Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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.

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 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...

Is there a peak for this? I feel like subscriptions are becoming more of a rule than an exception. Having the ability to directly purchase digital goods seems more like a thing of the past.

You may have heard the saying: "you'll own nothing, and you'll be happy". Maybe there's some real agenda supporting this way of life for us peasants, and this is the manifestation of it.

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

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.

I think a lot of the blame lies on the shoulders of platform makers:

Apple constantly churning their already-working OS so software makers have to keep working just to keep already-working software running

Google constantly fucking with web browser standards/frameworks so it’s an endless stream of work to keep a web app up to date.

The basic productivity software that computers run hasn’t changed in functionality for literally my entire lifetime, yet there is an endless supply of software engineers working hard on these same basic tools for no apparent gains.

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.

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.

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 must not 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 pricing subscriptions today, they are being too greedy.

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?

Don't forget the subscription to be able to start your car from your phone, or if you have really poor taste in vehicles the subscription to heat your seats or unlock other already-built-in features.

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]"?

It’s telling that my piracy of music all but disappeared when Apple Music came along. (Almost) Everything I want to hear is right there on my phone. I don’t have to switch between different services to find artists.

Now, whether such enormous consolidation of the record companies, allowing that kind of setup, is a good thing is another discussion…