Wow.
This might be the worst feature rollout I’ve ever seen, and it’s entirely unsurprising.
As shown in a number of other threads on this forum (default max-quality streaming comes to mind), Plex has made a conscious choice that users are theirs, not yours. Every product change introduced in the last 4+ years has been designed from that perspective. Knowing this helps explain why every time a Plex representative enters one of these community threads, it seems like they completely (and intentionally) cannot understand your viewpoint, or why these changes would be frustrating.
There are plenty of reasons that make this feature rollout excellent proof of the above statement. Posts in this thread and others have detailed a number of them.
You really only need to look at the fact that the UX for privacy setting management was broken on self-hosted UI, but functional on app.plex.tv.
It’s relatively clear that this disconnect in user ownership is intentional. Support pages concerning data privacy use language that shows they know security and anonymity is incredibly important to server admins. People are very protective about their media, and I think a previous poster in this thread accurately described it as a “gray area”.
Plex knows this change makes server owners uncomfortable, but they’re making a bet. Ever since they took additional funding back in 2021, it’s been clear that they are all in on AVOD content, and think that revenue sharing will be the answer to the growth expectations that come with VC money. I’m sure they expect it to vastly exceed any Plex Pass revenue, if it doesn’t already.
My guess is that they expect this feature to drive engagement with the AVOD area of their platform. Plex licenses some content from a big tv/film studio, user gets an email that their friend watched that show, it’s not a show you have on your server so the user watches it via AVOD and Plex makes $$$.
Their bet is that they can get more users interested in this system than they will lose by admins abandoning the platform. Maybe. I’m not convinced. On its face, this feature seems an incredibly misguided effort. There’s a reason Netflix/Apple TV/any other streaming platform doesn’t do this. It has the stink of big-tech-data-harvesting-privacy-concern all over it. I’m guessing that vastly more users will be put off by the email than will be interested in any of its offerings.
People want to control what gets shared about them. They want to curate what’s shared, how it’s shared, and with who it’s shared. They want it to paint them in a positive light. When a service tracks them and does the sharing automatically it makes them feel uncomfortable, and the majority response is going to be to reduce their activity.
It’s pretty concerning that Plex doesn’t understand this. It’s an extremely well-trodden and well-understood part of software/data engineering. If you’re going to collect user activity, obtain a well-informed opt-in, do it as anonymously as possible, do it quietly, and definitely do not share it with everyone the user is connected to in a big email blast.
Regardless, Plex knows that above all else, the real value for existing admins is how similar its UX is to every other streaming platform. It turns content that would normally be inaccessible to your dad, your aunt, your less techy friends into an experience that matches every other app they already use. Plex also knows that (at least right now) users are ultimately tied to their admins. If I turn off my Plex server tomorrow, every single one of my 58 users will never open the app again. None of them consume any AVOD content. The only thing keeping admins from leaving is that the alternatives add a whole bunch of friction to the process, and that’s the one thing we care about most. The alternatives are less like the services admins want to mimic, especially in the ways that matter to our less tech-savvy users.
Plex continues to disappoint. I desperately wish this project could be open-sourced.
If I could appeal to anything, I’d say that @elan and the rest of Plex have built an amazing platform. It really is special. The ability to spin up a server and make a library of content we control accessible to friends through a sleek, familiar UX is unique and it’s what makes Plex so impressive. Please let us retain what makes that cool.
p.s. the plex representative comments attempting to paint this feature as “opt-in” are silly. everyone in this thread can see what’s happening and reason through what a proper opt-in experience should look like. just be honest with us.
