New UI is an awful experience

Yes… I mean I’ve been pretty active in the Beta areas for this release and pretty vocal in my complaints - many of which have lately been addressed actually. My complaints aren’t always the same as others though so I get that there’s different priorities for some folks. Absolutely.

Edit: Just to clarify, my use is very Home Screen centric (lots of row customization) - me and my users rarely navigate into libraries directly.

My users went into their account settings and turned off all the online services without too much trouble. None of them care about this change. I gave them a heads up and bunch of info to manage it and they were just like “I can still find and play stuff so it’s fine, didn’t really notice”. :slightly_smiling_face:

Good. I don’t want you to tell me how I use my Plex account just because I’m connected to your server. I’m connected to multiple servers including my own and so are my users - how would that work in your mind when one admin turns off PlexTV and Online Services and the other doesn’t? What about if one admin disables watch indicators and the other doesn’t? That’s account level, not server level too…
If you have managed users you absolutely control it for them, so if that’s what you want you should setup managed users instead. Then you can control those aspects directly.

For your other points, most of that is kinda basic business models that are annoying - ads and data mining and opt-out rather than opt-in - but you can absolutely turn them off. If you couldn’t turn them off that’d be very different. It’s not even buried or hard to do.
There are aspects that are definitely pushing their profit products which wasn’t an aspect of the brand before that became a thing, and some ways of handling changes and features that I think takes users\customers for granted (I’ve certainly said as much myself), but I wouldn’t call it nefarious “enshittification” necessarily. There are definitely signs that if they keep up with some of that user\customer mishandling they could end up on the fully enshittification route but for now it’s less “on the route” and more, at least for me, a potential to watch out for (which is why I’ve been playing with Emby and Jellyfin lately). It’s kinda always a potential for any business chasing profits these days. Yay Capitalism! :stuck_out_tongue:

The one I think kinda fits enshittification is them changing course on remote access and locking it behind a paywall. That was a lock-in function they took away; for many it wasn’t a big deal because most local admins have plex pass and that includes ANY user remote access so was mostly a wash but definitely designed to push people towards a plex pass. I think Emby handles remote access better where you can either use managed users and free remote access or if you want “simpler” authentication you can pay for a hosted option.

Otherwise, I do think folks use enshittification a bit off as a term… it’s not just business practices we don’t like it’s a direct user lock-in abuse. I think the term has gotten kinda skewed like “gaslighting” is used often to just mean lying instead of the more manipulative aspect it really means. So with that in mind… no I’m not thrilled with some of Plex’s choices and it’s soured me on their brand a bit and they definitely have harmed the customer good will and reputation they used to hold. Hopefully some of the recent changes are a reversal… and if not… it’s a product and business for watching tv shows and movies… there are other solutions. :slight_smile:

Edit2: Here’s an example recently where “this looks like enshittification” came up: Plex Movies & Shows listings displayed despite having it disabled … pushing Plex Movies and TV on that screen even though it was turned off was a concern about that direction … but it was a bug and was fixed. The fact users in that thread weren’t sure it was a bug and not a new “feature” is an example of Plex’s declined reputation. As long as those types of situations are treated as bugs then I’ll hold off on the “enshittification” label. But if it was a “new feature” - I’d have called that a red flag.

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