I cancelled my premium (lite) sub. Don’t need that service for $60 per year

What the heck is this thing? Should many of us care?

Things like this incentivise me to sit down and write an alternative. I just wish I had the time and energy to do so.

Ugh, so what’s the alternative?

I like Trakt as a concept, I’ve used it sporadically, but their pricing was always optimistic, even at $30 a year. It has worked for them overall so far because it’s a well made project and people like them, but the value proposition of paying $5 a month now for something like Trakt feels crazy. It’s hard to look at different types of services at that price point and come to the conclusion that Trakt is comparable. There are actual streaming services creating some of the shows that show up on Trakt that are very similar in price (Dropout as a good example).

Only rational thing I can think of with this recent decision is that they’re tired of running Trakt and hoping to sell it off or close it up.

There are open source alternatives? Do they handle Plex/Infuse integration? Trakt’s obsessive march toward enshitification has been pretty predictable, but maybe this price hike will be the last straw.

What is trakt do ?

For people outside of the loop,

Trakt has been running since 2010, it got popular because it lets you track and record your watch history with a UI that no one else seems to offer. It connects to Plex and other services so you can scrobble your watches, get notified of new episodes and movies, and has a social layer throughout the site to commune with other users and comment on what you’re watching.

In the past few years, however, there has been one controversy after another.

Trakt abruptly stopping using TVDB for its data due to API costs and now uses TMDB. This created a number of problem with data being mismatched or completely wrong. The leadership of TMDB has a lot of weird ideas about how shows and movies are formatted, splitting episodes into multiple episodes here and merging episodes and entire series together there, or even disqualifying series from being listed over arbitrary technicalities. Trakt blindly follows whatever TMDB does and their admins locked a long-running thread complaining about these issues on their own forums.

Trakt started arbitrarily changing the way the site looks. Including locking the original color scheme behind a paywall, leaving free users a new, gaudy bright purple color scheme that isn’t even complete (random elements of the free site are still the original maroon). The site overall is getting harder to load and uses far more resources than it did just a few years ago. Trakt launched a “lite” version of the site which is not light in size, it’s just the mobile UI for desktop which is just as resource intensive.

Recently, Trakt nerfed crucial features for free users (and even for paid users in certain ways), limiting playlist making and record-keeping to the point where free is almost useless. And the reduction of playlists, which are curated and shared by users on the site, reduces engagement throughout the entire community.

Now this.

The whole company is becoming corporate and as a result been subjected to enshitification.

I am still using it, for now, because I still benefit from the recommendations it gives me based on what I’ve already watched. Once that stops being the case, I’m just going to leave.

I keep text documents of everything I watch. What I enter into Trakt is just a mirror. Trakt does allow all users (including free users) to download their data and just bugger off. So everyone who uses them should go test that feature.