My hot take is that you don’t actually want fewer streamers. As it stands, pirates benefit the most from content wars because the services are paying more to produce shows than they are receiving in subscriptions.

The obvious losses are legacy content and access to it. I don’t know that there’s a good solution. A streaming service benefits most from surfacing content that will keep you on the platform, meaning either a modern series with promised future seasons, or older content that’s still popular. Any old obscure media is going to lose money for rights holders on a $/stream deal because they could potentially make more $ from a single physical media sale than any amount of streaming would net them (if it’s $/stream, and only 2 people stream it, that’s very little return). And nobody subscribing to these services is going to shell out more money for specific titles because to them, that’s why they’re subscribing in the first place.

I thought this as well, but I’ve started to think they could be useful if I follow way more aggressively, and create a list that is “what I want on my feed” and default to that. It’s stupidly cumbersome, but would have the desired effect. Of course you’re right that they should just let you add directly to a list - I think the reasoning for the current functionality is to limit stalking/harassment, though I don’t exactly understand how that is inhibited at all.

Some game-of-telephone misinformation originating from this article - though it has gone from Google killed it (which this article states), to it was a protocol that allowed Facebook and Google to communicate and then got killed, to Facebook killed it.