The Internet is starting to Break - Here's Why.

Amazon sucks right now Uber sucks right now Netflix sucks Facebook sucks Instagram sucks all the big tech companies are changing before our eyes and I know I usually try to see the good side of technology but for this video I just want to be very brutal Honestly, I think most of these services we use are worse than you think and I want people to do something about it. The first thing to understand is that basically all big tech companies follow the exact same pattern, something that a guy named Corey Drro summed up very well. The term ification, when any of these companies first start, their only chance of success is to go above and beyond for their users by solving a key problem.

Take Uber for example. Uber arrived in 2009 and I remember using it for the first time around that time. Thinking this is the end of traditional taxis, this is much more convenient, the taxis find me instead of the other way around, the drivers are friendlier, the cars are cleaner and that did it all, being much cheaper. I mean, Uber in the beginning was 50.% sometimes 30% of the price of a traditional taxi, so it's not surprising how quickly people flooded into Uber. I remember just a year after going live it went from a party trick to an essential app that everyone should but then things changed as soon as Uber felt they had the user side of the market cornered completely locked into the app, They changed Focus to the other side of the drivers because the users are not going anyw

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at this point, so if Uber can manage to control them and also the drivers.

Uber owns the market, meaning riders will have to stay w

here

the drivers are and drivers will have to stay where the riders are, so they sweetened the deal for them. Uber began handing out sign-on bonuses for new members and began offering fuel rebates and discounts on car maintenance. They paid their drivers 80% of what the app earned and the best part was the price increase every time there was an increase in demand. Drivers could win twice, three times, sometimes more. I remember once leaving a music festival thinking I didn't need to reserve my car in advance. Uber would solve my problem only to realize that since I was hanging out with a multitude of other people, my only way to ensure I had an Uber was to pay them all with a five-fold price increase.

I paid £100 for a 15 minute taxi but there is a third stage to this master plan because what does Uber do when they have users when they know they are by far the best? the most convenient way to take a taxi and they have the suppliers, the a surplus at first to make their app essential and then they moved on to giving suppliers that Surplus to get them all involved to build Monopoly power and make it much harder to get a car outside of Uber, but this is the point in the That Uber and all the other big tech companies in this position will take all that Surplus because a well they can, but it's also because when a company gets to this stage, it's most likely a public company, which which means that decisions are made not by one potentially passionate founder, but by many shareholders, and because shareholders are not usually invested in the long-term health of the business, they just want the business to make money quickly so they can retire their goals. , they often come down to how we make users pay up to the absolute limit of what they are. willing to do it, but not over it, and then how do we pay suppliers the minimum they are willing to accept, but not less?

So this is what that inification looks like in practice and it all starts with tiering the basic service into multiple tiers all at different prices and at first glance that sounds great, like in Uber for example it means that now you can have priority if you want faster. Comfort, which are newer cars with more legroom, executive, which is high-end. cars with better rated drivers and then Lux which is the higher end, think about it now they offer all these options. What happens when you get a regular Uber? Now you get extremely long wait times because there is no driver to charge you.

Executive prices are going to take a ride for regular prices, you get all the drivers that don't qualify for highly rated service and all the cars that don't qualify are new enough for your comfort and believe me when I say the requirements for Comfort are not very high This idea of ​​

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ing things up to offer more premium services is not inherently bad, it's just the way these companies achieve it. It's much less about improving the experience for people who pay more, but making it worse. the non-Uber people are not changing the pool of cars on the road to accommodate these levels, it is the same cars, the same people with the same training, but they are now segregated in a way that each user pays the maximum they are willing to pay and the service provided is the bare minimum for that price or take Netflix when Netflix started, it seemed revolutionary to me.

I can pay £5.99 a month, which is cheaper than an average cinema ticket these days, and get all of this for free, but then Netflix introduced 4K quality which, rather than simply being added to the base service, became part of a separate tier that now charges at 17.99 a month and then they went so far as to introduce ads back into their movies after the whole deal. about how this is the way to watch movies without ads and unless you upgrade to the medium subscription tier, which costs £10.99, you'll get those ads. To be honest, Netflix isn't even the worst offender, at least their ad-supported tier is cheaper. than the normal tier, while Now TV and Amazon Prime simply placed ads on the normal tier, the point is that the tiers are not used to benefit the user, they are used to charge you more if you are willing to pay more and then give you the experience acceptable minimum if not and that brings me to subscriptions in general and subscriptions alone can be fine, they can be a way to make the Services more accessible rather than having to anticipate a large upfront cost, they can be A way to force companies to continue providing value and updates over a period of time, but the way these big tech companies are using subscriptions now has meant that we often don't pay for those monthly subscriptions in lieu of the higher upfront costs. that we pay them. both and you're actually getting worse service now while paying for a subscription that was originally free like Amazon for example the whole purpose of Amazon Prime was unlimited one day deliveries so why now we also have to often pay to get the fastest delivery and for many products I have to meet a minimum spend just to get that benefit, which is how all online stores have worked since the beginning, but without needing to pay a monthly fee or for Uber that I used regularly . taking Ubers to see drisha from the beginning when we were dating she was about 120 miles away and used to cost around £120 but in recent years I have seen the price not only go up but go up to 1502 200 250 and now £300 Uber has gone from half the price of a normal taxi to, in many cases, more expensive than simply calling your local limit company and booking a car in advance and remember it's for the lowest tier , which because this level exists means that you are specifically selecting a car that is at least 8 years old with a driver who has completed less than 100 trips or someone who simply has not been able to maintain a good rating and remember that price increase of the that we talked about before that still exists, but now you just don't see it instead of telling you that you're about to pay three times what you should be paying, it just makes you start to lose your reference point of what the product should cost. trip and that's where the subscription service comes to save the day.

Uber One. I pay for it every month because it gives you 5% off your rides and free delivery on your Uber Eats food orders. I'll get to that one real soon because it's actually an even bigger problem in itself, but what I'm trying to point out here is that if Uber is just making up the price, if Uber is just deciding how much it can charge you for this particular ride in instead of giving you an actual

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down. of why it costs what it costs, then a 5% discount on a made-up price doesn't really mean anything and you're still paying a lot more than you used to pay a few years ago for the same trips and now you have a monthly expense that ties it even more to use Uber and Uber alone for all your driving and delivery needs, and if you are enjoying this pretty painful video, then a subscription to the channel would be ironic because we are asking you for a subscription, but this one is free and we try very hard, so anyway, if you're wondering why Uber is now £300, it's not because drivers have started earning more, in the same way that companies like Uber and Amazon, once they become the default option, start To remove all that excess is simply by extracting the largest portion they can from each transaction, let's call this platform fees, let me show you Uber Eats for a minute, so I fancy some McDonald's chicken nuggets.

McDonald's, okay, wow, so the first one. What you'll notice is that the price of almost all food on Uber Eats is between 10 and no joke, 100% more expensive than it actually is in person, like 20 chicken nuggets for £6.99, which seems like a lot. , but that's okay, add it to the cart, then. when we go into our basket, look, add £81 to save with Uber 1, so again, notice that, just like with Amazon Prime, Uber is trying to frame this as if it's making some kind of profit when it actually delivers Free is something I'm actively paying a monthly subscription just to get and the app denies that benefit until you reach a minimum spend which, by the way, almost always means waste.

I mean, it's encouraging people to ask for more of what they want, in addition to what can I ask for. that's going to come to exactly £81. I'm going to have to revise, but anyway let's move on to the next page. Oh, people also ordered to try to tempt me into getting those group savings, but I can't resist next. Oh my god, would you look? that priority delivery £249 and to be very clear, priority delivery is not some sort of hyper-accelerated personalized service that would be worth a lot of that price, all it means is that your driver makes no stops on the way to you, you know exactly? how all takeaway services worked and this is a great example of rip when Uber Eats started it was simply an assumption that of course your driver would come directly to you to deliver your order until the normal takeaway service of the restaurant will end. has been eliminated and now, well, you want fast, you pay for fast, so okay, let's take priority.

I don't want my food to be cold when it gets to me and then you scroll down and oh, priority delivery is actually being charged. at £478 and that's because it actually adds to an already existing base shipping fee and then there's only one fee so if I click on that it says part of that is the small order fee for orders of less than £10 because orders less than £10 should have an extra charge because delivery is going to cost more because the priority delivery fee is my delivery fee so why is there a separate delivery fee for the fact Why is my order small?

Do you see what I'm saying? Then there is the service fee and this is what Uber wants you to consider their cut, but the truth is that Uber is taking a slice of every piece of this pie. In fact, I can show you, so the price of McDonald's chicken nuggets is okay, so it's £449. on the McDonald's app, which basically means that for delivery alone, Uber takes 70% of the order value, what a joke and this is actually what I find most insulting, is the fact that we are paying for a monthly subscription. for Uber 1, I just paid extra for priority delivery which says 10-20 minutes but when you click place order, Uber will only get involved and even think about refunding you something if the order really takes 45 minutes or more, it's okay, so just to Be very clear, your special guarantee just for me because I'm one of your highest paying customers is that my order will not take two and a half times longer than the upper limit of what you just guaranteed.

Well, thank you very much Uber one. It is mortifying how much they are exploiting the consumerhere. I mean, imagine what happens if companies like this take over your medical and emergency services. Amazon is just as bad the other day, Drisha was buying a batch of small mini baskets for some gifts. she was putting together £12.99 it's the cheapest you could find on amazon and just before paying we thought we'd do a little check elsewhere and a minute after browsing off amazon we found them for £4 it's so easy to fall into the trap to think, well, I already paid my shipping fee, that's what I'm paying for the subscription cost, because there's no way this is going to be cheaper at another store where I'm not paying a monthly fee for have it free. delivery from that's what they want you to think, but the truth is that Amazon is charging for Prime.

Amazon is charging extra for delivery. In some cases, Amazon is charging sellers to sell on the platform and then charging you more to buy on the platform. You may even notice this effect with free platform platforms, social media for example, although companies like Facebook and Instagram, Tik Tok and even YouTube, even if they are not charging you directly, you will find ways to maximize their profits once they know you are in Once Facebook had ever signed up for the first time being this open haven where you come to stay connected with every person you know and love, they became very aware that no individual person could just leave, that would be social suicide, so Facebook could make that money. -leveraging as much as they wanted, they could fill it with ads, they could charge companies as much as they wanted.

Targeting those ads at you, they can curate your feed by taking the people you follow, not as commands of what you want to see, but just suggestions, suggestions that are quickly discarded as soon as Facebook realizes what they can show you to earn more. money with you. Now where this all gets really tricky is dark patterns, basically tricks that companies use to make you do things that you did. I don't want to make chicken nuggets. They're here. In fact, I'm fasting, so I can't eat them. Go enjoy them. Last year they cost £1375. I actually signed up to use an app called Piccolo.

It's just a social or drinking game where it shows you directions on your phone and then you make those people do those things like, hey Brian, from now on you have to do the worm every time you say something, sorry Brian , the game has a 3 day free trial, oh cool, but then it's £49 a week £44 a week for a game that has clearly been designed to be played once a month at most and I would have happily bought it for £4, 49 or even 1 if that's what they charge you as a flat rate. I know what it used to be like before the subscription took over, but I went for the free trial anyway.

I played with my friends and we were drinking, so I didn't specifically remember to cancel it when I woke up the next day and it was late. Half a year ago, when my accountant asked me what that £4.49 each week going to Apple was, when he mentioned it I realized I had seen it a couple of times in my accounts, but as it was just a payment to Apple I assumed that it should be. be iCloud or something negligent on my part, yes, absolutely, but I'm human. I forgot once and my penalty for playing a telephone game for 2 hours a night, around £110, I have a lot of subscription services which I think are fair, but This is a very clear example of a predatory model whose business model revolves clearly around charging an unfair price and hoping people forget Another dark pattern I see so often today is the manipulation of the default option as "I buy." There's a lot on Amazon, right, and the reason for that is that while I know they're often not the cheapest anymore, it's that they're basically the only company whose delivery infrastructure I can primarily rely on, the only company that when They say next. day really means it will arrive the next day this is the key problem that Amazon first solved for its users is what the goddess also invested in the platform and got me and millions of others to start paying monthly subscriptions to Prime, but Now Amazon like Also, many times when entering a minimum order quantity to get free delivery, it also often preselects the slower delivery option and I have researched that there is no way to prevent it from doing this, so let me clarify that I you are getting paid a monthly subscription for unlimited next day delivery, but assuming that unless you specify otherwise, I prefer to receive the slower delivery that I didn't have to pay for and this is absolutely an example of a dark pattern because we have had at least Three or four times when we're about to shoot a video and then realize that some of the things we ordered for that video haven't arrived, we come back and realize it's because when we rushed out we didn't.

I don't realize that Amazon didn't select the fastest option they advertised to us as the delivery window on the product page. Honestly, at this point there is an intricate web of dark patterns that these companies are using and I'm sure you have experienced some of them. such as a deliberately confusing website design intended to trick or confuse the customer into not canceling their subscription, for example, it is quite common to have several pages that you have to go through to cancel, but what some companies have started doing is alternate the continue and back buttons between each page, so that while you try to press the mouse as quickly as possible to unsubscribe, you are actually taken around the company's pages in a loop so that you end up reading their entire speech offering you aggressively discounts and only offering you those discounts right before you decide you want to cancel, which always makes you realize how much you were overpaying in the first place and encourages you to pause your subscription to automatically resume after a set period of time , instead of you being a functioning adult who You can just cancel and then rejoin later if you decide you want to do so and try everything possible to make you feel guilty for fear of missing out on things like continuing with your deactivation only if you are a person boring girl who never likes to have fun there again. was a great study by an email tools tester that found that the average consumer encounters more than six dark patterns when trying to cancel any Subscription Service today.

I mean, imagine talking to a person and they try to fool you six times in the span of a few minutes. It's so bad it's hard to understand. In fact, I experienced one of the worst examples of this last week when I found myself with a little free time and thought I'd love to just have a month of PlayStation online. Playing that should be simple, so I opened the online purchase page and no, I don't want premium, no, I don't want extra, I just want to play online, but wait, there is no option to buy only one month, there used to be.

Am I supposed to now when I subscribe I want to stay subscribed forever but okay then I will buy the essential package and then cancel it immediately so I don't get charged in the following months so do that but where is the cancel button? You would think you could go to the same place you bought it to cancel, but no, the only thing you can do on that page is refresh; cancellation is actually hidden in your console settings, but where in the settings I spent so much time searching I gave up and actually had to google to find out that you have to enter users and accounts, then account , then to payments and subscriptions, then to subscriptions and then click on PlayStation Plus, okay? surely you just click cancel and you're fine, oh no, because then it asks you if you'd rather change your plan after I specifically chose to click the cancel button instead of the change button.

Okay, so click cancel, are you sure? We're about to lose these benefits and more when you confirm another window asking for your reasons before they actually let you cut back, but it's not even just about what one company does in isolation, it's just the fact that all the big ones technology companies Taking a subscription is itself part of the problem because in most cases, the more subscription services there are, the worse each one will be and the more you will have to pay to be able to continue doing the things you want to do. You have a limited amount of time, right?

Let's say you have enough free time to watch two movies a week in an era where subscribing to Netflix at its original price of £599 lets you watch all the blockbuster movies people were talking about, that's a great deal . you're basically paying 75p per movie, but then Disney plus comes along and brings Disney-owned shows to their own Apple TV plus platform, Amazon Prime Paramount Plus Peacock video comes along and they each take the rights to one or two of the big ones exclusive mustat. programs and before you know it, you're paying for like six different subscriptions. The services combine that with tiers, meaning that if you want the benefits and adree experience you initially signed up for along with that high quality, you'll mainly pay between £10 and £20 a month for each remember that your time has not increased the amount of content you consume hasn't changed you're just paying to rent movies from more different companies and using each service much less amounts to £1 per movie than Watch It Now, which is about what you would have paid for a DVD in the first place .

It feels like we've gone around and now we're back where we were, except now you don't own anything or the services. as if Netflix is ​​constantly removing its libraries just to keep its costs down. I was counting the number of my paid subscriptions I had a few days ago while planning this video and it was only when I threw it all away that I realized how ridiculous it was. It has become like just for work. I subscribe to Epidemia Sound Slack Trello, the entire Adobe Creative Suite.io framework Sur Shark Twitter Blue Google Drive Uber, a ton of different plugins, and then personally Netflix Spotify Vodafone Tidal Apple TV plus Apple iCloud Amazon Prime YouTube. premium delivery plus PlayStation Plus Xbox Live Nintendo switch online oh my goodness, so the total I spend on subscriptions in a month is 1212 per month oh my goodness, now the truth is that subscriptions and the dark patterns that often come with them They don't go anywhere, it's not surprising that every company wants them, they provide predictable regular income, which is basically the holy grail for companies.

I mean, it's much more encouraging to tell investors that we have a thousand users and they can expect 950 of them to pay again next. month to say that 1,000 people bought our product. We'll try to get more next time. It's much easier to attract people with a cheap subscription and then upsell them later with more expensive add-ons and tiers instead of having to go all out. with the big hard sell up front on a big purchase and also subscriptions create a lock in, so the people who are subscribed not only pay you for the subscription but are also likely to keep paying you more while they try to get the most out of it. of that subscription and then, finally, a lot of money.

I mean, this is what a company's revenue is like if they sell 100 products every month for £10 and this is what that same company's revenue is like if they sell 100 subscriptions for £2 a month. it surpasses individual purchases very quickly and continues to accelerate, so what do we do about it? Well, just me, what I would do is when you sign up for a subscription that you know you only want to use for a month, you just cancel it outright. away you will get that first month and you can make sure that nothing happens if you are stuck subscribing to each of the TV service services because you don't want to miss them and you want to watch them all.

You could just try rotating subscriptions to one at a time, gorging on what you want to watch most on that one for one month and then moving on to the next, but part of that also has to be a policy that we should push for governments to enforce. a more seamless switch between platforms, such as being able to continue contacting your Facebook friends without having to be an active Facebook user, and focusing on keeping platforms delivering on their initial promises beyond that initial honeymoon phase, so That a social media platform, for example, should show you first what you signed up to view, as opposed to what will generate the most retention, Amazon should first show you the product it actually thinks best fits your search, rather than who paid more to advertise and Google search should first show you the reviews that it thinks best answer your questions instead of just assuming that Google reviews should always be at the top and then also taking the consumer into accountwhen it comes to companies that fragment.

A lot of attention is paid to when companies get too big, and rightly so. It's a big deal, but it's also bad for the consumer, especially in this age of subscriptions, when they're split up in ways that make each a worse proposition right now. One of the few subscriptions I have that I really think flies in the face of most of this is surfing Shar VPN for a few reasons, it actually solves the mess created by other subscription services like Netflix, which don't purchase the licenses. for all their shows in all countries so each country has a different library which allows you to access it by simply moving your location it doesn't have any of those weird tricks like this subscription only works for people as long as they stay in the same household no , this subscription works for you and everyone you know They are not priced at $20, $15 or $10, they are less than $3 per month when you use the code boss with 3 months free with a money back guarantee of 30 days and, most importantly, instead of being identified, Surf Shark has actually improved.

I've been using it for years and the app has been cleaned up, there are no built-in ads, there hasn't been any price increases, and the number of features included for this price continues to go up, not down, thanks to Cory Drro, by the way. I've been reading a lot of his stuff while planning this video and I'll post his top articles below if you want a read next time.