People who make addictive social media apps and bureaucratic enterprise software love to glorify their work by lumping it in with vaccines, clean drinking water, and global food distribution in order to claim some of the halo of those obviously beneficial technologies (though claiming “fire and rock tools” is taking that to a hilarious new extreme). I hate to break it to you but you don’t work on any of those things. You work on selling people ads and making it easier for their boss to fire them. That tech is neutral at best relative to these problems you’re claiming and often destructive — ask people in Myanmar about how social media has affected war and violence, for example. Digital technology hasn’t had a demonstrably positive impact on worker productivity let alone mortality, hunger, or war. Start being honest with yourself that working in tech is a lot more like selling carbonated sugar water or making reality TV shows than it is like saving the world.
Can’t wait for the AI-generated “botshit” (to borrow Cory Doctorow’s term) to start killing of social media sites. You can see from the decline of Twitter (and Facebook amongst anyone under the age of 40) how weak some of their hold on their users already is. Hopefully AI’s big “contribution” to tech of empowering spammers will be the thing that pushes them the rest of the way into their much deserved grave.
Another obvious cause I don’t see anyone mentioning: tech simply created a lot less value in the last decade than in any previous decade. Pretty much every one of the big hyped up technologies that was going to be the future of everything turned out to be a bust: IoT, drones, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and on and on. Even the ones that got some traction like ride sharing really were just castles of smoke floated on giant clouds of dumb middle eastern and Asian venture capital money looking for a greater fool. Most of the changes in web development tech have made software slower and more bureaucratic to make in order to support large FAANG-style software orgs.
There was absolutely nothing remotely on the scale of the smartphone, social media, the web, the personal computer, etc from previous decades in terms of actually creating real value for users.
The genius of the web was its focus on documents: GET, POST, UPDATE, DELETE. Authoring and sharing text and images and video is essential to human knowledge and the web’s big contribution to the world was creating a fairly simple, universally understandable format for people to read and publish documents. The idea of the separation of information from presentation (and putting presentation in the control of the user-agent) was genius and lead to some of the biggest forms of innovation built on top of the web like RSS and podcasting. The gradual evolution of the web away from a hyperlinked network of documents towards being a thin frame into which we deliver complex software applications mostly destroyed so much of this value. It’s convenient for engineers but often deeply hostile to users and has lead to a systematic disregard for what was unique and special about the web. How easy do you find it to discover interesting or useful information created by actual people nowadays vs, say, 2007? Web engineers have largely destroyed one of the great human information technologies in order to make it easier to ship software. Good job everyone.
The write off is based on the cost of creating the show. I think the article is wrong/sloppily phrased in its line about the value of the company. If they remove a show then it will never generate any future revenue so they can write the cost of producing it off as a loss.
The real scandal here is how little viewership streaming shows get and how little revenue they generate off of that viewership. Particularly for how expensive these shows are.
I wrote a couple of comments elsewhere in the thread about some specifics and consequences. But the takeaway is that the last decade+ of super expensive “prestige” shows on streaming has been a huge bubble that isn’t supported by the underlying revenue generated by the shows. In 2022 Netflix spent $16 billion on producing shows [https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/netflix-content-spendi...] to generate shockingly few viewing hours (which is why they will never agree to WGA demands to release viewership numbers in order to pay writers residuals; their stock would go to 0 if those numbers ever became public). The future of streaming is ad-supported cheaply produced reality TV, ie exactly what niche cable looked like in 2008.
I think the article phrased it sloppily. I think what’s happening is that the studios write off the cost of the production as a loss and they can only do that if they don’t have them available to stream where they could in theory generate revenue in the future. The phrase about “the company’s value” is just sloppy/mistaken here.
The reason it makes sense for the studios to remove these shows for the minimal benefit represented by a lowered tax burden is that the shows generate shockingly little viewership let alone revenue. The mechanism for the relationship between those things is pretty fuzzy in a subscription-based world in the first place, Did a single viewer signup for Netflix or decide not to cancel their subscription because of The Irishman, for example? That movie cost Netflix something upwards of $160 million. It made $8 million in its theatrical release. Is there any world where the remaining cost was made up for by new or retained streaming customers? I highly doubt it.
This is why the whole streaming industry is moving to ad-supported and low cost reality content. And why the services are fighting the WGA demands to release streaming viewership numbers as part of paying writers residuals. It’s not the cost of the residuals. It’s the numbers. If streaming viewership numbers were public Netflix stock would go to 0 the next day.
They explain that the benefit to the companies is the tax write off. The part they don’t explain is how little money shows like these generate that they’re worth less than the potential write off. The big semi-open secret in streaming right now is that viewership is a lot lower than people think and much less correlated with show “quality” (where by “quality” here I mean production cost). This is why the whole industry is introducing ad-supported tiers. Look for that to be paired with shows that are radically cheaper to make and payout less to talent in residuals, ie. reality TV. The last decade of streaming has been a big bubble. The economics are fundamentally unchanged from 2008 basic cable so as these services try to actually become profitable expect the content to look a lot more like Toddlers And Tiaras than Westworld and expect to watch a lot more ads.