For me, discovery is the entire reason to use streaming services. I have a ton of hard drive space, and know how to find anything I want to download. I have a fairly large music collection from before the days of streaming. But streaming services help me discover all kinds of things I'd likely never hear otherwise. They still suck, as in they're greedy as hell and the quality is mid, but I don't know what I'd do if I had to listen to the same stuff all the time.
There will likely be no benefit for the employees or the users. For the PE firm, the goal is usually to pump up the value and resell or reenter the market, at a massive profit, in a few years. To do that, they'll have to make a lot of unpopular choices, such as layoffs and other cost cutting measures. If they're privately held, those choices have far less impact on the value of the company, since the stock market is heavily swayed by public perception.
Sync. It seemed to have the closest feature set to RiF early on and I've just stuck with it since then. I try other apps occasionally. They all have their strengths but Sync feels the most polished.
edit: Sync has started the inserting ads into my feed. Maybe they always have and I just didn't see them because I use DNS based ad blocking? They have an ad free version, but it's too much at $20. Even worse, the "ultimate" edition uses a subscription model, or is $99. For a Lemmy app? Insane. Guess it's time to change apps.
I won't lie, they pulled the wool over my eyes with Starfield. I kept waiting for that moment where they brought it all together and suddenly it would be a great game. I was shook when the credits rolled and I hadn't yet found the fun part.
That's what's stopping me too. I've tried to convince them that Youtube Music (I'm a holdover from the Play Music days, RIP) is good enough but they won't have it. I miss Songza.
A number of Android phones support most of this functionality. Unfortunately, you have to actually click on a "Lockdown mode" button after long pressing power+volume-up. Hopefully Google catches up here.
Even if this is true, and I'm not arguing that it isn't, if you've committed a different crime with a worse punishment, you'll have to take that into consideration.
Have you considered that your approach may contribute to your difficulties dealing with such people? The tone of your messages is extremely aggressive.
We get so much chocolate at Halloween. I'm not a big candy guy (pastries for me, thank you), and I'm sure as hell not letting my kids have unrestricted access to caffeine and sugar. We almost always have some left when the next Halloween rolls around. If I have a piece in September it will likely have bloom on it.
When I was a kid, I had seen, or at least heard of, nearly every TV show from my parent's generation. Going back probably 40 years. Like, I've probably seen every Looney Tunes, every episode of M.A.S.H., and most episodes of The Munsters, because some days there wasn't anything else to watch. My kids look at me crazy if I haven't heard of the latest flash-in-the-pan influencer, but if I bring up a 10-year old movie or TV show, they have no idea what I'm talking about.
It's the "see no evil" approach. If you didn't report the issue while the admin was online, then they aren't compelled to do anything about it. Convenient for the project maintainer who doesn't actually like maintaining things. Awful for the rest of us.
A bunch of the servers I'm on actively discourage the use of threads. No idea why. In a different server I'm on, an admin creates a thread for every post in general, so that people can talk about the post without cluttering up the main thread. I wish more servers followed that example.
For me, discovery is the entire reason to use streaming services. I have a ton of hard drive space, and know how to find anything I want to download. I have a fairly large music collection from before the days of streaming. But streaming services help me discover all kinds of things I'd likely never hear otherwise. They still suck, as in they're greedy as hell and the quality is mid, but I don't know what I'd do if I had to listen to the same stuff all the time.