As usual, ¡el problema es el capitalismo!, but this is a very well written and researched article which includes technical breakdowns of the subtitling software used by different companies over the years (including AegiSub my beloved) and timelines for how and when subtitle quality began to decline.

The article makes it very clear that capitalism is why we cannot have good things (apparently things as simple as color, positioning and fonts in our subtitles). There is a bunch of technical discussion about low-end devices however, and how that could be solved with hardsubs and stuff, to which I want to say:

I will grant that maybe el cheapo Android TV stick cannot render fully animated and anti-aliased spinning text in 4k at 30Hz (in software), but surely rendering like a static frame of a couple of words every other second at a reasonable resolution should be doable. Yes even when those words are in color and at an angle. So that’s just more penny pinching. They merely do not care to figure out how to do it, because that would mean hiring some people.

This is one of the best articles i’ve seen in a while, it’s so long i’ll actually have to read it in chunks.

Other sites would’ve split it up into 3 articles.