[Fire TV Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] harlekinwashere:
At least you are open about it and willing to learn. Have to give you props for that. :)

The issue with "give us money for free, casual" (last posting about this) is that you dont get support with it. Usually. ("I found it on facebook - it told me it would give me free for only 99.99...") So what happend to this community initially is that it got the "frenzy fun - bought for simple and free and it worked yesterday" crowd during the entire popularity peak of this device.

The Kodi community lost Android maintainers to the "i think we can make money here as well" pull and resulting internal conflict (and thats fair, but...), had to push through a public statement about its zero tolerance policy on piracy addon support, because they were swamped (30 postings a day - with people that never read anything but the tagline sold to them by shady thirdparties) with people looking up "Kodi" and then going on to solicit "help requests" from a dev community "facebook style ("my girlfriends old mother, ...")".

Reddit was full with bad advice, some of which was popularized by bloggers that saw it as a commercial opportunity (mostly talking about the youtuber scene, but not exclusively).

Kodi was removed from the Amazon Appstore on grounds of "public perception" (thanks "free and easy for a onetime payment of 99.99 crowd") alone - Amazon was allowed to start heavily overreaching and deciding what apps people would be allowed to use on the device (almost no one even had an issue with anything they did (ruined the basis of existence for the homebrew scene (if you are an app developer - how about you submit the app to our store?), by stripping out basics that we needed (which is why you probably won't be able to recover the device - even if it is recoverable ("is it running recent Amazon software"?)) - people just were afraid to loose free and as a result complacent to the actions that took place - people shushed you if you had nothing but cursewords for Amazon actively destroying the ecosystem - because as long as they left piracy working - "maybe it wasnt that bad") and what apps would have to be disabled (the ones that reduced their advertising effectiveness) - and the most popular people at that time were the bloggers that decided, that the crowd should enjoy "easy and free" (as in advertisment supported, as far as they were concerned), all the way until Amazon switched the rails and led them just as "easy and free" back into the subscription model again. Bloggers and all.

The subscription model needs channel exclusivity (or backroom deals) and heavy DRM safe guards, so If thats what people wanted all along, why did they cosy up with the hacking scene? (Which is strongly linked to consumer and device rights ideals, the open source ethos, ....) Those are two basically contrary vantage points.

You factory reset your Fire TV, right? It was easier that way - right? Using Plex - also, very easy. Its right there on the frontpage. Just sign into your account, pay the monthly fee...

So two lessons

- Never underestimate a crowd pulled by the sentiment of "free" to be able to ruin a community and leave only ashes.

- If they get pulled back into a subscription model again - let them. They want easy - they don't know how. They pay 10 USD a month and they get someone to talk to them for that, on the other end of a phone line.

But why should the hacking community ever provide product support essentially "for Amazon?" We arent responsible if a device becomes defect on its own. We arent the ones that told you to buy from a shady source that eliminated the warranty and "gesture of good will" exchange options. We are just the ones the "free and easy crowd" would never pay 50 bucks an hour (or more), because it probably would turn out to be more than they paid for the entire set up device (automated) in the fist place. The one that was supposed to give them free.

So this becomes a charity. (If people are in it to learn, it becomes a learning environment.. - but everyone just wanted easy - so...)

And what do you do with charities as a majority group? You try to exploit them. In some cases. Nature of the beast I guess.. ;)