Self-hosted media app starts narcing on its own users' anime and X-rated habits with an opt-out service, and it's going terribly
There comes a time in every app, website, or even game's life where it works about as well as it should. Unfortunately, due to the way society is, the question then asked is: 'how do we make more money?' We've all seen it. Weird bells and whistles added to perfectly functioning services that take away more than they add.
History has repeated itself with Plex, a streaming app that lets you build your own Netflix, in a sense.
Plex allows users to construct their own libraries, either collecting stuff from free streaming services, or creating their own «media servers» with whatever content you've got the files for. Then you can broadcast that to your T.V.
As spotted by 404media, however, an attempt to ramp up engagement has led to disaster. The «discover together» feature, introduced at the start of November, tries to capture the «Water Cooler Effect», i.e.
recommending your favourite shows during office small-talk.
This allows you to add friends, which isn't a bad idea in itself. Being able to share your library of totally-legally-obtained anime with your buds is cool in theory. It's also meant to create an ecosystem of automatic recommendations based on what you and your friends watch, which hit its logical conclusion last week.
Plex added a new «week in review» feature to the whole discover together thing.
In short, Plex will now share what you, and any user on one of your servers, has been watching. In a weekly round-up email. Sent to everyone else you know.
And it's opt-out. Uh oh.
This has been going down about as smoothly as a glass of nails. The Plex forums' general discussion section has some hefty complaint threads.
