the AI services are made to come across like you are talking to a human. Don't try to make people think it's a human.
I think the only place so far where I have actually preferred the AI version was when my phone provider switched from a "dumb" chat bot that ostensibly used natural language but rarely parsed anything successfully.
> Don't try to make people think it's a human.
Agreed.
A local pizza place (Tribute Pizza) switched its phone over to an AI assistant that goes out of its way to appear human to such a degree that it inserts random "restaurant bustle" sound effects into the call so it sounds like you're talking to someone standing in a crowded restaurant.
The subterfuge of layering in sound effects to make idiots think they were still talking to a human was a bridge too far and I swore off ever giving my business to them again.
Considering the many embarrassing failures huge fast food chains have had trying to get AI order takers in their drive-throughs I'd be very concerned about an AI at some random local pizza place getting my order accurately
This reminds me that I have to write my dentist. They replaced their beep answering machine with an AI chatbot, and the experience is horrible. I just want to say what I want, have it transcribed to text, and then have a human do something about it. It. I don't want to have to slowly explain to a bot who is just going to do the same thing.
Plus, the first time you encounter it, it doesn't identify itself as a bot for a couple sentences. And it's convincing enough that you fall for it. The feeling of being let down and realizing that you were just talking to a chump robot is severe, and is now associated with my dentist's brand.
Same experience calling a dental office recently. The voice on the other side introduced itself by name and had this uncanny valley quality where I wasn't quite 100% sure it was a bot and felt weird asking it outright. Made for an awkward conversation. Once it became clear that I was, in fact, talking to AI, I quickly wrapped it up but came away feeling quite negative about the experience. It's not even that it gave bad responses, but pretending to be a human is a step too far.
Same thing happened to me at my dentist! Infuriating!
I suspect someone is selling these to dentists in particular. Dentists have cash to burn on these kinds of solutions, I guess.
I suspect it's more accurate to say the private equity that bought out dental practices everywhere have the cash to burn. At least for now.
Dental practices are notorious for being badly run: dentists often have great technical skills but are lacking in people skills, business skills, common sense, etc. Seyle in The Stress of Life talks about early research about how many dentists struggle because of this.
Dentists frequently get talked into MLM scams (which they have a lot of money to lose on) or Scientology management training (which they have a lot of money to lose on.)
Given all that many of them might be happier if they work for private equity, and that trend is stronger with more women entering the field. I dunno if women are really worse at running a business but I think they are better at recognizing that they're not good at running a business when they're not.
I really want to agree and I can fill the rage building inside me when I talk to one... but on the flip side I just had a conversation with the Amazon one and it fixed my weird incorrect region/country problem in about 5 minutes. I was filled with rage the entire time, but it fixed my problem.
I've recently come to the thought that the reason why I find AI so snake-oily is because it isn't solving the bottlenecks of the use-cases it is being applied to.
The problem with customer service was never the frontline support agents but rather that these frontline agents are not empowered to solve the problems they encounter. I once had a human agent admit to me I was wrongly charged but they could not refund me on the spot because of protocol. Replace that agent with the smartest model and it still wouldn't have improved that interaction! (Of course, the business saves money if the AI costs a fraction of a human agent's salary.)
I'll take a shot in the dark and bet there was always an obscure/poorly documented way to solve your problem and that the AI could just find it in its playbook faster; it's search after all! It's also not inconceivable to go as far as to wager that a _human agent_ would just have been as effective; maybe the protocol to do it wasn't some obscure procedure for customer support.
----
That said, this is why I'm in disbelief that AI is bringing in as much value to the table as claimed. I realized that in software, it was never shipping the code that was the bottleneck to profit. I could be the mythical 10x productive engineer but all my output is still gonna be gated by things like testing of all sorts, customer acquisition, product development and design. Testing and product dev you could maybe automate but only after putting in considerable legwork yourself.
And of course, shipping 10x more features does not mean you'll get 10x more profit, not even that you'll get 10x more customers.
I have a friend working for an international law firm which has recently made a big push for responsible AI use. (I won't say which firm but the first partner name has to do with croissants and they recently organized an internal AI congress in Spain.) So, they are paying for AI subscriptions but I sincerely wonder if that's adding to their bottom line since their profit is bottlenecked by (a) how much billable hours they can account for and (b) the judicial process which famously moves at a glacial pace.
It's just a pattern I repeatedly notice when I look closer into things. And of course, as we all know, the cost of AI services today is still heavily subsidized by VC money. When that money is gone, I worry we'll be stuck with _expensive_ AI-centric workflows that's not really adding value to the business.
it really depends on if it can do useful actions, and both you and the company can reasonably trust that it will actually do the right thing
IMO it also depends on having a working alternative for when the fuzzy automated system fails to work... except that's the stuff companies want to eliminate in order to (theoretically) save money.
My main issue with these systems is that they tend to not be able to do anything beyond what I can do myself in whatever self-service portal is available. If I'm calling, it's because I need support beyond what the bot can probably provide, and it just becomes a matter of arguing with the robot to get to a human who can actually solve my problem.
I’ve had to use one of these to book something with a service company. It was horrible. It’s like talking to Pinnochio… there’s nothing there. And it’s trying to sound human and conversational. It’s creepy and annoying.
Just give me a human being or a plain voice menu.
Businesses just don’t want to pay people if they can help it. Some things are inefficient. Get over it.
Part of the problem is that even if you did a good job it doesn't really matter because the rest of the industry isn't, so no user wants to give you a chance
I was helping an 80+ year old with a phone problem this week. Dealing with the AI CSA was so frustrating. I don't think this lady was ready to burn down data centers that morning, but I think she was looking for a pitchfork by the afternoon.
It depends. Sometimes I have really stupid questions and I don't want to read the website, when I know I don't annoy a human when I click "chat" I may use it to ask my stupid question.
But this is a exception most of the time I just try to confuse the AI to get to an actual human faster.
People say jobs with the "human touch" will stay relevant after AGI. And I'm like have you seen customer service? I can't even find the phone number anymore on amazon
Whats implied there is that the "human touch" will become a luxury.
I have a hard time seeing a future where retail doesn't bifurcate even further into ultra low margin, happy-path optimized megastores and concierge-style high touch boutiques. Places like Crutchfield that split the difference nicely seem to be a dying breed.
I immediately skip all youtube ads that are AI generated, and I can easily spot them. Not just that, I am planning to actively avoid those brands that are doing this. A small way to send a message that this form of AI sucks. In addition, I make it a point to compliment humans that assist me in customer support, and ask them to tell their management that they need to hire more humans.
The problem is that your principled opposition to these ads by voting with your wallet does nothing. The advantage to the advertiser is that AI allows them to vomit out ads even more cheaply and to make even more micro-targeted versions of them, and the greater number of suckers sold to more than offsets principled opposers.
The real solution would be the ability to block AI-generated adverts completely in your browser, forcing advertisers to send you non-AI ads if they want your attention.
> The real solution would be the ability to block AI-generated adverts
To speak from a cynical step further along the spectrum (e.g. "aacktually the real real problem is...") I submit that "voting with your eyeballs" is just a weaker form of "voting with your wallet", which is itself a trap [1] that empirically doesn't work and mainly exists to dis-empower the public.
In other words, blocking the adverts would be nice, but unless it's part of an organized boycott it probably won't affect much either.
The real solution is blocking all ad tech. I'll show anyone who asks me how to set up an ad blocker in a decent browser.
If I were a manager I would be excited as well. Product quality doesn’t seem to be a metric that is actually correlated with executive bonuses, reducing cost is.
It’s why enshitification is so common. Create a tool that quantifies quality in a usable way as a metric and you change the entire economy.
That’s because customer support should be the absolute last place that an AI agent is used that might be one of the few places you will need humans in the loop for a while because that’s where people go when everything else doesn’t work
> even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story.
::2065, in a US Social Studies class::
And that, children, across many industries, along with the unfortunately-timed chatbot craze, then believed to be real AI, is the surprisingly simple origin of Corporate Optimistic Cynical Braindeadism. It’s a bit wordy, but it was LLM-generated before the Big Correction, and nobody bothered to fix it.
It wasn't obvious from the project outset that everyone would hate it, no matter how well designed it is?
>Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we went with some of the best and did our own intensive testing and worked on latencies etc., I actually thought the final version was pretty good but our customers just hated it.
I bet you did a bad job with your solution.
I hate AI (or humans following scripts like robots) customer service because they don't actually provide service. They jerk you around in circles, don't understand basic things, can't help, and take forever.
People don't hate customer service when they feel like they have been served.
Guarantee this is a generational split.
The younger demographics will prefer the AI bot to talk to.
Gen Z hates AI… according to https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/g... (and others)
If that were true schools wouldn't have a problem with AI.
AI usage is rampant.
I've actually been told by my teacher friends who used to complain about too much AI that their high school students are starting to reverse course here, and are now bullying each other for actual or perceived AI use. It's become cringe.
Assuming that's even remotely true, nerds were bullied for their use of computers.
Now no one uses computers because only loser nerds use computers...
Sure but like.. talking to a chatbot is like the most un-nerdy in spirit thing you can do next to playing football. Nerds are, imo, attracted to esoteric complexity, long bouts of focused, actual, solitude getting to the bottom of the something. it's why they are stereotypically socially misadjusted sometimes.
A "dork" is someone who likes AI a lot I think... They usually revolve more around a product or brand, and focus more on how great it is and everyone should like it. Rather than the "you wouldn't understand leave me alone" of the nerd.
AIUI, most of the AI usage by students is seen by themselves as cheating, and cheating is largely for the tasks that you don't care about. Which means there's likely a strong association with students of generative AI work products with "we don't care about the quality of this stuff."
Rampant use of AI for cheating is not at all incompatible with negative opinions of AI.
> Rampant use of AI for cheating is not at all incompatible with negative opinions of AI.
Possibly. Either way it (for me at least) neatly highlights why AI will succeed.
The students you talk about don't abstain from AI use entirely - they utilise AI for things they consider 'unworthy' of their attention/effort.
That is precisely the market AI will capture first - the tasks and processes that people (in general) have to do but don't really have any passion/interest in doing and for which perfection isn't critical.
More importantly and may surprise many people in this thread (given its flow so far)...there are a whole heap of things that you and I care about, that 10s if not 100s of millions of other people consider 'unworthy' of their attention/effort and for which they will happily make do with a 'sub par' AI experience if it's cheaper, easier, more convenient.
Is this all being astroturfed?
Even researcher are using AI to do their research. It's not just being used for cheating.
I don't thinks so because the ai bot will reliably give you the answers you could already get from the website to begin with and will never solve your problem. If people are calling or opening an interactive chat, this is because all automatized procedures have already failed and you are in a situation not supported by them.
I think people clicking through websites will be viewed the same as people going to the library and reading through books to research.
You just get the information you need way quicker.
Recently I had to make changes to cancel my flight. Luckily the website had an agent and I used it to cancel my flight. Didn't have to wait for an email/chat or worse call.
I even rescheduled my flight using the same website agent.
It's just way more convenient.
I'd tend to say that it is probably because they haven't yet crippled their AI bot with the same dark patterns (trying to make you select insurance, paid selection of seats, additional luggages, rented car at the airport) as they do on the website.
Airlines websites could be so much simpler and quick to use if they weren't designed to be full of traps.
Don't expect that edge to persist indefinitely, they are in the adoption phase.
It becomes a problem when individual users are driving these agents for them, locally through computer use.
The problem is that the agents can not be trusted to do things so at the end of the day you wade through loads of crap and they cant solve your problem because they usually only have the same powers you do.
Great if grandma doesnt know how to use a web form, fucking useless for everyone else.
Yes, it's a generational split.
People in their 60s or older get confused. People in their 40s or 50s tolerate it better. Younger people hate it with a passion and will hate anything that it touches.
I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.
>while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.
I would say that undersells the (not neutral, actively negative) impact of AI to many.
What many people hear is "made with the tech that plagiarizes, leaves artists (and soon you as well) without a job, and makes things generic and bland!"
You might as well market it as "created by child labor".
Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked. Even my iPhone brings up this brightly coloured keyboard expecting me to do something with AI, and I don't actually know what causes it.
So I think it's much simpler than solidarity with creators, artists or even workers more generally. It's that "AI" as a brand stinks, people are connecting it with annoying, low quality experiences and shitty low-effort art.
I think AI has also become synonymous with slapdash, low effort, probably steals my data
Precisely. "We're doing this with AI" reads as "we don't care enough about this to pay a person to do it."
And frustrating automated voice systems, support chat bots that go in circles, etc.
>> It looks like this isn't something I can help you with. Would you like to be connected to a human who can help?
> Sure!
>> Ok, I'm connecting you to a human now.
[5 minutes later]
> Hello?
>> Hi! What can I help you with?
> Are you a human?
>> No, I'm an AI agent programmed to help you with anything you need. What can I do for you?
> You said you were going to connect me to a human.
>> That isn't something I can do. What can I help you with?
Turns out "connecting to a human" is something it knows about in its training data so it'll hallucinate doing so.
At least your example IDs itself as an AI agent. The ones I've come across hide it but it becomes obvious with responses like "I don't have access to that information" or something a human would never say. I had a dealership give me one of those, so I hung up on it and called a different dealership where I was connected to an actual human. Guess which one got my business...
So AI is resurrecting the microsoft clippy problem
Clippy was just ahead of its time. Sadly for the bots of now, they are only slightly better than Clippy
>In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked.
Just the other day I was trying to fix someone's laptop and reflexively pressed (what I thought was) the context menu key, only to find no context menu opened, and instead a Copilot window right in the middle of the screen.
> Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more
Most egregiously: VSCode.
No, i absolutely never in my life will want Copilot to summarize anything for me and yet guess what button appeared in the UI and i accidentally clicked on last night....
VSCodium was better on this front last time I tried it, and since Microsoft seems intent on allowing the Extensions to be a wildly insecure free-for-all, I am seeing fewer and fewer reasons to stick with the official version.
I'm pissed off that Android took over the power button to activate their AI agent bullshit.
Search your settings for Power Button, Side Button, or whatever. You should be able to change the setting for a long press.
Google, not Android.
I assure you, the Android Open Source Project made no such change.
I've recently switched to grapheneos. I have a high tolerance for shit not working, but its been fine.
My washing machine also has this AI icon. Not a big deal but it makes me roll my eyes everytime I see it.
That's actually a feature that washing machines have had for a while - "generative washing" - it is where the extra odd socks come from.
> extra odd socks
I have the opposite issue, can generative washing recover the lost odd socks somehow?
Common misconception, the socks you think you're losing are being found by other people's washers.
Socks are not getting lost; they are getting compacted to keep the context window small.
My LG one has had smomething like that - a coupkle of years old. Seems quite nifty though - it tumbles the load dry for a while and alledgely uses the patterm of weight shift to determine what kind of load it is - the materials etc - and adjusts the wash accordingly
i blame microslop for poisoning public perception with copilot. god that was so awful.
Also the product itself is likely to suck.
One thing that the tech world has become obsessed with is increasingly non-deterministic products. Products that do what they think what the user wants to do rather than what they actually want to do. They've also fallen in love with changing things for the sake of change.
I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.
AI is the ultimate non-deterministic product. You can ask it to do the same thing repeatedly and get different results every time!
This is one hell that the cyberpunk people didn't anticipate. If you watch cyberpunk movies from the 80s or 90s the tech all works kinda like how a microwave or vcr would of worked back then: the device had discrete controls and it did one thing reliably. The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.
> The closest vision back then to what we're getting now is the moody ship's computer from hitchhiker's guide.
It's not the ship computer, but the door AIs, which had this marketing blurb in the brochure:
> All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.
Tellingly, the main characters respond with annoyance whenrver the doors speak up.
Hitchhikers Guide should not have been as prophetic as it ended up being, but here we are.
It's somewhat fascinating to me that we are so far out in the weeds of stupidity in the modern era that the only things that were predicted accurately have to come from satire about "Nobody would ever be so stupid as to build or create this"
It drives me crazy that after every update the menu icons, like the browser, is in a completely different arbitrary place. And since Tesla doesn't want to allow Carplay I'm forced to use the slightly less than useful mobile web version of my favourite apps.
The touchscreen is the only thing that's kept me from leasing a Tesla the past 8 years.
can you blame them? nondeterministic products have resulted in some of the most successful businesses of All Time (tiktok, reels, google search, product recommendations)
> I had a friend buy a Tesla and one thing that ruined the car for him is that the menu would change overnight. He'd know how to turn the fog lights on, for instance, but next time he had to do it, the menu had moved someplace else.
Incidentally, this is why I will never buy a Tesla. I used to want one pretty badly, I thought (and still think tbh) that they are very cool cars. I was even willing to barely tolerate using a touchscreen as the only interface. But to make that work safely, the controls need to be in the same exact place every time so that I can learn to manipulate them without looking at the screen. Moving stuff around willy nilly like Tesla does isn't just annoying, it's actively unsafe. So I'm not buying one and never will, because they have proved I can't trust them to act right.
I think you may be right. I enjoy tech and programming, but hardly any of my friends/family do. And nearly everyone in my inner circle (an admittedly small number of people, considering I'm an extreme introvert) condemns and avoids AI both for the reasons you mentioned and because they refuse to "outsource my brain to AI!"
In fact, the only time I personally encounter a lot of pro-AI commentary is when I come here to HN (and, obviously, there are plenty of anti-AI people on this site too).
I personally appreciate it and use it, but I'm still "old-fashioned" in the sense that I only ask it for very specific things and always read through what it produces. I'm honestly not entirely sure how I'm supposed to feel about all this. These are interesting times, to say the least.
I wouldn’t over index in the artist side of things. A lot of people don’t really think about that at all, just look at how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists.
But “AI is coming for your job” is very resonant.
> how readily Spotify was adopted despite taking a ton of money away from artists
Spotify was praised as an alternative to piracy that gave some money to artists at a price that consumers wouldn’t complain too much about.
You don’t have to look at Spotify, though. Look at all of the people who won’t even pay Spotify or Netflix rates for content because they know they can pay $0 to pirate it.
Sorry my friend, but Netflix is not a good product. It has a limited selection and, at least for my account, a lot of commercial ads. I am not pirating but I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.
bTW - I stopped watching Netflix.
Netflix was just an example.
> I calculated that if I were to pirate I would spend less time downloading the movie than the cumulative time spent watching commercials on Netflix.
I don’t know what plan you were on, but mine doesn’t have ads.
This kind of proves my point, though: People don’t want to pay for things (including the ad-free level) so they use it to justify piracy as being superior for various reasons.
The selection is still shitty though, even with no ads. Piracy is a superior choice.
Given that Netflix invests heavily in DRM, Piracy is at least the more ethical choice.
> Piracy is a superior choice.
And there it is.
Netflix was just an example. There are other services.
Sorry, my post was not clear. Today piracy is a superior choice. The bedt product Netflix offered me was when they shipped DVDs - their selection was immense (on par with Blockbuster). I could have pirated then (I was going once a year to my home country where DVDs were sold on open air markets) but I did no do that because was too much trouble.
When Netflix started to be online only I tagged along, and it was OK-ish - selection was not that great but but price was not big either and once in a while I would watch a movie. Today ads are very intrusive and the cost for no ads is $20 / month- which is not worth it for me. Compared to this, piracy is clearly a superior choice.