this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
51 points (96.4% liked)

Anime

4809 readers
156 users here now

This community is the place to discuss and ask questions about anime, anime news, and related topics.

Currently airing show discussion threads are created by our resident bot, rikka@ani.social. If it doesn't make a thread for an episode that you want to discuss, see the user guide on the wiki for instructions on how to ask rikka to make a thread for you to use.

Check out our wiki to find:

Rules

More complete rules on the wiki.

Post Tags

Post tags are completely optional, but some recommended tags would include:

Related General Communities

Chat

Thanks to @NineSwords@ani.social for running the discord!


rikka

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Rottcodd@ani.social 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I dunno... granted that I'm extremely cynical, that just doesn't sound like corporate behavior. I would more expect CR to just count on exclusive licensing and the convenience of siccing governments on pirates to protect their market share from any possible ill effects of downgrading their player.

I mean - Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to specifically describe a process involving online platforms and a combination of private users and business customers, but really the broad process is common to pretty much every corporate product/service in existence, and undeniably including streaming services.

Again though, I'm extremely cynical...

[–] Unboxious@ani.social 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think you're indeed being a little too cynical here. Enshittification happens because corps are trying to squeeze every cent they can out of everyone they interact with. It's not like they're going out of their way to make things worse; that's just an incidental thing that happens sometimes when a guy with an MBA sees a cost he thinks can be cut. In this case I think the target was a relatively expensive development team; any changes to how much work is put into translation and localization would be a separate matter.

Also keep in mind that they have some terrifying rivals - Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+. Each of these rivals has solid offerings in the anime world, and each of them has a deep warchest they could pull from if they wanted to fight Crunchyroll for exclusives. Up 'til now one of the biggest reasons to have a Crunchyroll account over those others has been (believe it or not) the quality of the subtitles. For all of Crunchyroll's mistakes, those others do it far worse. If Crunchyroll actually dropped their subtitle quality and got rid of features like typesetting I think they'd lose a lot of customers. Oh, and I guess HiDive also exists. They'll need to make some serious upgrades such as "a video player that plays videos consistently" or "a next episode button that actually plays the next episode" before they can threaten Crunchyroll though.

[–] Rottcodd@ani.social 3 points 5 months ago

Yeah - I'd have to say that I'm being too cynical, since I didn't see anything there I'd disagree with.

And I hadn't considered the scale of CR's competition - that's a good point.

But then we're back to it not making sense...