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

Amazon sucks right now Uber sucks right now Netflix Sucks Facebook sucks Instagram sucks every big tech company is changing in front of our very eyes and I know I usually try and see the bright side of tech but for this video I just want to be very brutally honest 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 basically every big tech company follows the exact same pattern something that a guy called Corey drro summarized really well with the term ification see when any of these companies first starts their only chance of succeeding is to go above and beyond for their users by solving a key problem let's take Uber for example Uber came in in 2009 and I remember first using it around that time and thinking this is the end for traditional taxis this is far more convenient the taxis find me instead of the other way around the drivers are friendlier the cars are cleaner and it did all of that while being so much cheaper I mean Uber at the start was 50% sometimes 30% of the price of a traditional taxi and so it's not surprising just how quickly people flooded onto Uber I remember that within just about a year of it becoming operational it went all the way from party trick to an essential app that everyone should have but then things changed as soon as Uber felt like they had the user side of the market cornered completely locked into the app they switched Focus to the other side the drivers cuz the users aren't going anywhere at this point and so if Uber can manage to control them and also the drivers Uber owns the market it means the users will have to stay where the drivers are and the drivers will have to stay where the users are so they sweetened the deal for them Uber started handing out sign on bonuses for new joiners they started giving cashback on fuel and discounts on car maintenance they paid their drivers 80% of what the app made and the best part of it was Surge pricing anytime there was a pickup in demand drivers could well earn two times three times sometimes more I remember coming out of a music festival once thinking I don't need to pre-book my car Uber will sort me out only to realize that because I was coming out with crowds of other people my only way to get guantee that I got an Uber was to outp pay all of them with five times surge pricing I paid £100 for a 15minute cabide but there is a third stage to this master plan because what does Uber do when they have the users when they know they're by far the most convenient way to hail a cab and they have the suppliers the X taxi drivers the restaurant takeaway drivers the package delivery drivers well that is when true entation occurs they gave users a surplus at the start to make their app essential then shifted to giving suppliers that Surplus to get them all on it to build Monopoly power and make it much harder to get a car outside of uber but this is the point where Uber and every other big tech company in this position will take all of that Surplus for themselves because a well they can but also be because by the time a company reaches this stage more than likely they are a public company which means that the decisions aren't being made by one potentially passionate founder but instead just many many shareholders and because because shareholders aren't usually as invested in the long-term health of the business they just want the business to earn quick money so that they can cash out their objectives often boil down to how do we make the users pay up until the absolute limit of what they're willing to but just not past it and then how do we pay the suppliers the absolute least that they're willing to take but just not less than it so this is what that in ification looks like in practice and it all starts with tiering splitting the base service up into multiple tiers all at different price points and on the face of it that sounds great like on Uber for example it means that you can now get priority if you want faster Comfort which is newer cars with more leg room exec which is highend cars with top rated drivers and then Lux which is the very very top end think about it now that they offer all of these options what happens when you're just getting a normal Uber now you get extremely long wait times because no driver who can charge exec prices is going to take a ride for normal prices you get all the drivers who don't qualify for high rated service and all the cars that don't count is new enough for comfort and trust me when I say the requirements for Comfort are not very high this idea of splitting things up to offer more premium Services it's not inherently bad it's just the way these companies achieve this is much less about making the experience better for the people who are paying more but much more about just making it worse for the people who aren't Uber isn't changing the pool of cars on the road to accommodate these tiers they're the same cars the same people with the same training but it's just now they're segregated in a way that each user user pays the maximum they're willing to pay and the service provided is the bare minimum for that price or take Netflix when Netflix first started it felt revolutionary I can pay £5.99 a month which is cheaper than an average movie ticket nowadays and get all of this at free but then Netflix introduced 4K quality which instead of just being added to the base service became part of a separate tier now being charged at 17.99 a month then they actually went as far as to introduce adverts back into your movies after the whole deal about this being the way to watch movies without adverts and unless you upgrade to the middle subscription tier which is £10.99 you're going to get those adverts Netflix isn't even the worst offender to be honest at least their ad supported tier is cheaper than the normal tier whereas Now TV and Amazon Prime they just stuck ads into the normal tier the point is tiering is not being used to benefit the user it's being used to charge you more if you're willing to pay more and then give you the minimum acceptable experience if you're not and that brings me on to subscriptions in general en subscriptions on their own they can be fine they can be a way to make Services more accessible instead of having to frontload a big upfront cost they can be a way to force companies to continue to provide value and updates over a period of time but the way that these big tech companies are using subscriptions now has meant that we're often not paying those monthly subscriptions instead of the bigger upfront costs we're paying them both and you're actually getting a worse service now whilst paying for a subscription than you were originally for free like Amazon for example the entire purpose of Amazon Prime was unlimited one-day deliveries so why is it that now we're also having to often pay to get the fastest delivery and for many products actually having to hit a minimum spend just to get that perk which is how every online store has ever worked since the very beginning but without needing to pay a monthly fee or for Uber I regularly used to take Ubers to go see drisha early on when we were dating she was about 120 miles away and it used to cost about £120 but over the last few years I have seen that price not just creep but sore up to 1502 200 250 and now £300 Uber has gone from half the price of a normal taxi to in a lot of cases actually more expensive than just calling up your local cap company and pre-booking a car and remember that's for the lowest tier which because this tiering exists means that you are specifically selecting a car that's at least 8 years old with a driver who's completed less than 100 trips or someone who just hasn't been able to keep a good rating and you remember that surge pricing we talked about earlier that still exists but now you just don't see it instead of uber telling you that you're about to pay three times what you should be paying it just does it so that you start losing your reference point of what the journey even should cost and that is where the subscription service comes in to save the day Uber one I'm paying for it every single month because it gives you a 5% discount on your rides and free delivery on your Uber Eats food orders I'll get to that one very soon cuz that is actually an even bigger problem in itself but the point I'm trying to make here is that if Uber is just inventing the price if Uber is just deciding how much it can charge you for this particular Journey as opposed to giving you an actual breakdown of why it costs what it costs then a 5% discount on a madeup price it doesn't actually mean anything and you're still paying far far more than you used to just a few years ago for the same rides and now you have a monthly expense as well that further ties you into using Uber and Uber only for all your driving and delivery needs and if you're enjoying this rather painful video then a sub to the channel would be [Music] ironic because we're asking you for a subscription but this one's free and we do try very hard so anyway if you're wondering why that Uber now cost £300 well it's not because the drivers have started earning more the biggest way that companies like uber and Amazon once they become the default option start to take all of that Surplus away is simply by extracting the largest cut that they possibly can from every transaction let's call this the platform fees let me show you Uber Eats for a minute so so I fancy some McDonald's chicken nuggets McDonald's right okay wow so the first thing you'll notice is pricing almost every item of food on Uber Eats is between 10 and no joke 100% more expensive than it actually is in person like 20 chicken nuggets £6.99 that seems like an awful lot but okay add to basket so then when we go into our basket oh look at that add £81 to save with Uber 1 so again notice just like with Amazon Prime Uber is trying trying to frame this as if I'm getting some sort of perk when actually free delivery is something that I'm actively paying a monthly subscription just to get and the app is denying that benefit until I hit a minimum spend which by the way almost always means wastage I mean it's encouraging people to order more than they want to order besides what can I order that's going to exactly hit £81 I'm going to have to go over but anyway let's go to the next page oh people also ordered to really try and tempt me into getting those group savings but no resist next oh my goodness would you look at that priority delivery £249 and just to be very clear priority delivery isn't some sort of hyper accelerated personalized service that would very much be worth that price all it means is your driver doesn't take stops on the way to you you know exactly how every takeaway service ever used to work and this is a great example of tearing when Uber Eats first started it was just an assumed thing that of course your driver is going to come straight to you to deliver your order up until normal restaurant takeaway service have been eliminated and now well you want fast you pay for fast so okay fine we're going to go 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's actually on top of an already existing base delivery fee and then there's just fee so if I click that it says part of that is the small order fee for orders less than £10 because orders less than £10 should have an extra charge because they're going to cost more to be delivered what because the priority delivery fee is my delivery fee so why is there a separate delivery fee for the fact that my order is small do you see what I'm saying and then there's the service fee and this is what Uber wants you to think of as their cut but the truth is Uber is taking a slice out of every single part of this pie actually I can show you so McDonald's chicken nuggets price okay so it's £ 449 on the McDonald's app which basically means that just for delivery Uber is taking 70% % of the value of the order what a joke and this is actually what I find the most insulting part of it it's the fact that we're paying a monthly subscription for Uber 1 right I've just paid extra for priority delivery which says between 10 and 20 minutes but when you click order Uber will only get involved and even think about refunding you anything if the order actually takes 45 minutes or longer 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 half times longer than the upper limit of what you just guaranteed it might oh well thank you very much Uber one it is mortifying how much they're exploiting the consumer here I mean imagine what happens if companies like this get in charge of your medical and Emergency Services Amazon is just as bad the other day drisha was buying a batch of mini little hampers for some gifts she was putting together £12.99 is the absolute cheapest you could find them on Amazon and just before we checked out we thought let's just do one little check elsewhere and within a minute of browsing outside of Amazon we found them for £4 it's so easy to fall into the Trap of thinking well I've paid my delivery fee that's what I'm paying the subscription cost for there's no way that this thing is going to be cheaper in another store that I'm not paying a monthly fee to have free delivery from that's what they want you to think but the truth is 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 they're charging you extra to buy on the platform and you can even notice this effect with free plat platforms social media for example even though companies like Facebook and Instagram Tik Tok even YouTube even though they're not directly charging you will still absolutely find ways to maximize their earnings from you once they know that you're in once Facebook had got ever on to sign up for the first time by being this open Haven where you come to keep connected with every single person you know and love they became very aware that no individual person could just leave that would be social suicide so Facebook could Crank That money-making lever as much as they wanted to they could fill it with ads they could charge companies as much as they wanted to Target Those ads at you they can curate your feed taking the people you follow not as commands of what you want to see but just suggestions suggestions that are quite quickly discarded as soon as Facebook realizes what they can show you to make more money out of you now where this all gets really deceptive is the dark patterns basically tricks that companies employ to make you do things that you didn't mean to do chicken nuggets are here I'm actually fasting so I can't eat them there you go enjoy them they were £ 1375 last year actually I signed up to using an app called Piccolo it's just a social or drinking game where it serves you prompts on your phone and then you get those people to do those things like hey Brian from now on you have to do the worm every single time you say something sorry Brian the game's got a 3-day free trial oh great but then it's £49 per week £44 per week for a game that's very clearly been designed to be played once a month at most and I would have happily bought it for £4.49 or even1 if that's what they charg it as as a one-off fee you know how it used to be before the subscription thing took over but anyway I went for the free trial I played the game with my friends we were drinking so I didn't specifically remember to cancel it when I woke up the next day and it took half a year when my accountant asked what is this £4.49 every week going to Apple when he mentioned it I realized I had seen it a couple of times coming up on my accounts but because it was just a payment to Apple I assumed oh it must be iCloud or something negligent on my end yes absolutely but I'm human I forgot once and my penalty for that for playing one phone game for 2 hours one night about £110 there are plenty of subscription Services I have that I think are fair but this is a very clear example of one that is predatory one whose entire business model clearly revolves around charging an unfair price and hoping that people will forget another dark pattern that I see so so much of nowadays is the manipulation of the default option like I shop a lot on Amazon right and the reason for that is that even though I know they're often no longer the cheapest is that they're basically the only company whose delivery infrastructure I can mostly rely on the only company for who when they say next day it really does mean that it will come next day this is the key problem that Amazon first solved for its users it's what godess also invested in the platform and well got me and millions of others to start paying monthly subscriptions to Prime but now Amazon as well as often times introducing a minimum order quantity to get that free delivery also often pre-selects the slower delivery option with and I've looked into this no way to stop it doing that so let me just get this straight you're charging me a monthly subscription for unlimited next day delivery but then assuming that unless I specify otherwise I'd rather get the slower delivery that I didn't have to pay for and this is absolutely an example of a dark pattern cuz we've had at least three or four occasions where we're about to film a video and then we realize some of the stuff that we' ordered for that video hasn't actually arrived we go back and we realize it's because when checking out in a hurry we didn't realize that Amazon didn't select the fastest option that was advertised to us as the delivery window on the product page honestly at this point there is an intricate web of dark patterns these companies are using and you'll absolutely have experienced some of them like deliberately confusing website design intended to fool or confuse the customer into not canceling their subscription for example it's quite common to have multiple Pages you have to go through to cancel but then what some companies have started doing is flipping the continue and the back buttons between each page so as you're trying to mash your mouse as quickly as possible to unsubscribe you're actually being taken around and around the company's pages in a loop so that you end up reading their entire Spiel aggressively offering you discounts and only offering those discounts right before you decide you want to cancel which always makes you realize how much you were overpaying in the first place encouraging you to pause your subscription so that that it automatically resumes after a set period of time as opposed to you being a functioning adult who can just cancel and then rejoin later if you decide you want to and trying every single thing they can to guilt you with the fear of missing out with things like continue your deactivation only if you are a boring person who never likes to have fun again there was a big study by email tool tester who found that the average consumer encounters over six dark patterns when trying to cancel any Subscription Service nowadays I mean imagine talking to a person and they try to mislead you six times in the span of a few minutes that's so bad that it's hard to wrap your head around I actually experienced one of the worst examples of this just last week when I found myself with a little bit of spare time and I thought I'd love to get just one month's worth of PlayStation online play that should be simple right so I opened up the purchase page for online and no I don't want premium no I don't want extra I just want to play online but wait there's no option to just buy one month there used to be does it just assume assume now that when I subscribe I want to stay subscribed forever but okay fine so I'll just buy the essential package and then I'll cancel straight away so that I don't get charged in any subsequent months so I do that but then where's the cancel button you'd think you'd be able to go to the same place you bought it from to cancel but no the only thing you can do on that page is to upgrade the cancel is actually hidden in your console settings but where in the settings I spent so long looking I gave up and I actually had to Google to find that you have to go into users and accounts then you go into account then payment and subscriptions then subscriptions then click PlayStation Plus okay so then surely you just click cancel and you're good right oh no because then it asks you if you'd rather change your plan after I've specifically chosen to click the cancel button instead of the change button okay so click cancel are you sure you're about to lose these benefits and more then when you confirm yet another window asking you for your reasons before it will actually let you cut but it's not even just about what any one company does in isolation it's just the fact that every big tech company is doing a subscription is in itself part of the problem because in most cases the more subscription Services there are the worse each one gets and the more that you end up having to pay just to be able to still do the things you want to do see you have a limited amount of time right let's say you have enough spare time to watch two movies a week in an era where subscribing to Netflix at its original £599 price lets you watch all the big blockbuster movies people were talking about that's a cracking deal you're basically paying 75p per movie but then Disney plus comes along and takes Disney owned shows onto their own platform Apple TV plus comes along Amazon Prime video Paramount Plus Peacock and every single one takes the rights for one or two of the big exclusive mustat shows and before you know it you're paying like six different subscription Services combine that with the tiering which means that if you want the perks and the adree experience that you initially signed up for along with that high quality you'll be paying mostly between £10 and 20 per month to each one remember your time hasn't increased the amount of content you consume hasn't changed you're just paying movie Rent to more different companies and using each service much less amounting to £1 per movie you watch now which is about what you would have paid for a DVD in the first place it feels like we've looped all the way around and now we're back in the same place we were except now you don't own anything and services like Netflix are constantly culling their libraries just to keep their cost down I was counting up the number of my own paid subscriptions I had a few days ago while planning out this video and it's only when I tossed it all up that I realized just how ridiculous it's become like just for work I subscribe to epidemic sound slack Trello the entire Adobe Creative Suite frame.io Sur shark Twitter blue Google Drive Uber one a whole load 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 on online oh my God so the total I spend on subscriptions in a month is 1,212 per month oh my God now the truth is subscriptions and the dark patterns that often come with them they're not going anywhere it's not surprising that every single company wants them they give predictable regular Revenue which is basically the holy grail for businesses I mean it's a lot more encouraging to say to investors we have a th users and you can expect 950 of them to pay again next month than to say 1,000 people bought our product we'll try and get more next time it's way easier to get people in with a cheap subscription and then upsell them later on with add-ons and more expensive tiers as opposed to having to go all in with the big upfront Hard Sell on a big purchase and also subscriptions create lockin so the people who are subscribed they're not just paying you for the subscription but they're also likely to keep paying you more while trying to make the most out of that subscription and then finally lots and lots of money I mean here's what a company's Revenue looks like if they sell 100 products each month for £10 and here's what that same company's Revenue looks like if they sell 100 subscriptions for £2 a month it overtakes the individual purchases very quickly and it just keeps accelerating so what do we do about it well just me to you what I would do is when you sign up to a subscription that you know you only want to use for a month just cancel it straight away you'll get that first month and you can make sure it's nothing past that if you're stuck subscribing to every single one of the TV Serv Services because you don't want to miss out and you do want to watch them all you could just try rotating subscribing to one at a time binging the thing that you most want to watch on that one for one month and then moving on to the next but then part of it also has to be policy we should be pushing for governments to enforce smoother switching between platforms like still being able to contact your Facebook friends without having to be an active Facebook user and focusing on making platforms continue to deliver on their initial promises beyond that initial honeymoon phase so a social media platform for example should first show you what you signed up to see as opposed to what will drive the most retention Amazon should first show you the product it genuinely thinks is best matched to your search as opposed to who's paid the most to advertise and Google search should first show you the reviews that it thinks best answer your questions as opposed to just assuming that Google's own reviews should always be on top and then also just keeping the consumer in mind when it comes to companies fragmenting a lot of attention is given to when companies get too big and rightly so that's a big issue but but it's also bad for the consumer especially in this subscription era when they get split up in ways that make each one a worse proposition in their own right now one of the few subscriptions that I have that I genuinely think flies in the face of most of this is surf Shar VPN for a few reasons it actually fixes the mess created by some other subscription services like Netflix who don't buy the licenses to all their shows in all the countries so every country has a different Library which this lets you access by just flicking your location it doesn't have any of those weird catches like like this subscription only works for people so long as they stay in the same household no this subscription works for you and every single person you know they didn't price themselves at $20 or $15 or $10 it's less than $3 a month when you use the code boss with 3 months for free with a 30-day money back guarantee and most importantly instead of in ifying themselves surf shark has actually gotten better I've been using it for years now and the app has got clean up there are no ads baked in there's been no price creep and the number of features included for this one price it keeps going up up not down big thanks to Cory drro by the way I've been reading a lot of his stuff while planning out this video and I'll pop his main articles below if you want to have a read catch you in the next one

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 6,184,129

Keywords: tech, rant, amazon, youtube, netflix, spotify, big tech

Id: wVYG1mu8Lg8

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2024