What can we do to stop it?

But apparently people don’t care? They just keep paying for this?

Is your goal to attempt to stop other people from falling for subscriptions? You would be setting yourself up for disappointment.

Or do you mean “what can we do to stop it [from harassing us personally]”?

When it’s only one or two a month it’s manageable, but now everything worth accessing is split over a dozen services. I gave the legal option a go and it became excessively expensive, so back to piracy. Both cheaper and more convenient.

I think some amount of it is apathy, or modern-life time-poor induced apathy where people just want something to work and work quickly without much effort or time and so they just pony up. And with so many people not keeping a budget, $10 a month here and there or $30 once a month doesn’t seem like much if you’re not adding up all those subs combined over a month or a year or 5 years. Really, some subs could fall into the category of a dark pattern because $10 a month doesn’t seem like much compared to say $100 up front even though over the course of a year (or 2, 3, 5+ years) that sub costs you more than just buying software up front. (Think also Sam Vines Boot Theory).

I see some people are getting fed up (I’m one of them) but sadly plenty more who mindlessly keep paying more and more.

I am too radicalized now. I refuse to fund my oppressors, and fuck all they can do about it.

I will teach my kids how to do it and advise them to never pay for engagement slop.

FAFO hollycreeps and recording studios, whatcha gonna about it, bitches ?

I used to have a program called netlimiter (needed to throttle individual aop downloads on a shared WISP that was slow as balls). I bought a lifetime license like 10 years ago because I liked the software. A couple years ago they got rid of the old version and bumped me up to the new version. About a year ago I got an email saying something along the lines of “pay our new subscription fee or you lose your access” and basically put me on a trial account. I pirated their old version years ago to see if I liked the software enough after a couple months. I no longer use that software.

Another time I bought a lifetime access for a game on patreon. About 2 years later the dev switched to a subscription only fee to access all the new content and never released anything from updated versions to the older public release. So essentially I bumped down to a free tier of access to a game I paid for.

I will pirate until I die. Fuck these douchebags.

I was thinking about this the other day when I heard Chick-fil-a wants to start their own streaming service. I feel like…it’s starting to feel like every big business is squeezing us like lemons. Not only do they artifically increase prices for their goods, but now they want us to pay for subscription services too.

It’s starting to feel extremely invasive. Surely, you would think there is a tipping point. But I also said that about the inflation of groceries and the general cost of living. But we haven’t seem to hit that point either, lol.

I think if you run Linux, you don’t notice it so much. Don’t need office suite or Adobe suitsäe or mediation apps or whatever… There are many decent free ones.

I don’t pay for any software at all actually, and my job pays for chat gpt…

I would pay if à la carte was remotely economical. For example a digital DRM movie rental should cost $1 in whatever resolution, on any device capable of playing it. A TV show should cost like $5 for a season or $0.5 per episode. To rent, not to own of course. I don’t care about ownership. With that model I would probably end up spending like $10-15/month on media, but I would feel better about it knowing the studio could pay more to those specific individuals who worked on the programs I am enjoying.

A subscription is a blank check to the studio to make whatever they think draws in subscribers, and to pay everyone involved as little as possible with no bonuses for blockbusters.

That’s the beauty of late stage capitalism.

Never. Red like must always ascend lest the gnashing of teeth from the shareholder comes to past.

My prediction is that now that tech has run out of its endless growth runway the- industry will begin to consolidate and they will have massive ecosystems that you can join for like 200 bucks a month

My peak was one. For like 5-6 years Netflix had enough content to keep me entertained by itself. When the other media companies started pulling their stuff off Netflix to make their own services I started pirating again. Why would I bother keeping track of multiple services when I can get one VPN subscription and have it all plus stuff that isn’t on any of them?

I know I’m in the minority but I am also a software developer, and I think subscriptions are a much healthier payment model for everyone. The issue IMO is not recurring payments but the total cost of ownership.

“Digitial goods” is very rarely just a thing that you produce once and then it’s done. The OS is regularly updated which causes incompatibilities, app stores introduce new demands, and there’s a constant stream of security vulnerabilities in your dependencies that need to be patched. Failing to adress any of these things breaks the social contract and causes rage among your users (“I PAID FOR THIS, WHY ISN’T IT WORKING/WHY AREN’T YOU FIXING BUGS/etc”). Even movies and music need to be maintained because new media formats are introduced, streaming services have to be kept responsive and up to date etc.

A subscription models the cost distribution over time much better, and it does benefit the users because it means the company can keep updating their shit even if new sales drop, instead of going bankrupt.

As an aside, I don’t think this stops with just digital goods. Manufactured products (and the environment) would also benefit from a subscription model because it means there’s no incentive for planned obsolescence. It’s an incentive for keeping the stuff we already built working for a long time, instead of constantly producing new crap and throwing the old in a landfill.

But, the caveat is that this shift cannot result in higher total cost of ownership for the end users over time. In fact, it should reduce the cost because repairing and updating is cheaper than building new stuff. The way many companies are doing subscriptions today, they are being too greedy.

I might sound a little in the minority of this.

Everyone should sit down and ask themselves - ‘Do I Really Need This?’

I can only speak on my behalf. I have over, roughly estimating, 1,500 games both purchased and pirated. Do I really need a subscription such as GamePass right now when I have so much already? No, I really don’t.

I’ve pirated thousands of songs over the years, do I really need Spotify’s subscription? No, I do not and I’m glad that I don’t.

So on and so forth. I decide what I need or want based on the current lifestyle and quality of life in my current state. I do not need over 40 subscriptions sapping me every month and it’s only gotten easier because I combat FOMO, I evaluate what else is out there that serves as an alternative that isn’t subscription based.

These days when I look at people paying a subscription model for Microsoft Office, I shake my head and have that kind of chuckle that makes you feel sorry over someone doing that. Because really, I still use older versions of Microsoft Office and LibreOffice to handle whatever modern features that there is to handle. Not a lot has really changed to warrant subscribing to such a model.

A lot of subscription models can be pressy to people who aren’t knowledgeable unless they take advantage of what’s out there.

Most of them are cheap though. Like Spotify at ~$10 is nothing, you can barely get a beer for that in the city these days. That’s far cheaper than you used to pay for CDs!

Netflix really took the piss though - with the charging for no ads, HD and multiple screens. Then it gets to like $30 a month which just isn’t worth it with the diminishing library, so I cancelled that and use Amazon Prime Video for now as it’s still cheap in my country (and has no ads for now).