Streaming services, digital services in general, should be made to compete on having the best platform, not on exclusive content.

The way to get that is to split them and say: a streaming provider can’t be a content creator as well. That way, content creating companies would be incentivized to sell their content to every streaming provider at a price that the market will bear, and streaming providers would be incentivized to compete on providing the best experience to their users.

I’ve no problem with paying for good services

Exactly. It used to be that netflix was all you needed to get most quality content, and it was a fair deal for customers: you pay a reasonable monthly amount, and you and your family gets convenient access to most streamable movies and TV series.

Now that quality content is spread out and locked out over half a dozen other streaming services, and subscribing to them all is not just a hassle but also incredibly bad value compared to the original offer.

In a healthy competitive environment, you would expect companies to counter reduced value by increasing customer value in other ways or by reducing prices, but instead we got price hikes, lots of low quality filler content, crack downs on password sharing, advertising, various unpopular UI changes and other service reductions decreasing value even further.

To solve this, I think the content producers and streaming services should be split up, because right now they’re not really competitors in a true sence but small monopolies who each clutch the keys to their own little franchises. It should be noted for example that music streaming works a lot better: there are various competitors that each hold a viable content library on their own, so you don’t need more than one music streaming service. IMO that’s because Spotify, Tidal, YT Music, etc. are merely distributors and not the actual producers.

You can use the wildcard domain

Yeah the problem was more that this machine is running on a network where I don’t really control the DNS. That is to say, there’s a shitty ISP router with DHCP and automatic dynamic DNS baked in, but no way to add additional manual entries for vhosts.

I thought about screwing with the /etc/hosts file to get around it but what I ended up doing instead is installing a pihole docker for DNS (something I had been contemplating anyway), pointing it to the router’s DNS, so every local DNS name still resolves, and then added manual entries for the vhosts.

Another issue I didn’t really want to deal with was regenerating the TLS certificate for the nginx server to make it valid for every vhost, but I just bit through that bullet.

Is it really that bad if kids see a bit of porn? Like really? I grew up before the internet, but even in my day porn mags and VHS tapes got passed around when I was a teenager. Kids are always going to be curious.

Even so on the internet there are much worse things than porn that are harmful for the development of children. There are various groups of questionable morality like incels, or other mysogynistic groups, alt right stuff like neonazis, christofascists, climate deniers, … If I had children, I would be much more concerned about them falling into one of those ideological traps than them seeing some titties. Hell, even TikTok is probably more harmful for giving them a dopamine addiction and an increasingly short attention span.

So to me, it seems a bit weird to single out porn. It feels like a convenient scapegoat for parents who don’t want to spend time raising their kids and paying attention to what they are looking at on the internet.