In practice, the way things disappear is almost a fatal flaw for me. I don't watch a lot of streaming video from these services, but I enjoy what I do quite a bit. I'll put a lot of stuff on my "future watchlist", whatever they call it, and get around to it several months later.
Which means my experience with Netflix was quite often that I would see something I want to watch, but it would disappear before I watched it. That's like, maximally frustrating.
And as Silicon Valley becomes ever more comfortable with censorship, as long as they can justify it to themselves that they're only doing it badthink badpeople so it's OK as long as it's in favor of them, it's likely that more and more things are going to get modified or disappeared. They're up to putting passive-aggressive warnings in front of some things now, it's only a matter of time and not much of it before they start outright editing old things wholesale. This is still theoretical... but only just. They've been creeping up on this for a while and they are very close to running out of small steps to take before they get to this point.
Which means my experience with Netflix was quite often that I would see something I want to watch, but it would disappear before I watched it. That's like, maximally frustrating.
And as Silicon Valley becomes ever more comfortable with censorship, as long as they can justify it to themselves that they're only doing it badthink badpeople so it's OK as long as it's in favor of them, it's likely that more and more things are going to get modified or disappeared. They're up to putting passive-aggressive warnings in front of some things now, it's only a matter of time and not much of it before they start outright editing old things wholesale. This is still theoretical... but only just. They've been creeping up on this for a while and they are very close to running out of small steps to take before they get to this point.