[nigelcleland]

There is a huge network cost towards doing this. The centralised platforms by definition will push us closer towards the mean (as the mean is most profitable) at the expense of the outlier.

This means that you'll have a higher quality median (note, not mean) experience at the cost of experiencing any true outliers. The best way it's been put to me is the follows:

* (AI/ML/Algorithmic Recommendation) = 8/10 products you will like, none you'll love or hate

* (Serendipitous Searching) = 5 products you will guaranteed like, 1 you will hate, 1 you will absolutely love

By only having access to the current rotation on Netflix/Amazon/HBO you cannot find the 'diamonds in the rough' that suit your taste.

[jonknee]

I guess what I'm saying is I am OK with this and vastly prefer it to collecting things in my home. I could put a ton more effort/money in and clutter my house and get some marginal more enjoyment from movies, but for me that is a losing proposition. I'd rather not buy anything or put in the time and enjoy the content less. I can definitely understand if movies are a passion this would be undesirable, but they're not a passion of mine and I really enjoy being able to outsource the hassle.

[nigelcleland]

That's a very reasonable approach. The issue is that if this is extended to every person in society then the cumulative effect would be worse.

An issue where the incremental benefits to one individual may have negative externalities throughout the society as a whole,

[mercutio2]

I think these friendly disagreements often come down to “how otaku are you about a given area of human expression.”

You and I (but not various other folks on this thread) place a lot of value on not avoiding hassle, and a pleasantly low albeit non-zero price for a reasonable subset of the output of Hollywood.

People who are deeply invested in being able to apply their own personal filter on what media is available seem less satisfied.

I know other people who play out the same disagreement for comedy and music.

For some reason not for dance. Where’s the cheap version of Netflix for the ballet?

Maybe somewhere on YouTube; I refuse to use YouTube so I wouldn’t know.

[cableshaft]

I think that point of view is fine on an individual level. For people who like to live a minimalist lifestyle and don't want to be tied down to a location or want to be able to pack up and move easily, or just plain hate clutter and don't find enough personal value in owning these things that's fine (although you can store a lot on a single external hard drive nowadays).

But I don't think this is a good idea for the world to become like this as a whole. The more things are centralized (stream from one server as opposed to living in a bunch of locations all over the world), the easier it is for parts of our culture to disappear.

The artifacts we find from thousands of years ago are a super tiny handful of many, many, many more that existed (perhaps not exact copies, but the same types of things), and we have lost who knows how knowledge and cultural artifacts from the past, in particular the ancient past, due to things like libraries and museums getting burned down or destroyed, statues being removed, massive wars fought, etc.

Even in our own lifetimes there have been the Taliban that have destroyed ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan[1], ISIS destroying artifacts in Iraq museums[2], and looters destroying or stealing artifacts from a Cairo museum while the Arab Spring was underway[3]. Along with many, many other examples[4].

We collectively have the capability to have exact or near-exact copies of all sorts of documents, art, video, audio, etc. The more people that hang on to these things, the more future generations benefit from it. And the more we can benefit from the archival actions of others now.

But again, it doesn't require that everyone do it, or even for each person to try to have a copy of literally everything that exists. Just that enough people own copies of the things they love and share them with people as much as they can, helps insure the survival of our cultural heritage.

BTW, I found an interesting site that chronicles all the various types of media that are known to have existed but are now lost. It's called LostMediaWiki, if you're curious. I was surprised how long the list was just for video games, which aren't that old as a medium.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Mosul_Museum_ar...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-12442863

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_heritage

[mercutio2]

These things aren’t disappearing. It’s just that the non-mainstream gets more expensive.

So I don’t agree it’s worse for society.

I do think it would be nice if game producers would put their code and assets in escrow, so once the platform they were built for goes away, and the producer decides to not invest in a succesor platform, the assets/code could be released to the public.

[cableshaft]

That is a really good idea. It might be worth developing a platform for that. Convincing companies to trust their code to a third party service (or to even bother) might be a pretty big uphill battle, though. Still tempting, though.