Why The Internet Is Starting To Break | Asmongold Reacts 

Paying money to still see ads…The absolute state of it.

I swear to God, if I were to cancel my Netflix subscription some day in the future, it might actually say, "Your sister really likes binging this show. Are you sure you want to deny her that?"

Pro tips: Pirate media. cancel subscriptions immediately. use ad block. dont use uber or door dash unless necessary/only order from places that deliver themselves instead of through a third party

if buying isn't owning then piracy isn't stealing.

Thomas Sowell said, the biggest enemy of business is the businessman.

Okay, one thing : Uber/Doordash driver here. When you pay for priority that only means you get your order first. It does not mean you get your delivery in 10 minutes, or 15 minutes. If you are priority it means you are the 1st person I drive to. You get no other special privileges. I don't care what the app promises you. Also beware. The driver could also know the other person address and could deliver to them first anyways. As well as they could be multi apping and have another to stack with yours going your direction. TLDR : Priority delivery is a scam. Don't buy it. Waste of money.

Ad revenue is drying up. Pay walls everywhere!

If anyone sends you to retention instead of canceling your subscription, just tell them your going to federal prison for tax evasion. They always cancel my subscription after that.

Even worse on many subscription sites now is that when you select cancel, they bring you to a page that lists all the benefits and says "Keep Subscription" as a big bright button. And then you literally can't find the confirm cancellation because its almost the exact same color as the background and is tiny size 9 text at the bottom of the page. Its insane.

-Calls spectrum for technical support -Gets a representative in another country with an accent i can't understand. -Calls to cancel service -Gets charismatic person who speaks perfect english trying to sell me a phone.

I litterally got fired from tech support, because I didnt try to do upsells, but tried to fix the customers problems instead. It really is messed up

4k only applies if you are using your computer. Netflix was misleading people into thinking they were getting 4k on their phones and tvs'. Rossmann repairs covers the terms in one of his videos.

Prime video just started charging an extra $3 or $4 a month JUST to not have ads even though we already pay an insane amount every year for Amazon Prime. Insane.

This is the Cyberpunk story. The only remaining on the plot is for a Ai to malfunction (or rogue or anything you call it), to crash the entire Internet. Considering how much the economy is dependant on the Internet imagine the fallout.

Fun fact if someone you know dies and a debt collector asks to pay any amount refuse, do not give them a single penny. They can aruge that the partial payment is proof that you assumed responsibility and for you the inherent the debt

I agree with him on Amazon and Netflix. But as a DD and Uber Eats Driver; if you don't like it, get your fat ass off your couch, get dressed, start your car, wait for it to warm up (I'm in Minnesota), drive in traffic 17 minutes to McDonald's, wait in line for 12 minutes, wait for your food for 8 to 25 min, almost get shot, almost get robbed (again, I'm in Minneapolis, I've been shot at twice and somebody tried to pull on my door handle in traffic once), and then sit in traffic again for 17 minutes, park your car, and get yiur fat ass back to your couch. I see the fees, and I still don't get paid enough for this shit. An order with this much time and effort probably pays $9 for 8.5 miles, both ways btw cuz everybody's house is just out of the area, and you have to get back to your red square.

In Baltimore we call it hacking a Uber, that’s when you find a driver you like and get their direct contact info. The driver gets all the cash I get a ride for half price Win Win for me and driver Alil loss for the app

The saddest thing is the healthcare & insurance systems in US are FAR more predatory & “scammy” then even Uber

Every time a company asks me why I'm canceling my subscription I select "other" and type in the text slot "I just farted real hard".

Paying services to serve you first is actually more than just a company's idea. It's a cultural no-no in many parts of the world. If you travel to some counties, you will be actively discourages to tip as it can indicate you are asking for preferential treatment. They simply pay the workers a fair wage and don't have their customers tip so everyone gets equal service. Our obsession with being "special" is costing us insane amounts of money...

The day Gaben passes the torch we are doomed.

the dead internet theory is looking more and more real by the day

This is happening to us truck drivers, Uber, and Amazon entered the market. Destroying rates, killing small companies.

I can't use Uber anymore because I randomly got charged a $150 cleaning fee that I refused to pay.

You should be able to cancel all recognised subscriptions from your banking app. I think it's so important to be able to control all of your subscriptions in one place. It's up to the company to check whether payment has been received for your account or not.

The internet, the housing market, and the economy in general are all going to hell. A zombie apocalypse would be more preferable.

The great irony that once a company goes "public" they're no longer in service to providing better service at a cheaper price and end up being owned and ran by the same group of people. Yet at the same time, we say our government is "public", yet they're also not concerned with better service at a cheaper price and tend to be owned by the same group of people. Apply everything he said about companies and their share holders to the government..

The fee for an ambulance from my local hospital was 1800 for a short 5 min ride.

Your job as a consumer in a free market is to stop using the products or services that do not serve you. If you're interacting with bad products, you're telling the market that they're worth it to you. So they keep in that direction. Don't interact with things that aren't good, or they'll never get better.

Publicly traded companies are legally required to do things for the benefit of the investors (1916 Dodge v Ford), not consumers. That ruling has done nothing but enable exploitation.

Worked as a CSR at ATT around 10 years ago. Can confirm Zach’s upsell story. They didn’t care about fixing people’s issues. They only cared about selling their U-Verse service.

I worked in tech support and they asked us to upsell a product that had nothing to do with what we were helping the customer with and do a whole presentation spiel in the middle of them trying to get help. Our whole team just didn't do it. Management came and asked why we weren't doing it. I told them it had nothing to do with what we were helping the customer with (in a nice way). Management stopped asking us to do that bs.

This is why Adblockers and piracy is your *DUTY*

i have 0 subscrbtions. i pirate everything.

I remember when sailing the seven seas was disappearing. Now it is on the rise due to skyrocketing pricing and tiering.

4:10 Claiming that Uber wasn't breaking any rules is a pretty contentious claim. They were operating what was functionally a taxi service, without paying any of the licensing fees or putting in the investment to remain compliant with other burdensome regulations that "honest" taxi services had to deal with. In court they argued that because their dispatch system was an app and an algorithm on a server, instead of people in a call center, meant that what they were doing wasn't a taxi service. And that's the only reason why they could undercut on price like they did: because they adamantly refused to pay all the routine bureaucratic costs the government imposed on their competition. And they managed to stall the courts long enough to dominate the industry and remain profitable despite the continued legal costs of stalling in court, at which point the competitors ran out of money and lost their ability to continue attempts to refute Uber's circular logic.

8:14 Louis Rossman did a video about how he was paying for 4K Netflix, but only getting 720p

So I was on the mod team during the PS4 launch. We reported over and over the feedback about how hard it is to cancel. Needless to say... the dev team and our contacts agreed, they took the feedback over and over and wanted to change it... but it was mysteriously never approved for a fix by executive leadership. Then, when the update we were testing actually came out... it was EVEN DEEPER in the menu and now asked you for that "why" screen rather than keeping it optional. This is real, really real shit happening daily in offices all over the world at astonishing rates. We are POWERLESS against this, as long as this remains laissez-faire. Which seems pretty obvious, since biz wants everything entirely de-regulated and they culturally sell the myth that 'oh don't worry about rules, competition will create rules" which is true. The rule is: If you can screw with someone the same way everyone else is screwing with someone, those someones will learn to accept the abuse. That's the real rule and product of competition, always. The race to the bottom really hurts when you finally hit the bottom and the engines keep pushing you down harder into the dirt. The "good ones" have increasingly diminishing power in these huge corps who limit themselves exclusively by legality and laugh at the idea of morality ruling them. Like, when was the list time you heard about a CEO being promoted from the board because they 'really look out for the consumer'? lol This tactic means we have one resort: Extensive legislation. It's just the purely logical response to their logical tactics. Absolutely blows my mind there's normal people out there making like 25K a year who will advocate for these corps "right" to screw us over like it's some moral high ground when it's really just pure ignorance and huffing propaganda as a hobby that makes them think that.

That "speedy delivery" fee is just another markup. I used to do doordash and ubereats. I've had customers complain they paid for the faster service, and it's still a stacked order. The only difference I've noticed is it gets your food dropped off first, but also picked up first. So if I pick up your order first, then drive to the next resteraunt and have to wait 10 minutes for tge 2nd order, then your food just sat for an extra 10+ minutes.

No because the minute a company has a monopoly, or near monopoly, it ceases to be a free market. The problem is that we have rules in place to account for this, but they don't get enforced and thus don't really exist. Most of the major companies that exist today should have been broken up ages ago.

This is why people like Gaben for Valve/Steam is so important. Businessman who stick to principles and values of their customers will always outlast those who stick to monetary gain. In 10 Years there will be 3 different Ubers but there will always be one Steam because nobody feels the need to move to different platforms when Steam is affordable and honest. Unlike Uber and these other companies who offer no value or trust to their customers.

I usually just cancel my free trials immediately after accepting the trial. If they are extra scummy though, they won't let you use the time once you cancel, but most places do still allow you to use the free trial time. Just think of cancelling as part of the free trial process

"Pay money to save money" lmao

The random doll feet in the targeted ad bit was a brilliant touch

We just had to go for the "Cyberpunk Dystopian Nightmare" world didn't we?

15:59 I’ve noticed fast food apps are starting to do “online only” deals while increasing prices of the menu on the app. They try to trick ya with a coupon but it ends up more expensive than the og prices without the deal

My question is - when people see how much all of this adds up to on the app, what in the flying fuck possesses them to say yes and hit proceed? I've gone through this a few times and each time I see the final price I say Nope, I just can't justify it, and delete the app.

I work in SaaS and I feel like I have so many answers in support of every thing the video said, and things Asmon said. Proper price anchoring in subscription models actually should happen the opposite way: Design the high value service. Strip away certain features with each descending tier, so that it encourages a "growth" user to keep upgrading to the full experience. The kicker here is "white glove services". All companies that charge a premium price for a premium service are offering an unsustainable product, because it is providing more value at the expense of the employees that make it possible. Eventually the key employees that make the value possible will get tired and quit or move on to more lucrative work. The people in charge now have a "talent vacuum" that they're never able to fill again. So those people in charge quit, and the company hires an executive with "the proper experience", which usually means that they'll distill the remaining service into fractional services that can be monetized and measured through KPI's. From there... it's a death spiral as execs quit and get hired to reshuffle and distill the remaining service again into new KPI's, until a new groundbreaking technology enters the market.

This is why Piracy and Adblock is so important. If you don't have one use one. You gotta show that if the service isn't worth it that you can always take it without giving them a single penny. The only way to change them is to actually deny them their money.

On your companies sell at a loss to break into a market. My town had 3 video stores back in the day (some of these young whipper snappers ain’t ever even been in one I bet). Anyway, Movie Gallery moves into town. Any movie, any game, $1 dollar rental. Kept the price there until the other 3 stores had to shut down. Once they were gone, $5 a rental. It really does happen in every field.

I worked for a small commercial printer... we were using a super old version of adobe because it was a one time fee instead of their INSANE monthly sub fee. One of the employees accidentally hit the automatic update button on one of the computers and it broke that old version of it, forcing you to upgrade to the sub model. We couldn't use that computer for photoshop anymore.

The solution to the cancel subscription problem is to only ever pay for a subscription with a preloaded card that doesn't allow overdraft fees. You can't get blood out of a turnip, and you can't charge a card with no money. Then you simply wait until a subscription you wish to continue emails you about your declined payment, load the appropriate amount of money onto the card, and make that payment.

Cancelling is super easy. Just dispute the charges with your credit card company and state "refused to cancel my subscription".

another issue is many people have a difficult time saying NO thanks to an upsell under pressure

33:23 Genshin Impact by Mihoyo does this dark pattern. When you uninstall it, it shows up a message begging you to not uninstall with a crying character

I tried cancelling a service that was $55 a month. They said that they can offer to me for $3 instead... THAT IS SUCH A HUGE DIFFERENCE!!! I still cancelled it because I didn't need it.

there's a way to "tag" your email when you sign up with a company. like whenever you get a new phone or have to open a new account to use a service. you can add a +companyname somewhere in your address, so when ever you get random spam, you can see EXACTLY which company sold it.

For the past 10-15 years, online tech companies had the cheapest price because they could sacrifice profits as long as it lead to growing market shares. Now that market shares have stagnated (mostly due to the saturation of regional markets), they have to turn a profit.

“Are you sure you want to cancel your subscription to continue living?”

usage: $40.21 distribution fee: $152.30 processing fee: $75.92 accessing fee: $45.21 transmission fee: $34.50 fee fee: $15.80 fee fi fo fum fee: $17.75 might as well fee: $5.00 WTF you gonna do fee: $3.00 Another dollar won't hurt fee: $1.00

"do you think its because of me" 10:54 No disrespect, but I do in fact believe that asmons mom and GF were buying a bunch of stuff because he had deep pockets and hes a hoarder.

"Tiering is like a psychological trick" "There is nothing wrong with tiering" (when it's not a psychological trick...)

Reminds me of a video Louis Rossman put up talking about how he signed up for LA Fitness online, but to cancel he had to send certified mail and they still tried to say they never got his mail until he read them the confirmation number

Sorry but a quick correction at the 32:00 mark, actually putting the buttons on opposite sides isn't to get you to go in circles. It may be a good byproduct of the action, but it's the companies way of protecting themselves and they have a legal standing in doing so because with you proceeding to follow the action with the buttons not being in the same place you as the consumer are actively reading the button and prompt to make an active decision and not just a quick passive one that could happen by accident but rather it it happening on purpose which can be fought in court if you as the consumer try to defraud the company out of easy money due to many instances of lucrative refund policies that payout first and ask questions later

Some gyms require you to allow them to pull your membership fee directly from your checking account, and they often have a contract that requires you to notify them 30 days in advance of your cancellation. You can have your banker freeze their ability to pull the funds, but then you'd have to take them to court to avoid having them send the unpaid account to collections if you don't pay the extra 30 days. Often times these gyms will turn off your door key card too. They get sued until they pull their heads out of their backsides for air. It's ridiculous.

Most of the problems in our current society can be summarized by the fact that it wasn't good enough for these companies to make money, or even a LOT of money. But they needed to make ALL of the money. And in trying to make all of the money, they severely damaged potentially beyond repair their ability to make any money.

39:25 guy just casually spending my rent on subscriptions

I started experiencing issues with Amazon these past two years, it seems. I agree with what you are saying that it has been everything going up. Fast food, regular food, FOOD,

I think the bigger problem is that the barrier for entry becomes too high in terms of amount of regulation. Think about housing, before - if you had a piece of land you just build a house. Now it's literally illegal - you need to hire an architect, enginner, who need to hire a lawyer to navigate the regulation, then you need to hire a licensed electrician, plumber and even a contractor. So barrier to entry is too high. It's become illegal to start small and people just don't have millions lying around.

Just got U Ride in my hometown. People online said "support your local cab businesses!" Called a cab for work the next day. Driver didnt show up. Called them back after half an hour. They said "our driver showed up and no one was there". I was late for work. Definitely using U Ride next time.

Had a situation where I signed up to a monthly gym subscription. At some point I wanted to cancel it, but they stated the contract was fixed on 1 year and I could only cancel it if I sent an email to some department and had to have a 'plausible' reason to cancel it. I had to make some random bs up like not being able to use my gym sub because of my work schedule. They did ask for evidence but I just replied back saying shouldn't have to provide anything and should just be able to cancel a service if I'm no longer using it and fortunately that was enough for them to go ahead and do so.

39:25 the look on Asmon's face says it all. He's sitting there thinking "holy shit... do I pay that much for all my subscriptions too?" 😂

That subscription total at the end there is the reason I support sailors of the high seas.

its like buying a normal car and then they change to buy with 2 wheels and for 500 bucks more you get the other 2 as a premium car

With the whole food ordering thing - I find that often they just seem to add a flat amount on for most items so the % increase varies. If they just add +£1 for every item on the menu it means the £5 item is only +20% but £1 item is now doubled... I've actually had restaurants tell me to just phone them and order directly in future to avoid this BS

You can sign up for a trial subscription on a gift card with just enough money to cover it so if you forgot about it, you don't keep getting charged

The Amazon delivery date one is slightly misleading, because as we can see he bought other stuff as well. Amazon tends to "bundle" separate deliveries to the same day, since most people doesn't have the free time to lounge all day everyday waiting for deliveries so that way they can just get all of them on a day off or something.

I'm in Canada here, and when talking about Amazon pre-selecting the 'alternative delivery time' option, it is 100% true. My next day delivery (with prime) was unselected and the alternative one was. It does seem to be hit and miss though. Sometimes its there, sometimes it's not. It may be a situation where the item you're getting wasn't originally 'available' for next-day shipping but a particular deal/sale made it so and it was a 'new' option that wasn't normally available because the item usually needed to be imported.

Falsely advertising discounts is illegal in Australia but the enforcement is, naturally, extremely difficult. Companies are also obligated to provide itemized billing upon request (but not as a standard) so you can get breakdowns of Uber trips etc as a price per KM or minute (this is actually standardised in taxis now, all meters will show price per KM or minute as well as flagfall)

As far as the Amazon cart selecting slower delivery, seems to happen on items without next-day or same-day, especially when you have a big cart with items coming from different locations and they can try to put items into a single delivery date

Australia has very strict price anchoring laws.. one of our biggest supermarket chains had to change the sticker system for prices since they kept getting caught out for anchoring

19:35 they triple dip in the price with the mark up, the service fee and the delivery fee. Because the order is too small the mark up is barely anything so they add a fee to make up for it

Airbnb used to be great in early days and around 2017 you start to have people that would come in and do drugs, quality just goes straight off the cliff from that point.

wait he said all of that and then advertised a subscription? okay we’re in black mirror.

I think with Gyms and things like that that require cancellation in person is because you need to hand over your membership card. While they can create your profile and set you up online/phone and when you come in the first time you pick up the card or its mailed to you. But this is likely because those cards all have the same access key to get through the doors, so they gotta make sure you arent cancelling and then still coming in to use the facilities.

Amazon is great for finding very specific things that would be almost impossible in a Walmart or Best Buy. Which are almost always out of stock or have 1 option that isnt exactly what you want.

8:54 remember it was netflix themselves that said "sharing a password is love" before saying it was stealing and locking you out from sharing with friends or family.

I cancel all my unwanted subscriptions by ordering new credit card with a new numbers works every time

When I built my PC 7 years ago I bought some stuff on Amazon because it was cheaper, others I went to other electronics stores because that was cheaper. Amazon runs on convenience factor. 2 day shipping is built into the price so if you don't need it immediately it's usually a better price elsewhere

These companies aren’t “the internet”

Agreed on the not fake story for call center help. Years ago I worked for ATT in San Antonio and upselling was a required part of what we were supposed to do while closing out a call.

It’s always amusing to see these people who demand governmental control for these companies when the people themselves can’t control themselves. We have left the digital age and went headfirst into the ADHD age. People of all ages are impatient af now and are willing to spend ungodly amounts of money just to get their dopamine hit faster. Also people these days have wants that they are conflicting as needs and thus are more likely to be manipulated into spending more.

in eu they broke rules getting into marketplace and that lead to whole market shittification

I knew everything sucked before it was cool. Now I just wait for the sweet release of death by snu snu.

*I've now started to immediately lose faith in anything up and coming that goes public on the stock exchange* 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

43:11 I heard that there was a bill that was in talks to be passed that covered the idea that subscription based services have to ensure that canceling the service was as seamless and effortless as enacting the subscription. I’m not really sure what happened to that, but it was relatively recent. As in, the last couple of years.

This had me going through all my stuff to get rid of ancillary or no longer needed subscriptions. Thanks for the money saving, Asmon.

How amazon handles returns and resells is trash. Someone returns a destroyed package and then someone else gets it

Taxis are super expensive because the government levies many high price certifications and permits. It, as many high price items, is the government's fault.

As a former AT&T sales rep, i can attest to what Asmon was talking about @ 34:35. One time when I was making my usual sales, I came across an old lady asking for technical help. Helped her reconnect her TV as cables were jumbled for some reason. After I helped her out, my team leader got mad at me for not upselling someone who clearly just needed help despite me actually trying to sell the old lady a new TV set so she doesn't have cable problems. Long story short, I left because they literally want every fucking cent they can get