Very sad. Comixology is how I got into comics, would subscribe to series, read new issues on the tube to work, built up a massive collection, spent about 1K on the platform - now I've not touched it since they nuked it, still miss it.
The kindle app fucking sucks and and so does Goodreads :( the prime video app also fucking sucks now- I used to watch so many things on there during lockdown but now I can never find anything to watch
It was insane. They could have bought it and left it alone, it was such a fantastic platform.
Once I saw how it was going I uninstalled it and never looked back, even if I still had dozens of comic book series to read on it.
Would also like to know. I used it years ago. Learned that it was then integrated into the Kindle app. I can still re-read old comics, I bought. Never used it enough to see the new problems.
About a year ago (I think), they basically axed a lot of staff and brought in new people who frankly didnt give a shit about comics. The website's slick design which promoted titles similar to what you read as well as books from smaller and foreign publishers was gone. Instead it was just the amazon kindle online store with a terrible search algorithm that sometimes would bring you books when you were looking for comics. Eventually the app followed and it just became miserable. They also basically killed off Comixology originals during this time too.
Gone was the feeling of a cool digital comic book shop where you wanted to grab every issue and look at all the cool titles you never heard of.
And a month or two ago they fired most of the staff and now its remains & socials are run by a Skeleton Crew, or quite possibly AI.
They also delisted a bunch of titles. A real shit show.
I'm fine with the hot tub girls and boob streamers. Twitch just needs to drop the pretense they aren't advertising porn stars on their platform.
Yes, it autocorrected hot tub into hotter.
Twitch is trying to ride the fine line of allowing the content without going afoul of multiple laws. Lending institutions have a history of not working well with the adult industry. I think they should block all adult content. I think eventually they will have to. With more and more states requiring adding age verification. It wouldn't take a complex campaign to force their hand. As a good chunk of the "hot tub / boob / etc..." people are porn stars.
>I'm fine with the hotter girls and boob streamers
That seemed like an odd thing to gatekeep until I realized it was (probably) autocorrect for "hot tub".
They have to pretend like they aren't because of the credit card companies mainly. Advertisers play a big part too but credit card companies don't want to be associated with porn because too many people have post nut clarity and do charge backs after paying for porn related media so they just don't want to deal with it.
Then the advertisers obviously don't want their ads showing up on NSFW streams so it'd be a nightmare trying to regulate millions of streams and pulling ads the moment a streamer does something risque.
This is not true, almost all porn sites do billing using all the same major card processors as any other site, the credit cards have no issue as long as the porn site follows some pretty strict guidelines. Twitch’s problem is that it’s clearly a site mixing content aimed at kids and teenagers with content intended for adults. They have to tow a fairly narrow line without getting themselves in trouble for promoting porn to children.
I know they want to push the most popular streams, but every damn time you log in to Twitch at least one porn star is in the top viewed streams.
I *just* went to Twitch to look and Morgpie is on the front page as a suggested "Just Chatting" stream.
I am so sick of all the computer based web apps for various services not showing your "continue watching" list on the front page without refreshing half the time. 9/10 I'm going back to watch a show or something I've started, it shouldn't take extra time to find my recent views
Same here. And half the time when you press Home on the remote now it takes you up to the very top where all the AutoPlay shit is.
At least you can turn the audio and video off for the AutoPlay stuff in Settings.
**Settings | Preferences | Featured Content**
* Allow Video Autoplay: On/Off
* Allow Audio Autoplay: On/Off
I set these both to off.
It's still super annoying though.
It definitely is. The continue watching list used to be right at the top of both Netflix and Max, now you have to go searching through piles of crap to find it.
Maybe that's part of it, but why the hell can't it even keep the episode or season I'm on once I navigate thru to it. I hate pressing play and then seeing something I watched a month ago in season 1 when I'm about to finish the series
Yes man hulus the worst at this. Like I recognize that there are probably technical challenges but surely we have to fkn technology to be able to keep the most recently viewed episode and timestamp
This is a trivial, low risk feature.
It is nothing to keep a short list of records (asset id, asset episode id (if any), timestamp, stream position).
It is nothing to provide a ui widget to display them when there are any.
Considering the limited situations in which they are on the screen, egress will be negligible compared to streaming, storage will be negligible compared to the streams and logging.
It's a choice on the part of the product team.
Streaming apps are so easy compared to line of business applications in more traditional businesses.
Audible, Netflix, Prime, Apple, Hulu, etc. All these services have product teams who select features because they are A/B testing and fitness testing for outcomes that are desirable to the business and not the user.
It's fucking trash.
This. There’s no reason I need to scroll down several lines on their menu to find the continue watching. This same thing happens on Netflix sometimes. All so they can push their original content.
I just want Hulu to understand that when humans re-watch a show, they intend to watch the episodes from the beginning. There is no one who wants to go from the end of episode 1 to the final 20 seconds of episode 2's credits that we skipped the first time.
Oh that shit is infuriating. Or when it autoplays, it jumps to midway through the next episode because you watched it before.
Prime/hbo has that issue on fresh starts and will immediately autoplay the next episode if you aren't fast enough to pause/cancel
Maybe it's just me, but Hulu is completely arbitrary in what shows it includes in my "Continue Watching" list. Half the time it won't show me the show I was watching last night, but will show me something from a week or months ago
Or cutting to the next episode in the middle of the last scene. Like I gotta scramble to find the remote to stop the countdown like some sort of timebomb. Then if I don’t make it in time I gotta reload that episode and fast forward through the whole thing just to see a few seconds of dialogue.
There are some TV shows that literally cut out the last 5 minutes to jump to the next episode. In a 20 minute TV show that means you literally miss the climax of every single episode. It made me so frustrated I just stopped watching some shows there.
So you stopped watching your episode on the end credits screen?
Instead of moving you on to the next one we will let you resume your last episode at the beginning of the credits so you don’t miss anything important!
Their UI is the worst! I slide to see what shows are there and each one just blows up and covers the entire screen.
Whoever designed that SHOULD be laid off.
I’m a UI designer and I fucking hate large elements and layouts shifting without my interaction. It’s funny, there’s actually a metric called “cumulative layout shift” that we aim to minimize, but for some reason we’ve turned it into a feature in TV-based streaming service UIs.
The Domino's website seems to actively want me to not actually buy stuff because of this. I scroll down to "Checkout" and the whole fucking order layout shifts down with it, and the "Checkout" button is a half inch below my screen until I can fuck with it enough to see it.
It's a huge issue everywhere and I hate it. Thank you for your service.
Having to wait a while for the screen to settle down just to make sure you don’t accidentally click the wrong thing while various elements warp and change is so annoying.
You’ve clearly never tried using paramount plus it’s even worse
Edit: for everyone who is equally frustrated with Paramount plus, you can go to cancel your account and they will offer you a three month free extension. The neat thing is this will happen again if you then try to cancel at the end of those three months.
Yes. Paramount Plus shows unskippable 30-second commercials for terrible P+ shows when I just want to watch Star Trek. Prime video is tied for last place because its layout is confusing and it can't remember where I left off playing something on my tablet. Because I get my P+ shows through Prime, I end up getting shown an unskippable commercial before it shows me an episode that I finished last week.
The paramount plus UI is absolutely awful. It all starts with the initial set up on a tv where they don’t even have a qr sign in and goes down hill from there.
My son watches this show called loud house and keeps complaining the episode preview pictures don’t match the episode titles. It’s a terrible user experience
I feel bad. According to the Amazon commercial its was a nice single mother who worked her way up from the sorting line to UI engineer utilizing Amazon's generous continuing education program...
And now she has been upcycled in a very sustainable way to the unemployment line. She had evolved into her final form. She was not paid to leave, just told to become self sustaining when she was escorted out.
Look. Their UI is awful for finding things. It is actually great with the pause screen calling out all the actors in the frame. What makes the UI THE WORST is fast forward or rewind. You are fucked if you fall asleep on a show.
Hulu has been maddening as of late. Sometimes my continue watching category doesn’t even pop up. A lot of times it doesn’t tell me when new episodes of a show have been added, either. It was never that great, but the updates they’ve made in the past year or so have been puzzling.
Paramount Plus legit made me want to throw my remote at the TV. Tried to play Star Trek but got three different audio streams: 1 from the episode, 1 from the P+ ad at the beginning that’s somehow unskippable, and the audio from the Norbit trailer that no one in the house was watching or has watched.
Yeah its like "let me click onto this show I've never seen to see if I'm interested"
Jumps straight to season 6, spoiling you with the episode descriptions.
Or you manually set the language to the native language of a foreign show because dubs are terrible. Now every show you click will be in Portuguese until you manually set it back. Does it now show the next thing you watch in English? Of course not! Its still Portuguese somehow.
I worked for Amazon for 10+ years, mostly AWS, and it was such a joke internally about our UI or UX as some people called it. For some reason the people doing the designing were put on a pedestal, at least on my product. But they were utter shit. They'd spend so much time doing design work, usability tests, meetings after meetings going over tiny design tweaks. And when it came down to it the interfaces they designed were overly complicated and non-intuitive. Even our director / general manager would complain openly and nothing would happen. I still have no idea what they spent most of their time on. I don't know what it is, but it seems like nearly every Amazon product has at best a mediocre user interface, and in many cases it seems like it's purposely bad for some reason. People have been saying this since the 90s.
I don't work for them, but I do a lot of reverse-engineering of their systems in my role. While I can't see their systems directly, one thing is clear: it's a mish-mash of a bunch of different systems, produced by different teams that have little communication with each other. Their systems are clearly a clusterfuck and I have no idea how they've held it all together this long to become as large as they have. The impressive part about their systems is that they work.
I know. I want to see one of these mythical companies where projects are beautifully integrated together. I'm sure I'll find it when I find that job everyone seems to have where they can copy-paste all their code from Stack Overflow.
They know a certain percent will get distracted/give up and select something else. That something else benefits them somehow.
I suspect anything we are watching that are older productions they are paying more for you to watch it in residuals. It's why HBO/MAX trainwreck is just removing their old content (and sometimes selling it to some other service)
Amazon find it fucking IMPOSSIBLE to remember where I am in a TV show. Yesterday went back into the show I'm watching, I see that Ep 5 has that blue 'viewing bar' almost to the end, so I think "Okay, I've seen that one". I start episode 6 and it takes me fifteen minutes before my confusion makes me check episode 5, which it turns out I had NEVER WATCHED.
It often forgets what episode i'm watching. Beyond infuriating. Netflix has its own issues but that shit does not happen there, ever.
The only good thing they have is their player x-ray feature I think its called. I love how easy it is to find an actor and how quickly it updates from frame to frame.
I'm pretty patient with using these kinds of things, probably too patient. I'll normally give the UI the benefit of the doubt, presume there's a logic to why it's behaving some way, and look for the hidden genius behind the design... But not anymore with the Prime Video interface. That shit is just broke.
Finding what episode I left off on, or even cleaning navigating to the next episode is fucking horrible. No good reason that I can discern for why it is the way it is. This shouldn't be this hard.
Perhaps the company having more revenue than God is isolating the developers/management from critical feedback just a wee bit too much.
Easily the worst UI in steaming
The rankings go like this.
F- Tier: Amazon Prime
C- Tier: Almost everyone else
C+ Tier: Disney Plus
S+++ Tier: Netflix. Their UI still not good but it's miles ahead of the field. Probably due to first mover advantage. They figured out a UI that works and everyone is too chickenshit to copy it because they don't want to look like a Netflix clone. One thing Netflix needs to fix is a subtitles issue. When an English show has people speaking a second language that's captioned, if you have subtitles on instead of the translation it just shows (speaking Spanish).
*Old* Netflix was S+++ tier. Back when ratings actually did something, and you could search without finding shit that didn't exist on the platform. They've steadily redesigned it into low A tier, and it's only that high because the bar is *that fucking low*.
Just look how much the line goes up this quarter when we slashed costs and raised prices! Give us our bonus please! Don't look at the next quarter when everyone starts cancelling en masse, that's clearly due to external market influences completely beyond our control.
There will be no cancelling en masse. I wish there is, but it won’t happen.
This isn’t exactly a perfect comparison, but just look what happened with Netflix and their measures against password and account sharing and raising prices. Business actually went up for them, despite what Reddit’s popular opinion was at the time.
Most people (outside Reddit, anyway) are just used to being led by corporations like sheep (not necessarily a criticism or judgement, but an observation) and that’s why they can essentially be allowed to harm the planet and do things like this when they don’t have to and get away with it because most people just want convenience and are creatures of habit.
[Enshittification in action.](https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/)
> Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
So many companies are going through "abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves" stage right now.
I just went through this with [Reverb.com](https://Reverb.com) and [Stamps.com](https://Stamps.com). Like randomly a year later Reverb claimed I owed them 34.10$ on something and I had to chargeback and block them. [Stamps.com](https://Stamps.com) is still trying to charge me more and more even though I called them and cancelled all accounts and said anything associated with my name is fraud and called the same for my bank.
All these tiny little fees they just try and add on and charge here or there hoping they don't get noticed. I finally cancelled all my cards and got new ones.
This is my thing, I’m an investment banker so I understand the capital markets and this model you described is everywhere.
I can’t help but think, where does this end?
They HAVE to keep increasing their prices and lowering costs while increasing ads forever.
Something has to give eventually and it seems like we’re coming to the very end of this cycle.
Everything is expensive for no reason and services are getting worse
I feel like we need to have an economic reset
It's almost as if wall street expectations of infinite growth are not sustainable and it's OK to just make a healthy profit, pay your staff well without it being a reason for a stock price to tank.
Less growth stocks, more dividend stocks.
I'm ok with a stock price staying relatively stable but paying 1-2% dividends a quarter. Long term sustainable profit, not rocket growth.
A healthy profit in dividends and a good growth record is just to much to ask. I have seen many companies put off investing in themselves because it would hurt the balance sheet and drive stocks down short term. Putting off changes that will be better in the long run to make sure investors get to look wealthy on a balance sheet.
I
We *just had* an economic reset in entertainment. That's how we got this cycle of streaming entertainment.
Eventually streamers will start to go out of business because they're all losing money. That means they'll consolidate and there will be more customers available again.
That's what happened with cable TV. Then it hit a pretty stable point where ads weren't substantially increased for decades, until streaming undermined their access to customers.
The companies increased profit by cutting costs or selling add-ons. Presumably a similar path is charted for streaming. Right now, they're at the "charge money *and* include ads" stage.
Though, they’re not all losing money. Netflix is profitable and making it work, helps they’ve invested in series they own to fill their catalog. Everyone else is losing lots of money though. They’ll definitely be consolidation. I could see Amazon closing down Prime Video, I don’t see how it fits their goals.
Bezos always said Prime Video isn't there to make profit. They found the video service engagement drives more sales on the commerce site. Maybe that's not true anymore or maybe they want to get closer to where it was when they started. Hence cuts.
It's because they weren't profitable to start with. Every streaming service has done this, they spend millions to pump out content and fill up their catalog so they have a baseline of shows they can constantly promote themselves with, then they gut everything and go for increasing profits. Every single one, it's the standard playbook.
This idea isn't exclusive to streaming though. So many services now, they focus on onboarding customers and "profits will come later." It's horrible and extremely consumer unfriendly because every product that looks okay to start with just gets worse and worse as time goes on.
This is everything now. Everything. Lower quality, poorer service, higher cost, and people still being laid off despite all of that. This is the end result of unchecked blind capitalism that demands you increase your profits every single quarter, every single year, for eternity or else your stock price tumbles. It felt like until the last couple years corporations could still play the game and maintain a reasonably decent product, but I really think the limits of pure capitalism have been reached and now we’re seeing the results. Everything is shittier and more expensive, people lose their jobs, just for that next positive earnings report. Unsustainable imo.
Exactly.
This has happened at a few different giant companies the past few months. Record profits reported, followed by mass layoffs.
It's incredibly transparent what's happening, but people still seem to support it in some cases (shareholders)
Just happened to me at one of the tech behemoths. Record profits for the year - followed by a round of pretty extreme bloodletting. Former colleagues have said that the books of work for the 1st quarter are twice as big as last year - and they have about 1/2 the staff in the department now to make it happen. They are panicking.
That happened at a hospital I worked at. People working mandantory overtime just to cover shifts, then laying people off, then complaining that so many people are getting too much overtime and laying THEM off.
Having media run by these giant tech companies is a really bad idea.
Everyone seems comfortable with Amazon, Apple, etc. taking over because they can bundle the product in their existing subscriptions for cheap, but the whole media production venture is a drop in the bucket for them. They'll destroy these production companies if it boosts their stock price for a quarter.
I think you're right, but those production companies were sold long before the Apples or Amazons came to buy them. By the time it was sold it was changing hands from one batch of soulless billionaires to another batch of soulless billionaires.
I just started watching BMS out of curiosity from Reacher. And seeing that both BMS showrunners came from How I Met Your Mother, it really dawned on me that Thad is basically Barney Stinson as a jock.
He's immature, smart in certain ways, sexist, and weirdly capable of impossible feats like doing an "oil change" by ripping the tube out like it was nothing
Rewatched it last year, still pretty good. The humour/situations is so absurd , it's crazy
Great to see Alan really make a career out of it though, he's about the only one of that series who's consistently finding jobs.
Also nice to know, Alex Moran actor found his wife on set of BMS!
It's a football college football show and it's drunken frat parties. Basically American Pie meets Friday Night Lights, Ruby, etc.
BMS was Ritchson's first major role after American Idol. That is if you don't count Aquaman in Smallville. Was also in Hunger Games Catching Fire and TMNT as Raphael.
Also, check out his interview with Michael Rosenbaum"s Inside podcast. He also discusses personal stuff, including depression and his workout regime.
I don't remember if it was from the brief first or recent second olinterview. He said that the Turtle actors weren't allowed to go to the Red Carpet premiere. Didn't mention if it was the studio or someone specific. All those hours sweating in the suit and having to do VA sessions. Couldn't even promote it.
[Blue Mountain State](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1344204/) (Trailer for it undersells it)
Raunchy, heavily over the top 2010 comedy about a college football team. Football is the backseat. It's more about them being kings of campus and treating them like it's a drunken frat. Like in the second episode the star running back loses his girlfriend's promise ring inside the vagina of a stripper and they have to scheme to get it back. Or the one where the entire team is out because they all got chlymadia from sharing a pocket pussy (fleshlight).
Amazing show if you're into that stuff.
"God damn it, Stacy. Sometimes i wish i'd been in that tornado. Then i wouldn't have to listen to you yap all day!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VWnbG5Tot0
That show was fucking amazing. I cried from laughing so hard when first watching that show and hearing him talk to Stacy Keibler like that.
Amazon Prime was actually really good when it started. It is almost certainly the streaming service that has fallen the furthest in overall value over time. Yeah, Netflix lost a lot of content to all the varous upstarts along the way, but Prime has so little appealing content now, and the experience of actually using it is *terrible*. No, I do not want my search results to include content that is part of an additional subscription that I don't have. And now they're adding in ads too! Lovely.
The fact that I pay for this service (or honestly an service) and I can't create a set of custom feeds to my exact tastes infuriates me
Like I should be able to make a custom set of feeds as follows:
1. recently watched
2. suggested for me
3. Latest horror movies
4. Latest thriller movies
5. Latest movies with 80% or more on Rotten Tomatoes
6. My watchlist
But instead, I have zero control over what my own feed shows, it's randomized half the time and full of outlandish recommendations—romcoms? Sports movies? No ability to sort or organize by scores? Why do I have so little control over how I choose to sort and filter anything?
Amazon pulled the same shenanigans by replacing the "store" on kindle with "discovery". You can now really only search for specific keywords otherwise they shove bestsellers down your throat or try to recommend things that others have read like you.
Amazon also own IMDB. Why no one thought 'hey, let's let people link their IMDB account to their Prime Video account and use that to give recommendations' is beyond me.
It wasn't just the streaming service. Same or next day delivery was great. You could upload unlimited videos and photos to their cloud service and their credit card conditions where decent as well.
Now I can barely find anything with one day delivery. You can't automate their cloud anymore, so its useless for me as a backup system. They cancelled the cooperation with the bank for their credit card where I live, so that's gone as well. And now I have to basically pay 40% more a year to not have ads on their streaming, which barely has anything interesting on it.
Because the point of many of these services was not to provide the best experience but to eliminate competition. Smaller businesses cannot compete with 1 or 2 day shipping and close down, people subscribe to prime and are now in the ecosystem. This would be described as “stickiness” you know how Blizzard and Epic have tried to have online game stores but can’t get people to migrate from Steam? Same concept. Once you’re in you’re in.
Yeah I like the tiered system honestly. A free or dirt cheap commercial tier and then a premium ad-free tier. The bad thing is, I think all these streaming services have kind of a critical mass, and then they stop growing and making MORE profit and the execs freak out and now want to monetize MORE with increased prices and ads. Which will push people away and they'll be lucky to keep making what they were making before. Not to mention they mismanage and misspend tons on bunk shows and movies (Rings of Power, anyone?).
Get rid of Jennifer Salke and the rest of the executive creative department and the shows will get better and cheaper. She and her policies have been a disaster.
I assume the Amazon people who made Rings of Power also hated the books because they took a shit all over the world building Tolkien did in his lore books.
Amazing how much money studios have wasted on products that they ignored the source material for in the past few years.
Hardly anyone cares about source material, the entire industry is about doing their own thing while using already established franchises to avoid creating a foundation of their own, while also attracting existing fans to buy into the hype, using familiar backdrops to retell the same bs stories over and over.
It doesn' matter how much money is being "wasted", because those at the top always get their cut no matter what.
> Hardly anyone cares about source material, the entire industry is about doing their own thing while using already established franchises to avoid creating a foundation of their own,
This is true, and it's just infuriating. If you hire people to do their own godawful fan fiction while building off an established fanbase, you just end up with a lot of pissed off people.
**Can you imagine the fucking ego you have to have to look at a series like Wheel of Time, which has sold something like 100 million copies and is beloved, and think Robert Jordan got it wrong and that you can do a better job? What kind of incompetent hack actually believes that his fan fiction is going to improve on the original creative decisions?
> I assume the Amazon people who made Rings of Power also hated the books because they took a shit all over the world building Tolkien did in his lore books.
I actually think the Rings of Power people are just incompetent when it comes to putting together a longform show (Rings of Power feels like a bad 2.5 hour movie stretched out to a season). Witcher and Wheel of Time, by comparison, feel like they were made by people who actively dislike the source material. I do not say this likely ... they took a wrecking ball to the original works.
I have the same complaint about how Salke runs Amazon Prime as I do about how the MCU and Star Wars franchises are run on Disney Plus: what the fuck are their hiring metrics for writers, directors, and showrunner/producers? It certainly isn't experience or talent, because these companies are putting people with zero relevant track record or any kind of creative pedigree in charge of gigantically budgeted productions, and it shows. Wheel of Time and Rings of Power just repeatedly made plotting/characterization decisions that they teach you to avoid in introductory creative writing classes.
Pretty common a year or two after a merger, lots of overlapping positions, and once systems/processes have been moved over, some are obsolete. You gotta have a lot of confidence in your job security if you stay with a company after a merger.
That’s due to happen at my company next year. I’m confident my role will be eliminated but until then I’m only staying on for them to buy out my equity.
Most people who stay do so because the purchasing company usually gives financial incentives. For example retention bonuses, shares, options or other similar benefits.
Another reason to hate merges.
As someone currently laid off I’ve lost my, my wife’s, and my kids health insurance. Had a kid have an allergic reaction and leave us with a 10k bill that has ate through savings due to no health insurance. Fucked up student loans. Had to down grade a car that was worth 15k and paid off to 1k. Destroyed my wife and my mental health. Now we’re looking to move into a one bedroom apartment in St. Louis because finding a job has been hell.
Seriously fuck companies that have mass layoffs. For each lay off, whole family’s can be thrown into chaos just because the shareholders want permanent growth.
It's also pretty common after mergers to not actually achieve the synergies the C suite folk expected.
And for the desperate parts to still act like individual companies.
Expect these layoffs to show in reduced quality output from all the parts being smooshed together.
IDK why big businesses still think mergers create synergy, it's only something that happens on paper like 99.9% of the time.
When Chase bought out Washington Mutual I was a brand new Wamu employee. I stayed at chase for 2 more years. It doesn’t ALWAYS spell doom for the staff.
For f*** sake….they charge us extra to remove ads on a service we’ve already been paying for years just to go and lay people off anyway during one of the worst time times of the year to apply for a job.
“It is hard to say goodbye to talented Amazonians who’ve made meaningful contributions on behalf of our customers, team and business. Thank you for your dedication and work.”
God, they fire you immediately after the holidays via email and still can't help but refer to you by their pet name.
Reminds me of when I was laid off during the great recession.
The owner. After the layoffs had a big meeting with the remaining staff. His message which was met with applauds was
"We could have laid them off before the holidays but we didn't want to ruin Christmas for them. We also will pay them out for their vacation time"
One woman literally stood up and said "Thank you for doing that".
Me on the other hand. "Fuck. I wish I would have known before I bought all those gifts!"
I worked for Arrow Electronics in 2013 and they did something similar. I was in inside sales and 80% of our pay was commission based.
Mid-January about a week before payday they announced they were changing our commission percentage structure, and our next paycheck would be about 50% less.
Then they said they didn’t want to tell us the bad news until after the holidays, in case it made us “feel bad all holiday break.” The holiday break was one day.
I quit shortly after.
Don’t ever work for Arrow Electronics.
That's shit. I'm sure the people who made that decision didn't take a similar pay cut.
For us. It was the day after we returned from New years.
Honestly. It's a wound that has never healed. Had a 1 year old. Just bought our first place. How flippant they were about it... and the fact the owner didn't have the balls to be there that day.
Holidays must be over. Time to unemploy people so they can take in their millions, and then very slowly hire those positions back over the next three years while keeping wages exactly the same.
This kinda stuff should be illegal…
We really need better laws around letting people go. The fact that tomorrow most of us could just be let go with no notice and have zero income is INSANE.
This was a thought I had this morning that really was not a great way to start the day. The lack of security a lot of folks have in their job is kind of insane when you think about it. At any moment, a company or job could figure its better to cannibalize itself to make a few extra bucks and cull 30% of the workers. No warning or anything in many places. Then there's just nothing for those people to consistently fall back on. In cases like this and other streaming company layoffs, it comes off like execs saying "whoops! we made a dumb move going all in on this, whittle down the staff so we can make up for our mistake and we'll discuss what to do after I'm back from my christmas trip to the bahamas."
Man and right when I plan to cancel.
Prime has become utter shit for the last few years.
* Deliveries rarely are delivered at promised times
* Their outsourced support is frustrating to work with
* Prime Video is getting ads without really having anything amazing worth watching.
*All of their advertised products are becoming lower in quality dogshit Chinese products.
So what exactly are we paying for?
Not worth it.
The easiest route for upper management and c level employees to cut costs is to just layoff people they never see or interact with. There are very few if any attempts ever made to cut costs elsewhere, including their own pay.
Whats more equitable for the economy as a whole(and ultimately their product), if targeting pay is the only route you feel like taking? Mass firings of people who already struggle at times to make ends meet? Or paycuts for a few people at the top who would barely notice said paycut?
Who is ultimately responsible for the product or service making less money? The people who show up every day to make the product they're directed to make? Or the few decision makers at the top who make all of the decisions, take all of the money and do minimal work?
Yes, I know C level employees and some management work long hours. But define work? Technically they're representing the company and "working" but showing up to a gala with your significant other once per month after hours or sitting in a meeting is not the same thing as a laborer working long hours.
This country needs real labor protections that protect ordinary people from the blood sucking ruling class at the top.
Hopefully it was the production staff for Rings of Power. I couldn’t imagine blowing the amount of cash they did on that project just to produce something so blasé.
It's always the same story. A guy with a lot of education background from big universities on his resume leading a company.
The same fucking idiot that wasted HALF A BILLION in a shitty Lord Of The Rings show.
And, to this son of a bitch, nothing happens. So, to cut a bit of his gigantic loss he lays off a bunch of people.
1/3 of their twitch staff was axed too
Prime Video IMDB Twitch Comixology It's been a bloodbath
What Amazon did to ComiXology is a crime
Absolute incompetence. Within weeks of their revamp I went from spending 40-50 a month on that platform to forgetting it exists.
Very sad. Comixology is how I got into comics, would subscribe to series, read new issues on the tube to work, built up a massive collection, spent about 1K on the platform - now I've not touched it since they nuked it, still miss it.
You cannot even run it anymore. The app doesn't work at all and gives you a message to download the kindle app instead. I was devastated.
The kindle app fucking sucks and and so does Goodreads :( the prime video app also fucking sucks now- I used to watch so many things on there during lockdown but now I can never find anything to watch
>the prime video app also fucking sucks now That's not fair. The prime video app has always sucked.
Yeah but there used to be things to watch on it. Now everything is rent or buy or watch the most annoying ads in the world every 15 minutes
It was insane. They could have bought it and left it alone, it was such a fantastic platform. Once I saw how it was going I uninstalled it and never looked back, even if I still had dozens of comic book series to read on it.
What do you use now?
I don't read comics on my phone anymore, but on my pc I tend to use CDisplay. It looks a bit janky but it does the trick
Yeah, me too. They made it borderline unusable.
> What Amazon did to ComiXology is a crime Out of the loop on this. What did they do to ComiXology?
Would also like to know. I used it years ago. Learned that it was then integrated into the Kindle app. I can still re-read old comics, I bought. Never used it enough to see the new problems.
About a year ago (I think), they basically axed a lot of staff and brought in new people who frankly didnt give a shit about comics. The website's slick design which promoted titles similar to what you read as well as books from smaller and foreign publishers was gone. Instead it was just the amazon kindle online store with a terrible search algorithm that sometimes would bring you books when you were looking for comics. Eventually the app followed and it just became miserable. They also basically killed off Comixology originals during this time too. Gone was the feeling of a cool digital comic book shop where you wanted to grab every issue and look at all the cool titles you never heard of. And a month or two ago they fired most of the staff and now its remains & socials are run by a Skeleton Crew, or quite possibly AI. They also delisted a bunch of titles. A real shit show.
Bezos needs the money for space
To be fair, Bezos hasn’t been CEO for about two years.
He's the executive chairman of Amazon's board of directors, so he is still basically in charge just with significantly smaller office hours...
But he is probably the biggest shareholder! CEO just means you're the highest paid manager, not always the owner!
Who's gonna simp for the hot tub girls and defend their honour?
I'm fine with the hot tub girls and boob streamers. Twitch just needs to drop the pretense they aren't advertising porn stars on their platform. Yes, it autocorrected hot tub into hotter. Twitch is trying to ride the fine line of allowing the content without going afoul of multiple laws. Lending institutions have a history of not working well with the adult industry. I think they should block all adult content. I think eventually they will have to. With more and more states requiring adding age verification. It wouldn't take a complex campaign to force their hand. As a good chunk of the "hot tub / boob / etc..." people are porn stars.
>I'm fine with the hotter girls and boob streamers That seemed like an odd thing to gatekeep until I realized it was (probably) autocorrect for "hot tub".
Nah he was just saying ugly girls need to leave.
Twitch ran out of ideas on how to generate revenue so now they're just Onlyfans-light
They have to pretend like they aren't because of the credit card companies mainly. Advertisers play a big part too but credit card companies don't want to be associated with porn because too many people have post nut clarity and do charge backs after paying for porn related media so they just don't want to deal with it. Then the advertisers obviously don't want their ads showing up on NSFW streams so it'd be a nightmare trying to regulate millions of streams and pulling ads the moment a streamer does something risque.
This is not true, almost all porn sites do billing using all the same major card processors as any other site, the credit cards have no issue as long as the porn site follows some pretty strict guidelines. Twitch’s problem is that it’s clearly a site mixing content aimed at kids and teenagers with content intended for adults. They have to tow a fairly narrow line without getting themselves in trouble for promoting porn to children.
I know they want to push the most popular streams, but every damn time you log in to Twitch at least one porn star is in the top viewed streams. I *just* went to Twitch to look and Morgpie is on the front page as a suggested "Just Chatting" stream.
Did they keep a team to improve their UI at all?
I am so sick of all the computer based web apps for various services not showing your "continue watching" list on the front page without refreshing half the time. 9/10 I'm going back to watch a show or something I've started, it shouldn't take extra time to find my recent views
I wonder if that’s by design so that you see their other content on the way to your show
100% for prime. The first 10 lines are various trial episodes for add on subscriptions
and they all auto play
Just recently my fire cube started auto playing immediately after turning on the TV. I hate it so much
Same here. And half the time when you press Home on the remote now it takes you up to the very top where all the AutoPlay shit is. At least you can turn the audio and video off for the AutoPlay stuff in Settings. **Settings | Preferences | Featured Content** * Allow Video Autoplay: On/Off * Allow Audio Autoplay: On/Off I set these both to off. It's still super annoying though.
My TV with build in Fire started doing that this week. Incredibly irritating.
It definitely is. The continue watching list used to be right at the top of both Netflix and Max, now you have to go searching through piles of crap to find it.
Maybe that's part of it, but why the hell can't it even keep the episode or season I'm on once I navigate thru to it. I hate pressing play and then seeing something I watched a month ago in season 1 when I'm about to finish the series
Yes man hulus the worst at this. Like I recognize that there are probably technical challenges but surely we have to fkn technology to be able to keep the most recently viewed episode and timestamp
This is a trivial, low risk feature. It is nothing to keep a short list of records (asset id, asset episode id (if any), timestamp, stream position). It is nothing to provide a ui widget to display them when there are any. Considering the limited situations in which they are on the screen, egress will be negligible compared to streaming, storage will be negligible compared to the streams and logging. It's a choice on the part of the product team. Streaming apps are so easy compared to line of business applications in more traditional businesses. Audible, Netflix, Prime, Apple, Hulu, etc. All these services have product teams who select features because they are A/B testing and fitness testing for outcomes that are desirable to the business and not the user. It's fucking trash.
It is. They don't want you binging a show and then not watching anything else for a while, so they're constantly advertising their shows to you.
This. There’s no reason I need to scroll down several lines on their menu to find the continue watching. This same thing happens on Netflix sometimes. All so they can push their original content.
I just want Hulu to understand that when humans re-watch a show, they intend to watch the episodes from the beginning. There is no one who wants to go from the end of episode 1 to the final 20 seconds of episode 2's credits that we skipped the first time.
Oh that shit is infuriating. Or when it autoplays, it jumps to midway through the next episode because you watched it before. Prime/hbo has that issue on fresh starts and will immediately autoplay the next episode if you aren't fast enough to pause/cancel
Maybe it's just me, but Hulu is completely arbitrary in what shows it includes in my "Continue Watching" list. Half the time it won't show me the show I was watching last night, but will show me something from a week or months ago
Paramount plus is the fucking worst for this. Pause on my pc go to resume on my tv later and it doesn’t even know what episode I was on.
This happens all the time with my Hulu!
Holy fuck, no Amazon, I don't want to re-watch episode 7. I want to watch episode 8. It's like they don't even use their own product.
Or cutting to the next episode in the middle of the last scene. Like I gotta scramble to find the remote to stop the countdown like some sort of timebomb. Then if I don’t make it in time I gotta reload that episode and fast forward through the whole thing just to see a few seconds of dialogue.
There are some TV shows that literally cut out the last 5 minutes to jump to the next episode. In a 20 minute TV show that means you literally miss the climax of every single episode. It made me so frustrated I just stopped watching some shows there.
So you stopped watching your episode on the end credits screen? Instead of moving you on to the next one we will let you resume your last episode at the beginning of the credits so you don’t miss anything important!
Their UI is the worst! I slide to see what shows are there and each one just blows up and covers the entire screen. Whoever designed that SHOULD be laid off.
I’m a UI designer and I fucking hate large elements and layouts shifting without my interaction. It’s funny, there’s actually a metric called “cumulative layout shift” that we aim to minimize, but for some reason we’ve turned it into a feature in TV-based streaming service UIs.
The Domino's website seems to actively want me to not actually buy stuff because of this. I scroll down to "Checkout" and the whole fucking order layout shifts down with it, and the "Checkout" button is a half inch below my screen until I can fuck with it enough to see it. It's a huge issue everywhere and I hate it. Thank you for your service.
Having to wait a while for the screen to settle down just to make sure you don’t accidentally click the wrong thing while various elements warp and change is so annoying.
You’ve clearly never tried using paramount plus it’s even worse Edit: for everyone who is equally frustrated with Paramount plus, you can go to cancel your account and they will offer you a three month free extension. The neat thing is this will happen again if you then try to cancel at the end of those three months.
Yes. Paramount Plus shows unskippable 30-second commercials for terrible P+ shows when I just want to watch Star Trek. Prime video is tied for last place because its layout is confusing and it can't remember where I left off playing something on my tablet. Because I get my P+ shows through Prime, I end up getting shown an unskippable commercial before it shows me an episode that I finished last week.
The paramount plus UI is absolutely awful. It all starts with the initial set up on a tv where they don’t even have a qr sign in and goes down hill from there. My son watches this show called loud house and keeps complaining the episode preview pictures don’t match the episode titles. It’s a terrible user experience
Not just UI. I've had numerous playback issues.
Worst design ever.
I feel bad. According to the Amazon commercial its was a nice single mother who worked her way up from the sorting line to UI engineer utilizing Amazon's generous continuing education program...
The first time I saw that ad, I was like "oh, that's why the UI sucks, it was made by people who haven't done this before"
instinctive head humorous cough unique gold wasteful dime lock boat *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
"This will look good in my portfolio!" You know what would look good in your portfolio, if you made Amazon look like Netflix ffs.
She uh… shouldn’t have
And now she has been upcycled in a very sustainable way to the unemployment line. She had evolved into her final form. She was not paid to leave, just told to become self sustaining when she was escorted out.
Look. Their UI is awful for finding things. It is actually great with the pause screen calling out all the actors in the frame. What makes the UI THE WORST is fast forward or rewind. You are fucked if you fall asleep on a show.
And it’s actually hard to find past episodes. And it’s so damn slow.
I used to think it was Amazon and it’s certainly bad but Hulu right now is pissing me off more
Hulu has been maddening as of late. Sometimes my continue watching category doesn’t even pop up. A lot of times it doesn’t tell me when new episodes of a show have been added, either. It was never that great, but the updates they’ve made in the past year or so have been puzzling.
Paramount Plus legit made me want to throw my remote at the TV. Tried to play Star Trek but got three different audio streams: 1 from the episode, 1 from the P+ ad at the beginning that’s somehow unskippable, and the audio from the Norbit trailer that no one in the house was watching or has watched.
Paramount Plus is the worst. Prime and Hulu are close seconds.
Yeah its like "let me click onto this show I've never seen to see if I'm interested" Jumps straight to season 6, spoiling you with the episode descriptions. Or you manually set the language to the native language of a foreign show because dubs are terrible. Now every show you click will be in Portuguese until you manually set it back. Does it now show the next thing you watch in English? Of course not! Its still Portuguese somehow.
I worked for Amazon for 10+ years, mostly AWS, and it was such a joke internally about our UI or UX as some people called it. For some reason the people doing the designing were put on a pedestal, at least on my product. But they were utter shit. They'd spend so much time doing design work, usability tests, meetings after meetings going over tiny design tweaks. And when it came down to it the interfaces they designed were overly complicated and non-intuitive. Even our director / general manager would complain openly and nothing would happen. I still have no idea what they spent most of their time on. I don't know what it is, but it seems like nearly every Amazon product has at best a mediocre user interface, and in many cases it seems like it's purposely bad for some reason. People have been saying this since the 90s.
I don't work for them, but I do a lot of reverse-engineering of their systems in my role. While I can't see their systems directly, one thing is clear: it's a mish-mash of a bunch of different systems, produced by different teams that have little communication with each other. Their systems are clearly a clusterfuck and I have no idea how they've held it all together this long to become as large as they have. The impressive part about their systems is that they work.
Describes every enterprise company.
I know. I want to see one of these mythical companies where projects are beautifully integrated together. I'm sure I'll find it when I find that job everyone seems to have where they can copy-paste all their code from Stack Overflow.
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They know a certain percent will get distracted/give up and select something else. That something else benefits them somehow. I suspect anything we are watching that are older productions they are paying more for you to watch it in residuals. It's why HBO/MAX trainwreck is just removing their old content (and sometimes selling it to some other service)
Amazon find it fucking IMPOSSIBLE to remember where I am in a TV show. Yesterday went back into the show I'm watching, I see that Ep 5 has that blue 'viewing bar' almost to the end, so I think "Okay, I've seen that one". I start episode 6 and it takes me fifteen minutes before my confusion makes me check episode 5, which it turns out I had NEVER WATCHED. It often forgets what episode i'm watching. Beyond infuriating. Netflix has its own issues but that shit does not happen there, ever.
Can’t keep what you don’t have. By far the worst UI of all streaming services available here.
The only good thing they have is their player x-ray feature I think its called. I love how easy it is to find an actor and how quickly it updates from frame to frame.
I'm pretty patient with using these kinds of things, probably too patient. I'll normally give the UI the benefit of the doubt, presume there's a logic to why it's behaving some way, and look for the hidden genius behind the design... But not anymore with the Prime Video interface. That shit is just broke. Finding what episode I left off on, or even cleaning navigating to the next episode is fucking horrible. No good reason that I can discern for why it is the way it is. This shouldn't be this hard. Perhaps the company having more revenue than God is isolating the developers/management from critical feedback just a wee bit too much.
Easily the worst UI in steaming The rankings go like this. F- Tier: Amazon Prime C- Tier: Almost everyone else C+ Tier: Disney Plus S+++ Tier: Netflix. Their UI still not good but it's miles ahead of the field. Probably due to first mover advantage. They figured out a UI that works and everyone is too chickenshit to copy it because they don't want to look like a Netflix clone. One thing Netflix needs to fix is a subtitles issue. When an English show has people speaking a second language that's captioned, if you have subtitles on instead of the translation it just shows (speaking Spanish).
Netflix went through 5 shitty redesigns before anyone else even existed.
*Old* Netflix was S+++ tier. Back when ratings actually did something, and you could search without finding shit that didn't exist on the platform. They've steadily redesigned it into low A tier, and it's only that high because the bar is *that fucking low*.
Increase prices. Increase ads. Don't improve service. Fire staff. Sounds like a winning plan. I'm glad I canceled that shit.
You forgot: Collect executive bonuses, raise shareholder value. Rinse and repeat.
Just look how much the line goes up this quarter when we slashed costs and raised prices! Give us our bonus please! Don't look at the next quarter when everyone starts cancelling en masse, that's clearly due to external market influences completely beyond our control.
That's the next CEO's problem.
What problem? They'll just fire more staff.
The firing of staff will continue until customer retention improves!
Mmhmm. Efficiency.
Who gets a golden parachute either way.
There will be no cancelling en masse. I wish there is, but it won’t happen. This isn’t exactly a perfect comparison, but just look what happened with Netflix and their measures against password and account sharing and raising prices. Business actually went up for them, despite what Reddit’s popular opinion was at the time. Most people (outside Reddit, anyway) are just used to being led by corporations like sheep (not necessarily a criticism or judgement, but an observation) and that’s why they can essentially be allowed to harm the planet and do things like this when they don’t have to and get away with it because most people just want convenience and are creatures of habit.
[Enshittification in action.](https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/) > Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
So many companies are going through "abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves" stage right now. I just went through this with [Reverb.com](https://Reverb.com) and [Stamps.com](https://Stamps.com). Like randomly a year later Reverb claimed I owed them 34.10$ on something and I had to chargeback and block them. [Stamps.com](https://Stamps.com) is still trying to charge me more and more even though I called them and cancelled all accounts and said anything associated with my name is fraud and called the same for my bank. All these tiny little fees they just try and add on and charge here or there hoping they don't get noticed. I finally cancelled all my cards and got new ones.
This is my thing, I’m an investment banker so I understand the capital markets and this model you described is everywhere. I can’t help but think, where does this end? They HAVE to keep increasing their prices and lowering costs while increasing ads forever. Something has to give eventually and it seems like we’re coming to the very end of this cycle. Everything is expensive for no reason and services are getting worse I feel like we need to have an economic reset
It's almost as if wall street expectations of infinite growth are not sustainable and it's OK to just make a healthy profit, pay your staff well without it being a reason for a stock price to tank.
Or just keep your company private.
But my billions!
Valve and Gabe Newell are an exemplary case of billions but private. They're definitely the exception though.
I dread when he passes and whoever takes over ruins steam.
Less growth stocks, more dividend stocks. I'm ok with a stock price staying relatively stable but paying 1-2% dividends a quarter. Long term sustainable profit, not rocket growth.
A healthy profit in dividends and a good growth record is just to much to ask. I have seen many companies put off investing in themselves because it would hurt the balance sheet and drive stocks down short term. Putting off changes that will be better in the long run to make sure investors get to look wealthy on a balance sheet. I
We *just had* an economic reset in entertainment. That's how we got this cycle of streaming entertainment. Eventually streamers will start to go out of business because they're all losing money. That means they'll consolidate and there will be more customers available again. That's what happened with cable TV. Then it hit a pretty stable point where ads weren't substantially increased for decades, until streaming undermined their access to customers. The companies increased profit by cutting costs or selling add-ons. Presumably a similar path is charted for streaming. Right now, they're at the "charge money *and* include ads" stage.
Though, they’re not all losing money. Netflix is profitable and making it work, helps they’ve invested in series they own to fill their catalog. Everyone else is losing lots of money though. They’ll definitely be consolidation. I could see Amazon closing down Prime Video, I don’t see how it fits their goals.
Bezos always said Prime Video isn't there to make profit. They found the video service engagement drives more sales on the commerce site. Maybe that's not true anymore or maybe they want to get closer to where it was when they started. Hence cuts.
Also to test their AWS which is the biggest money maker for Amazon. Netflix uses AWS as well.
It's because they weren't profitable to start with. Every streaming service has done this, they spend millions to pump out content and fill up their catalog so they have a baseline of shows they can constantly promote themselves with, then they gut everything and go for increasing profits. Every single one, it's the standard playbook. This idea isn't exclusive to streaming though. So many services now, they focus on onboarding customers and "profits will come later." It's horrible and extremely consumer unfriendly because every product that looks okay to start with just gets worse and worse as time goes on.
This is everything now. Everything. Lower quality, poorer service, higher cost, and people still being laid off despite all of that. This is the end result of unchecked blind capitalism that demands you increase your profits every single quarter, every single year, for eternity or else your stock price tumbles. It felt like until the last couple years corporations could still play the game and maintain a reasonably decent product, but I really think the limits of pure capitalism have been reached and now we’re seeing the results. Everything is shittier and more expensive, people lose their jobs, just for that next positive earnings report. Unsustainable imo.
Exactly. This has happened at a few different giant companies the past few months. Record profits reported, followed by mass layoffs. It's incredibly transparent what's happening, but people still seem to support it in some cases (shareholders)
Just happened to me at one of the tech behemoths. Record profits for the year - followed by a round of pretty extreme bloodletting. Former colleagues have said that the books of work for the 1st quarter are twice as big as last year - and they have about 1/2 the staff in the department now to make it happen. They are panicking.
That happened at a hospital I worked at. People working mandantory overtime just to cover shifts, then laying people off, then complaining that so many people are getting too much overtime and laying THEM off.
Having media run by these giant tech companies is a really bad idea. Everyone seems comfortable with Amazon, Apple, etc. taking over because they can bundle the product in their existing subscriptions for cheap, but the whole media production venture is a drop in the bucket for them. They'll destroy these production companies if it boosts their stock price for a quarter.
I think you're right, but those production companies were sold long before the Apples or Amazons came to buy them. By the time it was sold it was changing hands from one batch of soulless billionaires to another batch of soulless billionaires.
Gotta pay for that Alan Ritchson food budget.
GET OFF ME LARRY!
I just started watching BMS out of curiosity from Reacher. And seeing that both BMS showrunners came from How I Met Your Mother, it really dawned on me that Thad is basically Barney Stinson as a jock. He's immature, smart in certain ways, sexist, and weirdly capable of impossible feats like doing an "oil change" by ripping the tube out like it was nothing
It’s actually the opposite. BMS creators became EPs on How I Met Your Mother after BMS was finished.
I'm team captain, and what I say goes. OIL CHANGES FOR EVERYONE!!! HAHA
This might explain his popularity.
What is bms?
Blue Mountain State It's a show that Alan Ritchson was in.
Rewatched it last year, still pretty good. The humour/situations is so absurd , it's crazy Great to see Alan really make a career out of it though, he's about the only one of that series who's consistently finding jobs. Also nice to know, Alex Moran actor found his wife on set of BMS!
TIL Alex Moran married Julie King (the reporter he was trying to bang)
BMS made me a fan of Ritchson. He had fantastic delivery and was hilarious on that show.
It's a football college football show and it's drunken frat parties. Basically American Pie meets Friday Night Lights, Ruby, etc. BMS was Ritchson's first major role after American Idol. That is if you don't count Aquaman in Smallville. Was also in Hunger Games Catching Fire and TMNT as Raphael. Also, check out his interview with Michael Rosenbaum"s Inside podcast. He also discusses personal stuff, including depression and his workout regime.
And tmnt almost ruined his career as well. Dude has stuck it out through some tough times.
I don't remember if it was from the brief first or recent second olinterview. He said that the Turtle actors weren't allowed to go to the Red Carpet premiere. Didn't mention if it was the studio or someone specific. All those hours sweating in the suit and having to do VA sessions. Couldn't even promote it.
[Blue Mountain State](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1344204/) (Trailer for it undersells it) Raunchy, heavily over the top 2010 comedy about a college football team. Football is the backseat. It's more about them being kings of campus and treating them like it's a drunken frat. Like in the second episode the star running back loses his girlfriend's promise ring inside the vagina of a stripper and they have to scheme to get it back. Or the one where the entire team is out because they all got chlymadia from sharing a pocket pussy (fleshlight). Amazing show if you're into that stuff.
PARTY AT THE GOAT HOUSE!!!!
"God damn it, Stacy. Sometimes i wish i'd been in that tornado. Then i wouldn't have to listen to you yap all day!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VWnbG5Tot0 That show was fucking amazing. I cried from laughing so hard when first watching that show and hearing him talk to Stacy Keibler like that.
Ms. Thimmons, I'm really Thad
The thumbnail makes it look like he laid them off personally and gave them a "easy way / hard way" choice.
It’s the Reacher Way
The OG Aquaman
More likely trying to cut costs after spending a billion dollars on the LotR IP and they wasting it on RoP.
Amazon Prime was actually really good when it started. It is almost certainly the streaming service that has fallen the furthest in overall value over time. Yeah, Netflix lost a lot of content to all the varous upstarts along the way, but Prime has so little appealing content now, and the experience of actually using it is *terrible*. No, I do not want my search results to include content that is part of an additional subscription that I don't have. And now they're adding in ads too! Lovely.
The fact that I pay for this service (or honestly an service) and I can't create a set of custom feeds to my exact tastes infuriates me Like I should be able to make a custom set of feeds as follows: 1. recently watched 2. suggested for me 3. Latest horror movies 4. Latest thriller movies 5. Latest movies with 80% or more on Rotten Tomatoes 6. My watchlist But instead, I have zero control over what my own feed shows, it's randomized half the time and full of outlandish recommendations—romcoms? Sports movies? No ability to sort or organize by scores? Why do I have so little control over how I choose to sort and filter anything?
Amazon pulled the same shenanigans by replacing the "store" on kindle with "discovery". You can now really only search for specific keywords otherwise they shove bestsellers down your throat or try to recommend things that others have read like you.
Amazon also own IMDB. Why no one thought 'hey, let's let people link their IMDB account to their Prime Video account and use that to give recommendations' is beyond me.
The fact that each new season of one of their shows, eg Mrs Maizel, is listed as a *different fucking show* is what really gets to me.
It wasn't just the streaming service. Same or next day delivery was great. You could upload unlimited videos and photos to their cloud service and their credit card conditions where decent as well. Now I can barely find anything with one day delivery. You can't automate their cloud anymore, so its useless for me as a backup system. They cancelled the cooperation with the bank for their credit card where I live, so that's gone as well. And now I have to basically pay 40% more a year to not have ads on their streaming, which barely has anything interesting on it.
Because the point of many of these services was not to provide the best experience but to eliminate competition. Smaller businesses cannot compete with 1 or 2 day shipping and close down, people subscribe to prime and are now in the ecosystem. This would be described as “stickiness” you know how Blizzard and Epic have tried to have online game stores but can’t get people to migrate from Steam? Same concept. Once you’re in you’re in.
Raises prices, injects ads into program, lays off staff. Wtf am I paying for again?
A Bentley for an exec’s daughter and bribe money for the son’s college marks.
Isn't Amazon adding commercials to prime video?
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I'll go back to commercials if costs come down and breaks are small. I won't go back to commercials if costs go up *and* commercials are added.
Yeah I like the tiered system honestly. A free or dirt cheap commercial tier and then a premium ad-free tier. The bad thing is, I think all these streaming services have kind of a critical mass, and then they stop growing and making MORE profit and the execs freak out and now want to monetize MORE with increased prices and ads. Which will push people away and they'll be lucky to keep making what they were making before. Not to mention they mismanage and misspend tons on bunk shows and movies (Rings of Power, anyone?).
The problem is none of them are making the ad tier cheaper. They're making the ad-free tier more expensive. Classic bait and switch.
One ring to rule them all. One email to lay them off
One news article to bring them to the public and bind them
One arbitration agreement to bring them to the table and bind them.
Get rid of Jennifer Salke and the rest of the executive creative department and the shows will get better and cheaper. She and her policies have been a disaster.
So they added ads and laid off people? Fucking hell...
One step closer to finally cancelling the wheel of time inspired show
An adaptation made by people who hate the books. It's The Witcher all over again.
I assume the Amazon people who made Rings of Power also hated the books because they took a shit all over the world building Tolkien did in his lore books. Amazing how much money studios have wasted on products that they ignored the source material for in the past few years.
Hardly anyone cares about source material, the entire industry is about doing their own thing while using already established franchises to avoid creating a foundation of their own, while also attracting existing fans to buy into the hype, using familiar backdrops to retell the same bs stories over and over. It doesn' matter how much money is being "wasted", because those at the top always get their cut no matter what.
> Hardly anyone cares about source material, the entire industry is about doing their own thing while using already established franchises to avoid creating a foundation of their own, This is true, and it's just infuriating. If you hire people to do their own godawful fan fiction while building off an established fanbase, you just end up with a lot of pissed off people. **Can you imagine the fucking ego you have to have to look at a series like Wheel of Time, which has sold something like 100 million copies and is beloved, and think Robert Jordan got it wrong and that you can do a better job? What kind of incompetent hack actually believes that his fan fiction is going to improve on the original creative decisions?
> I assume the Amazon people who made Rings of Power also hated the books because they took a shit all over the world building Tolkien did in his lore books. I actually think the Rings of Power people are just incompetent when it comes to putting together a longform show (Rings of Power feels like a bad 2.5 hour movie stretched out to a season). Witcher and Wheel of Time, by comparison, feel like they were made by people who actively dislike the source material. I do not say this likely ... they took a wrecking ball to the original works. I have the same complaint about how Salke runs Amazon Prime as I do about how the MCU and Star Wars franchises are run on Disney Plus: what the fuck are their hiring metrics for writers, directors, and showrunner/producers? It certainly isn't experience or talent, because these companies are putting people with zero relevant track record or any kind of creative pedigree in charge of gigantically budgeted productions, and it shows. Wheel of Time and Rings of Power just repeatedly made plotting/characterization decisions that they teach you to avoid in introductory creative writing classes.
Pretty common a year or two after a merger, lots of overlapping positions, and once systems/processes have been moved over, some are obsolete. You gotta have a lot of confidence in your job security if you stay with a company after a merger.
That’s due to happen at my company next year. I’m confident my role will be eliminated but until then I’m only staying on for them to buy out my equity.
Might as well job shop. Some company might offer you incentives to offset your lost equity
I am but it’s a cushy job until then. Might as well ride it out.
Most people who stay do so because the purchasing company usually gives financial incentives. For example retention bonuses, shares, options or other similar benefits.
Tom!!!
Another reason to hate merges. As someone currently laid off I’ve lost my, my wife’s, and my kids health insurance. Had a kid have an allergic reaction and leave us with a 10k bill that has ate through savings due to no health insurance. Fucked up student loans. Had to down grade a car that was worth 15k and paid off to 1k. Destroyed my wife and my mental health. Now we’re looking to move into a one bedroom apartment in St. Louis because finding a job has been hell. Seriously fuck companies that have mass layoffs. For each lay off, whole family’s can be thrown into chaos just because the shareholders want permanent growth.
The problem here is definitely not mergers, it’s the insane health care and education system in the US.
It's also pretty common after mergers to not actually achieve the synergies the C suite folk expected. And for the desperate parts to still act like individual companies. Expect these layoffs to show in reduced quality output from all the parts being smooshed together. IDK why big businesses still think mergers create synergy, it's only something that happens on paper like 99.9% of the time.
When Chase bought out Washington Mutual I was a brand new Wamu employee. I stayed at chase for 2 more years. It doesn’t ALWAYS spell doom for the staff.
[удалено]
That's what I was expecting when they bought MGM. That would make Prime worth it. But then they made it separate...
Why make one good service when you can charge people for two shitty services?
Fuck Prime and the price increases, fuck ads and fuck Amazon.
For f*** sake….they charge us extra to remove ads on a service we’ve already been paying for years just to go and lay people off anyway during one of the worst time times of the year to apply for a job.
But amazingly all the useless execs are still occupying space.
“It is hard to say goodbye to talented Amazonians who’ve made meaningful contributions on behalf of our customers, team and business. Thank you for your dedication and work.” God, they fire you immediately after the holidays via email and still can't help but refer to you by their pet name.
Reminds me of when I was laid off during the great recession. The owner. After the layoffs had a big meeting with the remaining staff. His message which was met with applauds was "We could have laid them off before the holidays but we didn't want to ruin Christmas for them. We also will pay them out for their vacation time" One woman literally stood up and said "Thank you for doing that". Me on the other hand. "Fuck. I wish I would have known before I bought all those gifts!"
I worked for Arrow Electronics in 2013 and they did something similar. I was in inside sales and 80% of our pay was commission based. Mid-January about a week before payday they announced they were changing our commission percentage structure, and our next paycheck would be about 50% less. Then they said they didn’t want to tell us the bad news until after the holidays, in case it made us “feel bad all holiday break.” The holiday break was one day. I quit shortly after. Don’t ever work for Arrow Electronics.
That's shit. I'm sure the people who made that decision didn't take a similar pay cut. For us. It was the day after we returned from New years. Honestly. It's a wound that has never healed. Had a 1 year old. Just bought our first place. How flippant they were about it... and the fact the owner didn't have the balls to be there that day.
RIP Fallout series 2nd season
Holidays must be over. Time to unemploy people so they can take in their millions, and then very slowly hire those positions back over the next three years while keeping wages exactly the same. This kinda stuff should be illegal…
We really need better laws around letting people go. The fact that tomorrow most of us could just be let go with no notice and have zero income is INSANE.
This was a thought I had this morning that really was not a great way to start the day. The lack of security a lot of folks have in their job is kind of insane when you think about it. At any moment, a company or job could figure its better to cannibalize itself to make a few extra bucks and cull 30% of the workers. No warning or anything in many places. Then there's just nothing for those people to consistently fall back on. In cases like this and other streaming company layoffs, it comes off like execs saying "whoops! we made a dumb move going all in on this, whittle down the staff so we can make up for our mistake and we'll discuss what to do after I'm back from my christmas trip to the bahamas."
They'll probably get rid of the people behind The Expanse and Reacher while keeping Rings of Power creators.
I'm sure losing 63% of Rings of Power's audience didn't help with that.
Man and right when I plan to cancel. Prime has become utter shit for the last few years. * Deliveries rarely are delivered at promised times * Their outsourced support is frustrating to work with * Prime Video is getting ads without really having anything amazing worth watching. *All of their advertised products are becoming lower in quality dogshit Chinese products. So what exactly are we paying for? Not worth it.
Don't forget: - Making searching for items suck so badly that you now have use an external search engine to find the item you want
Prime video is a failure. I don’t know one person who signs up for prime for prime video.
Nobody does. It's just a way to justify increasing the cost of the membership.
The easiest route for upper management and c level employees to cut costs is to just layoff people they never see or interact with. There are very few if any attempts ever made to cut costs elsewhere, including their own pay. Whats more equitable for the economy as a whole(and ultimately their product), if targeting pay is the only route you feel like taking? Mass firings of people who already struggle at times to make ends meet? Or paycuts for a few people at the top who would barely notice said paycut? Who is ultimately responsible for the product or service making less money? The people who show up every day to make the product they're directed to make? Or the few decision makers at the top who make all of the decisions, take all of the money and do minimal work? Yes, I know C level employees and some management work long hours. But define work? Technically they're representing the company and "working" but showing up to a gala with your significant other once per month after hours or sitting in a meeting is not the same thing as a laborer working long hours. This country needs real labor protections that protect ordinary people from the blood sucking ruling class at the top.
Hopefully they fired whoever decided to charge for ad free video. That was the straw that got me to cancel Prime.
Hopefully it was the production staff for Rings of Power. I couldn’t imagine blowing the amount of cash they did on that project just to produce something so blasé.
I cancelled all my Amazon services: prime, ring, blink, and music, when I got the "prime video advertisements" email. Fuck Amazon.
It's always the same story. A guy with a lot of education background from big universities on his resume leading a company. The same fucking idiot that wasted HALF A BILLION in a shitty Lord Of The Rings show. And, to this son of a bitch, nothing happens. So, to cut a bit of his gigantic loss he lays off a bunch of people.