Today I’m donating my streaming sticks. I got a ONN brand 2k one I bought for 15 and I got an Amazon Firestick 4K I got for $3 from a thrift store because they didn’t know what it was.
And I love the concept of stream sticks, I really do. Too fucking bad that corporate interests got in the way and now everything has to have a bundle of ads at every damn turn. Not even some of the things I’m subscribed to is free from ads because this is the future apparently, we’re here.
Shame because I don’t want to let these go and even if I were to subscribe to Netflix’s ad-free subscription, that’s only one source. Why do that when I can just grab a long HDMI cable, plug it into my desktop and to my TV and I can watch everything that’s there, without ads because of the extensions I use to block ads.
Smart-anything is just a dumb novelty design because rich techie users are about as wowed as dangling plastic toy keys infront of an infant. Nearly nothing is anymore useful when it becomes ‘smart’ and largely gets that title because of it’s capability to connect to the internet and just become another app for data-farming services to nag you over.
These things are just also another way to rob people more money because they’re going to have more models, the company is going to talk down to you for being filthy and not upgrading. You’re going to spend a lot of time dealing with a lot of variables that people already have presented for having a smart device and this is where the argument of “old is always better” comes into play.