OpenStars

Netflix has consistently been right on the line between barely acceptable vs. just not. Unfortunately, it's hands-down the best (legal) streaming service available. Extremely unfortunately for us all:-(.

I am so fucking confused right now. This article tries to talk about it, and even throws out the exact phrase "grandfathered into", but it fails imho b/c after reading it I am more confused than I was before. Maybe there was a typo in it or something, or maybe the old plan was called "Basic", instead of the new plan "Standard"... or something, but in any case unless you already had that plan from previously you cannot get onto it now. Nor do I have it, despite not having changed my plan in quite some time...

TLDR: somewhere/somehow/someway things are changing, but whether that means anything or what precisely it means is not clear, plus that itself may change too as time goes on.

Tbf, Netflix did start auto-playing crap but then walked back on that. They do that continually - pushing the boundaries past what people are willing to take, then a few months later dialing it WAY down, but still forward from where it started. Although more recently they did get it to a nice place imho - if you have a friend with a subscription, check it out and you may be pleasantly surprised. I am not saying that it makes up for the loss of content that they used to have, or that it is a fully good experience, but it is a LOT better than it was there for awhile (so: not that you would consider ever going back, but at least you would know:-).

Tbf, Netflix - along with Blockbuster - really was one of the pioneers in offering streaming services, when nobody else would. And it is not their fault that ISPs decided to throttle them, essentially holding their entire business hostage until they ponied up more dough, and now the content providers are doing the same. Also, most of the time they tend to grandfather people into older plans, so whatever the price is they usually (tbf, not always) tend to honor for many years in the future.

I am perpetually a year or less away from cancelling my own subscription b/c of how they continually skirt the line of pushing forward to do things like adding in "advertisements", but then walking back to make them more bearable before they start losing customers like me in droves. So I am not exactly a full-on "fan" of Netflix, just trying to offer a balanced perspective.

They also did put in the work to make a SUPERB player, plus invested heavily in making apps for physical devices. It was only this year that I finally stopped being able to play Netflix on my 9-year-old TV, and even that has a heavy chance of being more the fault of the device itself (I mostly don't care b/c my Chromecast still works just fine). Plus I still can do things like e.g. go workout in a gym while watching a pre-downloaded Netflix video without needing to use any of my mobile data, all that needing virtually no setup at all, unlike e.g. piracy that would require paying for a VPN and investigation into what mobile apps are available, plus constant monitoring to see if they remain trustworthy (so many famous examples of apps that got taken over from the inside by a malicious update).

Even so I may still leave it in a year or two, regardless of whether it is their fault or not, b/c I am not sure that I am getting anywhere close to the "value" for the amount that they are charging, anymore:-(. Seeing shows come out like Stranger Things gave me some hope, but then watching that same show enshittify itself immediately for the sake of chasing after profits to the exclusion of all else quickly killed it.

Though in that case I will need to research some alternatives...

In that case, what are we?

Meat suits hung onto skeleton hangers, obvi.

Or even more foundationally, proteins doing things with fatty membranes.

Basically piles of highly organized goo.

What I replied to though said this:

That’s not really a tag though, you’d have the same search result just searching for “school”, right?

So it seems relevant to me that the search results are not identical?

Beyond that, it would find many more instances if people started using it, ofc, but the manner in which people use it may still facilitate easier searching - e.g. instead of casually bantering around with "school", "college", "education", "edumacashiun", if you knew that a specific term was used like "#school", then you could still find it easier.

Anyway, I am not here to defend using hashtags - I have no skin in that game and truly don't care one way or another. I just did not want OP to feel attacked like we are a bunch of Karens asking to speak to the manager about their choice of language:-P. Lemmy has little enough content as it is - we want moar content creators, not to turn away people offering us free stuff to ~~distract us from the pain of existence~~ enjoy!?:-)

I normally despise animated gifs - bc THEY NEVER F-ING STOP!! (seriously, how difficult would it be for the browser to allow it to play 3-5 times and then auto-pause it!?) - but in this one case I will make an exception:

Having just tried it, no. There are many instances of the word "school", but I only saw a single one with "#school".

I often want to use the search to find things, but cannot due to the deluge of irrelevant crap. Also the terms seem broken in that while some work 100% of the time, others 100% of the time fail to function as stated - e.g. asking for "all" results from the last "top 6 hours" ago returns MANY comments from 10 months in the past, though no posts prior to 6 hours ago, so it functions only halfway i.e. it does not work at all if my aim was to find a particular thing.

So if OP wants to use hashtags, and they help, why try to restrict them? We are supposed to be the welcoming Fediverse here!!? :-)

Those eyes though...

We can do more! Maybe... significantly lower the resolution, while keeping the image the same size?

Also, image search found this completely unrelated gem: link

While not automated, typing those terms into the search bar does function to retrieve posts with those hashtag terms. So OP is not confused - rather, they are taking us all #backtoschool:-).

To be clear, not of himself, but rather when Trump assassinated Iranian General Qassem Soleimani - whatever else he may have been, he was employed in that capacity by a foreign power, and Trump killed him with a "precision strike", aka assassination. I thought that event might have literally started WWIII, but instead Iran was like "naw, we're cool bro", and that was it.