Information asymmetry is a thing, but EMH nominally handles that; prices quickly shoot up to the max any one guy is willing to pay
Suppose we have a stock and a bunch of investors. All of the investors have some set of information implying a value v. Except, one investor is smarter and finds an edge (rise of AI or whatever) which implies a value of 2v.
That investor will buy the stock any price up to 2v. The rest of the investors will be happy to sell at any price above v. Given unlimited money the price should stabilise at 2v very quickly.
However there are lots of real-world caveats like, not everyone has an infinite money glitch.. and there are probably second-order and third-order effects like some hedge fund notices the pattern and does XYZ which influences price... options make price a function of expectation of price, then the price of options is driven by the expected price of the same options near execution date... idk
I think the take is: If 100k people watch the episode, spending $200 more for higher quality subtitling comes out to... a whopping 0.2 cents per person (per episode). Let's just say that would cost an extra $1/month per person. Are they price sensitive enough that they won't go to a competitor that's a few dollars more expensive per month if it has better subtitles? I don't know, but maybe some manager believed they were, and thus it was worth it to make the subscription a little cheaper.
> Are they price sensitive enough that they won't go to a competitor that's a few dollars more expensive per month if it has better subtitles
Outside of Asia, Crunchyroll is a de-facto monopoly on legal anime. From the article, 70% of new releases are exclusive to Crunchyroll. They're not losing customers to platforms with better subs, because customers have no alternative.
(Besides pirating, but I assume the golden age of Tier 1 fan subs is over)
> I assume the golden age of Tier 1 fan subs is over
That's just because the legal options were easily available, right? Kind of like people stopped pirating as much when Netflix was actually decent. But now the tides are turning again, so maybe the fan subs will start coming back as well.
There used to be an unwritten rule in fansubbing that you should only fansub anime that didn't have a licensed release - but of course that was during the time when barely any anime got licensed.
Still, though, I wonder if that mindset is still going to be around.
Less now, but the bar is higher because now there's a baseline good enough product, so even if in the past you'd have done it anyway with more care, now unless the official sub is bad enough, why would you bother?
I remember seeing (I think Netflix release) of Komi-san can't communicate, noticing A lot of things being missed, like Komi's literal main manner of communication (A notebook where she writes) not getting any translation for some episodes, or a lot of things I'd have to fill others in that normally at least would have been a T/N in fansub
It was bad enough that I went looking elsewhere to see if I had missed more than I realized, and the fansub did have everything covered
At the moment the threshold for a fansub getting made or not is whether or not the licensed releases are "good enough". If the official releases are terrible, expect someone to step up and at least fix the typesetting even if they use the script from the license.
Also, it’s trivial to standup a minimal quality stt+translation workflow in something like comfyui, all freely available models, and run on modest consumer gpu, ~3050 is just fine. If you’re handy with this tech you can do a lot better. If crunchyroll is only going to have slightly better quality then it can be appealing even to moderate fans who wouldn’t spend the time doing things manually.
I don't think that's accurate to the current market. Ten years ago it was true but in 2025 they have several competitors and not nearly as many exclusives. I can name several counterarguments.
* Shonen anime, which are consistently the most popular ones, are also on netflix and probably several other services. Eg, demon slayer, dandadan, etc.
* there are still shows that are japan-exclusive because nobody bothers to license them. Roboshinkalion is an entire franchise that nobody cares to import! We actually had to wait two extra years for gridman universe because nobody bothered to license it for English localization!
* just this year they failed to obtain the rights to Mobile Suit Gundam G-Quuuuuux and Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt because amazon outbid them. These are both new entries in well-established brands and they're both made by studios with large fan followings (khara for g-quuuuuux and trigger for panty and stocking).
* somehow Hulu ended up breaking harmony gold's 45-year blockade around the macross franchise and won exclusive streaming rights.
* netflix has a lot of exclusives these days, including Jojo stone ocean and the upcoming steelball run.
At least in Europe, if CR has licensed a show or a season, then nobody else can license the same show or season. There's always exactly one place to watch one particular show or season. So, no competition - licensing goes to one, and only one place. Likewise, if Netflix has licensed something then CR isn't getting that license (e.g. Komi Can't Communicate - it's on Netflix, therefore not available on CR)
This may be true for current seasons but previous seasons and finished series are often available on other services. At least crunchyroll and Netflix have an overlap (in Sweden). Frieren is available on both as an example.
i think you've counted it in a way that makes it sound cheap, but in reality isnt.
$100k per month is extra revenue, if they do a half-assed job. A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).
The price of the subscription is already adjusted to be the maximum of what the market would bear for maximum revenue - presumably raising that price higher would lead to lower subscribers and revenue.
>A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).
When fansubs were good, Crunchyroll was forced to compete with them on quality. It's hard to convince people to pay when the alternative is both free and much higher quality.
Now that they've driven fansubs groups "out of business", they no longer face the same degree of competitive pressure to deliver a quality product.
My recollection is that, by the early days of Crunchyroll, fansubs weren't really competing on quality so much as speed. And with the legitimate licensors having access to the scripts slightly in advance of the Japanese release, the fansubs could never catch up to them in release speed.
Why is the $1 added to the subscription cost? They don't redo the subs every month. It's developing subs once and then enjoy the benefits forever. It should be a cost that's amortized over something.
Well, it's not completely crazy. They don't redo the subs for an old show every month. But they do create new subs for new shows every month. They have constant, ongoing costs of subtitle development, and if they permanently increase those costs, they will be spending additional money (compared to the alternative) every month forever.
They have 17 million paying subscribers. If they subtitled 1,000 episodes of content a month * 200$ = 200k / 17 million ~= 1 cent per subscriber per month. Actual cost per subscriber is well below that.
> Are they price sensitive enough that they won't go to a competitor that's a few dollars more expensive per month if it has better subtitles?
They should probably consider that this competitor is actually mpv playing the DRM-free blu-ray quality fully subtitled mkv files obtained for a grand total of zero dollars from organized groups of people who simply care about anime to an absurd degree.
"Paying customer" is a synonym for "fool" in this context. Paying for inferior products is just foolish. It is damaging to one's self-respect. It is even more damaging for the reputation of the corporation. A bunch of fans regularly put them to shame by releasing better products on a daily basis. That's just pathetic.
I'm actually one of the fools who tries to support creators by "buying" (licensing with 0 rights) their things. Why do you think I'm so angry at the shit quality of the products I receive in return? Anger doesn't even begin to describe what I feel when I pay for streaming services and get video so poorly encoded they have artifacts in black frames.
I am also paying for crunchyroll and trying to support the creators in various ways.
But still, I often find myself watching anime from fansub groups even though I have a legitimate, official way of watching them. Paying for a streaming service that is objectively, significantly worse than even the shittier pirate offerings does make me feel like a fool.
Anime will not disappear if CR implodes. It will still be funded by the Japanese market and other streamers. There will probably be fewer shows per season for a while, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
And sometimes it's more fun when there's no central source. Snarky chapter titles and leaving in a commercial for Morning Rescue when editing down the TV rip? Sure, why not.
I don't believe managers can operate with that kind of precision. I don't know how they'd execute the "let's spend 200$ more" idea. You're either in a quality or in a cost reduction mindset usually, these are _really_ difficult to mix for management. I know I've tried :) When you even bring up how long something takes, that can already have adverse effects on quality without you actually decreeing anything.
Well, they can, and at least did. I know because I was one of them! The P&L that I rolled up to our execs was dead simple as well. I think everyone had a pretty clear picture of what was going on, down to the fraction of the hour.
I just wish that there were versions of closed captioning that were fan-made and kept. There are movies that I watch over-and-over again that have bad subtitles, and I can do nothing about it. This is a travesty for the hearing-impaired, and the only good thing about it is that on occasion a film may have Easter eggs in their subtitles or things from the script that didn’t make it into production.
It’s cheaper than you might think. Much like in gaming, there’s a lot of people who really want to work in the anime industry, even if it’s just on the localization and distribution side. This drives down salaries quite a bit.
Someone who knows English natively and Japanese sufficiently is necessary for producing quality subtitles; it's arguable that potentially having slightly less accurate subtitles (i.e. missing nuance) is better than having slightly less fluent English (i.e. not communicating in a natural-sounding manner).
It's not just about translation, after all, but localization. While you can (or kind of have to) assume some level of familiarity with Japanese life/culture for someone watching anime, it's easier for a native English speaker/someone who grew up in North America to notice cultural disconnects and figure them out.
An example I once heard: a book in Italian might say the character "ordered a coffee" and then "picked up the coffee, drank it, and walked out of the cafe". An Italian without as much consideration of American culture might translate that directly, but someone who understands localization would know that Italian character ordered what we would call an espresso, and know to change the text to be specific; otherwise, it sounds as though the person is guzzling an entire mug of black coffee on the spot, which would likely come across as psychotic and unnerving compared to taking a single shot of espresso.
Likewise, an Italian reader of an American novel might be unable to comprehend how or why an American character could spend 20 minutes nursing a cup of coffee, because they might be picturing a 1-2 oz espresso rather than a drip coffee.
So yeah, that's the big part of why it can't just be someone who knows English to some sufficient degree - because without fluency in spoken and written English, familiarity with how things would be said in English, and cultural differences between Japan and North America, you're going to end up with all kinds of dissonance.
While I agree, it's all a our whether they can pass the cost off to the customer. Customers will care a lot for food quality - will they tolerate a price increase to preserve sub quality or accept lower quality for the same sub price? Are there competitors?
These are the questions that would get played out in the decision process.
Reminds me of products on Amazon with little to know information about the product and photoshopped images. Somehow it was worth making, but selling? Who can be bothered.
This is really what’s driving business AI products’ push by fleece vest set, though: knowing that they can make enshitification just that much more attractive.
ADHD isn't a personality quirk and also, it is fundamentally a disorder of regulation not attention. The education system (for all its drawbacks and inflexibility) works for most because they're able to regulate the urge to get up and climb random shit when they can't figure out how to start writing the answer to Q1 on the worksheet..
I also think its cope to take a disorder where a specific part of the brain tasked with very specific functions is physically less dense and performs than other people and go "ADHD isnt real he's just quirky!1"
I guess its tempting to take like MRI/ECG style studies and draw fundamental conclusions from them about the distinction between "personality" and "disorder" but I think its good to bear in mind at least three things:
1. a lot of these studies suck. Brain imaging is very hard, the interpretation and analysis of the results involves lots of degrees of freedom, the study sizes are typically not as big as you'd like, and most of the results are only really visible in aggregate. I do not give much credence to them, as a scientist. One way to think of this is that if someone separates two groups of people into "ADHD" and "NOT ADHD" and you average their MRIs you might detect a difference in the two groups. But one person's MRI would be almost useless to assign them to one of the two groups. You could certainly try it, but it would not be very effective.
2. Literally every difference in behavior between two people or between a person and themselves at a different time is necessarily reflected in a difference in brain behavior, at least if you buy the materialist paradigm that brain -> mind or at least brain == mind. Thus, you would expect differences in personality to show up in MRI scans as well as differences which rise to the level of "disorder."
3. The brain isn't made up of "specific parts with specific functions." While its certainly true that we can roughly map different areas to different functions, its really not separable in any way that (for example) a human designed machine might be. We cannot remove and replace your "attention center" and it doesn't really mean anything to talk about it without all the rest of your brain. The part/whole relation is bullshit in all contexts (in my opinion as a mereological nihilist) but especially in neuroscience.
I guess its sort of a useful rhetorical frame to point to physical differences between brains as some kind of determination of the distinction between "mere" personality differences and "disorders" but I just don't think it makes sense in a fundamental way.
I'm a person with ADHD and Autism diagnoses and I think they are handy things to use from time to time, I think of them as entirely relational descriptions pertaining to my position with respect to the world, not fundamental ontological categories. On the other hand, I think of essentially everything as relational and I don't really believe in fundamental ontological categories so maybe I'm the fucked up one.
Nowhere did I claim ADHD was a personality quirk. Nowhere did I claim ADHD wasn't real. I'm not disputing the neurodevelopmental pathophysiology of ADHD. I'm questioning the labels society applies to people with such a disorder.
I claimed it's not the "attention deficit" people think it is. People with ADHD are clearly able focus when the subject is interesting enough to them. That's a huge contradiction. The truth is probably that school is way too boring for them.
I think signal to noise ratio is a good analogy. People with ADHD are easily distracted by noisy stimuli and need disproportionally high signal to focus. Society consistently fails to provide high enough SNR then labels neurodivergent people as problematic.
ADHD discussions always remind me of this article:
> People with ADHD are clearly able focus when the subject is interesting enough to them
"interesting enough" is not a sufficient condition. You may be super interested, very motivated, and yet completely unable to start. That is one of the most frustrating parts of ADHD to me. When and how hyperfocus kicks in seems to be mostly outside of your control.
it's just poorly named; it's an executive function disorder. The hyper focus you described is just as uncontrolled and pathological as lack of attention. I used to hyper focus on StumbleUpon. You think that's evidence I _don't_ have an attention disorder?
Stop spreading medical misinformation. You're extremely uninformed.
> it's just poorly named; it's an executive function disorder.
That's my point. Labeling people as having "attention deficit" leads to unnecessary stigma and marginalization.
> The hyper focus you described is just as uncontrolled and pathological as lack of attention.
I didn't say it was controlled or healthy. I said it was evidence that people with so called attention deficit were, in fact, capable of paying attention. And it is.
> You think that's evidence I _don't_ have an attention disorder?
Nobody claimed that.
> Stop spreading medical misinformation. You're extremely uninformed.
> Here are some lectures
Refer to lecture "Why is ADHD considered a disorder?".
When does it become a disorder? When it starts causing harm, adverse consequences, for the individual. When the environment starts kicking back.
In other words, if you can adapt the environment so that it doesn't kick back at the patient, harm is mitigated.
In other words, ADHD patients might adapt reasonably well to certain environments and not others, and we can reduce impairment by putting patients in an environment that is stimulating for them.
This logic is not even unique to ADHD. Numerous diseases have adaptation of the environmental as a vital part of the non-pharmacological treatment. For example, adapting the environment is vital for preventing falls in elderly patients.
So I don't see where the lectures disagree with me. I shadowed a neurologist who specialized in ADHD patients, he combined pharmacological treatment with this environmental approach and it was very successful. Schools labeling kids as problematic was a huge problem for us.
If MIT were responsible, sure! But Notion is a $10b company that shouldn't be shitting up my device's free memory just to show a basic webpage. Very much the same deal with FB marketplace which is probably the worst offender.
There are a couple of SaaS products in Australia that do examination transcription.
I know of one practice that went all-in on the stuff. They had to re-hire their secretaries after their AI transcription recorded "this bone normal, no damage to this other area" but totally failed to mention that the first part of the sentence was "distal fracture to whatever", ultimately failing at it's most basic bloody function.
I'm pretty sure the founders are not doctors but tech industry types, who figured that there was some non-zero error rate and just like, collectively shrugged at the consequences.
Suppose we have a stock and a bunch of investors. All of the investors have some set of information implying a value v. Except, one investor is smarter and finds an edge (rise of AI or whatever) which implies a value of 2v.
That investor will buy the stock any price up to 2v. The rest of the investors will be happy to sell at any price above v. Given unlimited money the price should stabilise at 2v very quickly.
However there are lots of real-world caveats like, not everyone has an infinite money glitch.. and there are probably second-order and third-order effects like some hedge fund notices the pattern and does XYZ which influences price... options make price a function of expectation of price, then the price of options is driven by the expected price of the same options near execution date... idk
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