I’m not sure what the logical outcome of this escalating arms race of enshittification will be, but as a career Sysadmin I’ve been able to avoid a LOT of this bullshit through self hosting, which is something a (Non-tech nerd) layman isn’t going to bother with, for as long as existing products (and their subscriptions) are still within “tolerable” levels.
But the thing is, a lot of the convenience with computing devices today didn’t exist in the 90’s, when it was more common for young normies to have what would be considered above average computer technical skills today.
When the entire market turns into inescapable subscriptions, the market for a non-technical friendly appliance box, like Synology came close to doing, shows up to corner the market on hardware you can own and run your own shit on with minimal headaches and no subscriptions.
In short, people with the money to spend can’t be arsed to inconvenience themselves with self hosting or ‘alternative’ sources.
Folk without the money find a way through perceived necessity and maybe learn something on the way.
Then there’s people with the money and the know-how who are just looking to save or do so on principle.
Younger generations grow up with subscriptions and black boxes that are not ultimately under their own control, and lack the knowledge to change it.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but their tolerance for ads and subscription slop keeps attention away from people like me.
Counterpoint - younger generations grow up in the same poverty as their parents (so that any subscriptions are unlikely) and even if they don’t - their media needs may not fully align with what their parents would buy. So children in my experience do find ways to pirate. Maybe not the best ways, but still.
So don’t sign up. Go without.
I get the sentiment but this is not really an option most of the time if you want to stick with lawful methods. For instance, I cannot watch most movies or TV series these days without a subscription to some service.
i think its imporant we destigmatize piracy, honestly.
Uh, how? I mean you’d need to make it legal I feel like. But that’s never going to happen and I honestly don’t think that’s fair either. If piracy is legal, how would content creators actually be paid?
the first thing to realize is that most of the cost of a game goes to publishers, not the creators.
weed was destigmatized even being illegal for the longest time.
legal != moral
most of the cost of [anything] goes to publishers, not the creators
My edit obviously. It does feel like that though. I pay Netflix, not the people making the movie. For games it is at least a bit better - I pay Valve (Steam) and the publisher but at least some of it goes directly to the devs. But it could be better still I suppose. But I’d honestly be okay if we got a Steam-like platform for series and movies where I could buy the ones I want without any subscriptions.
and if you’re technically capable, self host and share with friends/family. fuck corporate greed
But did anyone ever say that you HAD to subscribe to everything? No.
I must be one of the few people in a group who have a better control in what they feel they can subscribe to.
Adobe expects me to pay monthly for Photoshop? No, fuck you, I’ve got GIMP and a number of other paint and photo manipulation programs.
Microsoft expects me to pay for Office 365? No, fuck you, I’ve got LibreOffice and your older Office software still works as good. Your word processing program, Word, hasn’t really changed that much since 2007 or even 2003. Hell, maybe not since 1997!
I understand this video highlights some of the more draconian practices of subscription services and they deserve to be. But also, people really really need to learn about alternatives instead of feeling like they’ve got to subscribe to something that they never had to in the first place.
My subscribtions are Protonmail, Mullvad VPN and ChatGPT. On top of that I’m paying a voluntary monthy donation to a podcast.
That’s it. If I had to guess, YouTube premium will be the next one but so far adblocking still seems to work.
I think the subscription overload has to do with the whole 90s kids are the only ones who know how to build and fix computers. We know how to go out and find alternatives or roll our own services. Hell we invented digital piracy so we are comfortable with not subscribing.
I only subscribe to two services, Google storage so my family’s mobile devices can auto backup and Spotify because I like the suggestion engine and it’s easier for my kids to stream music. For everything else there’s piracy.
So then there is this new generation that are clueless in tech so these companies can nickel and dime them because they don’t know any better. I know I try to teach my kids how to use tech but they just don’t have an interest like I did.
90s kids are the only ones who know how to build and fix computers.
Aww dude
IDK, a kid not knowing how to pirate is weird too, at least where I live. That would mean their parents actually buying them media, which, in my experience, is not that frequent of a sight. I had classmates who had subscriptions just to feel good about consciously paying for the content (they were also upper-middle-class). The rest didn’t really think about ethics and just pirated, the information on how to do it spreads through kids’ collectives pretty easily. It seems to me that many of them don’t even know that what they and their families are doing is “piracy”…
It seems to me that many of them don’t even know that what they and their families are doing is “piracy”…
Yes🐸
Lol bruh, have some self reflection. People do it because it’s easier. If you have the time to have all the hobbies that other people have and to roll your own home servers that’s great, but that means you have an above average amount of free time. Otherwise, other people have hobbies that don’t include server OS updates and choose to spend their time there and pay for someone else to manage their servers.
Thank you so much for this comment
Hell, maybe not since 1997!
Office 2000 was peak office: it had the definitive version of Clippit, and every actually useful feature you’ll probably ever need to type and edit any sort of document.
…I will say, though, that Excel has improved for the weirdos that want 100,000 row spreadsheets since then, but I mean, that’s a small group of people who need serious help.
This has nothing to do with anything, but whatever.
…Good god, someone actually called him Clippit. I never thought the day would come
I do, but I also never have reason to refer to him.
I don’t know exactly when the features arrived, but things like xlookup, power query, live data connections, etc have been welcome improvements in Excel.
Heck, even textbefore is a great QOL improvement.
100k rows is a small data set for a lot of what I look at, but that is at work.
Let me split it down.
For work use, 100% has to be Excel. For personal use, either of the FOSS is more than enough.
I think that’s where the divide is, and why my employer pays for everyone to have Microsoft Office but I use a free office suite. I simply don’t need the extra capabilities for my own personal use.
Microsoft expects me to pay for Office 365? No, fuck you, I’ve got LibreOffice and your older Office software still works as good. Your word processing program, Word, hasn’t really changed that much since 2007 or even 2003. Hell, maybe not since 1997!
So I moved to foss probably about 20 years ago and have been going back and forth between libre office and open office.
A couple of years ago my wife wanted me office, so I got the subscription…and man it’s so much better than either of those two, and to suggest that maybe it hasn’t changed since 1997 is mindboggling.
I’m a big proponent of not signing up for these services, but this paragraph really misses the mark for me.
Just use Google Docs then. Yes, it’s Google. Yes, it will somewhat tie you into their ecosystem but Google Docs are free, get regular updates and are pretty good overall. I’ve been using Google Docs for many years now. I occasionally use Office365 for work and Google Docs is just as good, if not better.
Disagree. E.g. Word typography is not as advanced as LibreOffice. And words document master is buggy as hell.
But yes. Excel can handle big files now. Still sucks at im- and exporting different csv formats…
But… Because it’s integrated so we’ll with windows, is faster most of the time.
In reality: of course word should be a better program and it does get lots of loving from redmond. Only because: if no new features, no new sales. And since word is mostly a solved problem, redmond invented new problems…
Working with a LO user and a sub par program always beats working with a word user who can’t use styles, review, and merge documents.
As much as I hate Google. I think they are king with document collaboration and sharing.
Yes. But thats not word. Thats something else entirely which atleast my employer would never use (security, long term support, offline, integration with 3rd parties etc)
To me office is the bonus to the cloud storage and syncing. Yeah I know it’s easy to run a NAS but the UX of having to manage it is a headache and quite frankly it gives me more piece of mind to pass the buck of getting pwned to Microsoft or Google
This. Office 365 offers 1tb for 5 accounts plus office for cheaper than just storage from Dropbox or Google drive.
Office is just a bonus
Adobe expect me to pay for Premire Pro? No, fuck you, i’ve got Kdenlive and it feels like premium-quality app
In theory open source can help you escape subscription hell but Gimp and LibreOffice do not have feature parity with Photoshop and MS Office and have significantly inferior UX. Maybe for word processing, LibreOffice or an older version of Office is fine, but that is not true at all for spreadsheets. So much the case that I would rather use Python Dataframes + Juypter notebooks than LibreOffice Calc.
This is also the case for Indesign vs Scribus, Illustrator vs Inkscape, Autocad vs Freecad. Audacity is fairly powerful but again horrible UX. That list goes on I am sure.
I have a bunch of smart devices - light bulbs, wall plugs, etc. They all connect to Home Assistant running on my own server and I don’t need to pay any subscriptions.
IoT is not the problem, corporate greed is.
I do agree that it’s pretty cool that HA can be used for free, but if you like something and use it regularly please find ways to contribute.
You can contribute with giving your voice: https://ohf-voice.github.io/wake-word-collective/#ok_nabu
That’s one way. Or you can contribute code, help others in the forum, file bug reports… OR if you’re the lazy one like me you can actually give them money.
Don’t like subscriptions? Ok by me, but please don’t think that complete teams will be working on great and secure software for free. That’s not something that can be maintained for a long time.
If you like something, contribute to it.
Microsoft expects me to pay for Office 365? No, fuck you, I’ve got LibreOffice and your older Office software still works as good. Your word processing program, Word, hasn’t really changed that much since 2007 or even 2003. Hell, maybe not since 1997!
Yeah, it’s a word processor. I don’t need a newer with more features that I will never use. Some of these might make sense for a business with collaborative projects and such, but your average home user doesn’t need it.
the only things in life im happy owning is my home, my transportation and my informatics
Worst is, if you don’t subscribe to specific services, people will call you the odd one out
Those people are dumb and weird.
Yep. Those people aren’t my friends.
Random memory just appeared. When i was in highschool, i used to sit with a group of people one of which. Begain a conversation talking about invader zim, everybody kinda pitched into the conversation with quibs and factoids about the animated series. Execept of me, as invader zim was only on your local soul sucking, nipple rubbing cable company (south park reference insues). The girl asked what i thought about the show? I simply explained i never had or cared for cable. To which basically apalled her, “how do you not have cable”, “what do you watch!” I replied antenna. Then for the next 30minutes of lunch there was a hole song and dance about how ive never watched (insert cable tv show). Im glad i didnt grow up with cable, the three stooges were fun to watch, and the fun of me and my dad watching is forever with me. The whole “flix cult” sounds similar to my cable tv experience.
WHAT YOU DONT HAVE
DISNEY PLUS (they can kill you now)
HULU (they have your favorite show! Only season 3 though cause fuck you!)
Netflix (has netflix originals which are very hit or miss)
That’s fine, I started doing my thing and stopped caring what the world thinks.
I look forward to the range of emotion someone’s face acts out when I tell them that I don’t have FB or I don’t have Amazon Prime.
🤌
Vote with your wallet. Boycott rent seeking companies that lock away their IP and charge money for access to it.
For example, FOR ADOBE TO DESERVE MY MONEY EVERY MONTH, 100% OF THEIR TECHNOLOGIES SHOULD BE OPEN SOURCE.
The only rent I happily pay for is a good VPN.
jokes on them, i still use CS6.
wankers.
Yea. Still use my full suite $200 adobe from being student. Like what, a decade old at this point?
Boycott rent seeking companies
That’s all of capitalism.
yes it is…
I pay for music streaming on Tidal. I have a pretty big library of music from attempts to get away from streaming (and keep it up on Soulseek), but I use curated playlists too much to get away from streaming
I definitely don’t recommend that you look up Tidal downloaders that allow users to keep the music they want from the service. You definitely don’t want to build a whole digital library that way.
God forbid a programmer be compensated for their labor.
I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with lifetime purchases?
I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with lifetime purchases?
This thread is about subscriptions. So I’d assume that when people talk about ‘rent seeking companies’ etc, they are referring to subscription payments rather than lifetime purchases.
As a programmer, and an open source one paid handsomely, fuck subscriptions and asshole software companies.
How do you get paid handsomely for open source? What’s your funding model?
The customers (multinational and middle size companies, ranging from telecoms, banks, governments, goods and services) pay for support and features of the software. Software has always bugs and CVEs that need fixing, or new features, or needs for securing its supply chain (with SLSA, SBOMs, etc).
There’s a handful multibillionarie companies that follow this approach with open source: Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, VMware, etc. Particularly in cloud-native tech like Kubernetes and all that gets deployed on top of it.
If a technology is not open source it really doesn’t exist anymore. Customers have learned from the last 30 years and run away from vendor lock-in (AWS, AKS, Google cloud services…).
Oh, I program with open source stacks too. I thought you were referring to a specific FOSS app or SaaS.
According to Wikipedia, he’s actually a criminal defense attorney in California, and also “The Fish”, original lead guitarist for Country Joe and the Fish.
Mmh, and if I go by your nickname, you are Jason Kaye, influential hardcore DJ and dead since a year.
I also appear on any graph that shows the months between July and January abbreviated by the first letter of the month.
I am a programmer, and I get paid whether or not the product is bought. Shovel your dogshit somewhere else.
That’s a pretty short term view though, no? Presumably if an expected revenue stream does not generate flow to supplant the initial capital outlay, said business will not be a going concern for long?
I’m not defending subscription models at all, they’re corrosive to the economy, but your comment had me curious.
I am a tech consumer and enthusiast first. I am a corporate shill sellout second. I wish for bad practices in the tech community to die, even if it’s my own company doing it.
My concern as an engineer is that the product gets made well. I have no say or control over how the business cretins and marketing scumbags decide to destroy the company through terrible unethical practices like charging SaaS for completely self-contained software.
The short term view is that you need to keep a company afloat. Businesses should fail if they deliver products in awful ways. Yes, if the company fails, I will lose my job, and that is okay. It would be through no fault of my own, or really even the customers who wouldn’t pay for my company’s product. It would be the fault of the business decisions that were made. And the product landscape would then open up after my company’s failure. For example, if Adobe would finally fucking die then we may actually see better products on the PDF, and photo/video editing market. No more monopoly on sub-par creative cloud products.
The more realistic long term view is that software engineers will be okay if their company fails. The overwhelming majority are smart, get paid extremely well, and exist in a field that needs their manpower. They will be able to find a new job much easier than other fields. The tech community will not be okay long-term if bad companies cannot fail.
you are attempting to align the interest of a wage slave with owner of corporation, corpo owners literally tell workers they aint shit and they are easily replacement.
think game industry crunch and fire practice… after rockstar lays off GTA6 staff, you buying the game does not help the laid off guy
You’re conflating two separate things. I make a distinction between understanding the inherent friction of Labor and Capital along with a broad and deep awareness of the stacked playing field, and also keeping oneself employed by necessity.
wage worker is never aligned long term with his employer… at best short term.
Yeah thanks for the insight
You buy a pair of shoes, the maker is paid. Why do you have to pay the bastard every month?
Samuel Vimes nodding
Between you the developer there is a mega corp… Programmer is paid a salary. Corpo pays bare minimum for labour. It doesnt matter if you buy peoduct personally or not.
With that being said if everybody did the same, it would hurt the corpo but thats the goal… They need to get their act together and while idiots keep paying blindly, they wont.
Adobe still has lifetime purchases?
yeah, https://1337x.to
I’m actually a programmer. There are ways to compensate us that doesn’t force people to pay rent for our work.
I pirate everything, own everything and I’m happy as fuck. I even share my Jellyfin server with 20 other people so they can share in my joy.
They should pay you monthly for your costs. (:
only way i’ll be happy with that is if no one owns anything. corporations, people, billionaires. Otherwise might as well burn it all down, why should care if i dont own anything.
This is why fact checks are bullshit. Reuters admits that
a WEF social media video from 2016 that stated eight predictions about the world in 2030, including: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. What you want you’ll rent, and it’ll be delivered by drone.”
Now to make the statement false they bring in a strawman “Stated goal” condition and prove that particular part to be false, then claim that makes the whole thing false.
Such bullshit.
Fact checkers are all just self-important opinion columnists.
That doesn’t mean all fact checks are bullshit, just that fact checkers are people with jobs and opinions too.
Yes, it is possible to fact check with integrity. Not like this example.
Opinions should not enter into fact checking as opinions are not fact.
In this case the job of these people is clearly to perform damage limitation for the WEF
the biggest reason for subscriptions is. 1. consumer laws don’t protect it. and 2. you can quit your job and don’t have to be actually productive and work for a living because your users will just keep on “buying” the product every month indefinitely. and finally 3. subscription basically gives you monopoly in any given area you host it; because the user will usually not look or even have the means to look for options or alternatives once they have already tied a percentage of their monthly income to a company for the software or service they provide - as wallets got spread thinner and thinner until they, now, are entirely swallowed by subscriptions.
the only people arguing in favor of subscriptions are those who don’t want to work for a living while still taking advantage of the capitalist system.
The only case where a subscription can be good is if you don’t have that much money to afford something(if its a one time purchase), because you would have to save up for some time. That’s the only case where a subscription can be good, but this doesn’t apply to 99% of them
It’s pertinent if you only need something for a short time, or if you want to test something before committing to buying it.
Otherwise, there’s few cases where renting makes sense.
It’s expensive being poor
I worked at Amazon and the head of Ring said their best customers were people who bought a subscription and then put the camera in a drawer and forgot about it. They don’t even want to provide you a service. They want you to absentmindedly give them money every month because you forgot to cancel.
Fine, but this is on the buyer not on the seller.
I mean, if you buy a subscription to something and then don’t use it (or forgot to cancel while not using it) is not really a seller fail: you would have wasted your money even you’d have bought it without a subscription.I get subscriptions are (mostly) bad, but it is not always a seller fault and the buyer should be aware of what he is doing or spending money.
I get what you’re saying but the forgetful customer is explicitly what they said they want, which is dumb any way you look at it. Many times you’re forced into signing up for subscription, or coerced under the guise of a free trial. Now this wouldn’t be as bad if they came back and were like, “hey we see you haven’t used our service in a while, do you still need it?” rather than just leeching money from the user. The system is designed to purposely allow the user to make these errors and that’s wrong any way you want to shape it.
That’s cool, I do not have a single subscription and will never, ever have one. If I can’t buy your product, I’ll sail the 7 seas
How do i pirate insurance?
Maybe become a sovereign citizen? YMMV.
I made my own “cell phone service” but it only works within 10m of my home.
Can someone explain the “be happy” part of the “you’ll own nothing and be happy” quote? I fail to see what is there to be happy about.
I’m not OP but I think it means “Providers are saying consumers should accept subscription-based models without complaint”
It came from a speaker a few years ago at the Davos World Economic Forum. Davos is where the ultra rich gather each year to plot out how to be even more evil.
I feel like someone needs to point out that this saying is often conflated with the idea of 15 minute cities.
The idea of 15 minute cities is that people want their amenities within 15 minutes so they don’t have to drive.
It is not an idea to keep you confined and take away your ownership of things.
Found this out when I wanted a decent journaling app for Android. All the most popular ones have subscription tiers that amount to hundreds of dollar over just a few years… for a fucking journal app? what the hell!
F-Droid… An open source app store with exactly that: Apps without BS
Definitely feel ya there. I highly recommend Obsidian or Joplin. Not sure what features you’re looking for, but I’ve found Obsidian refreshingly simple. Aso nice knowing that it’s just markdown files on my device that can’t be sold as data.
if you are looking for an Foss alternative for obsidian, check out logseq. it isn’t a 1 for 1 copy of obsidian and its feature set, but the way I use them they are identical, besides the source code availability!
Hadn’t heard of that one. Looks nice! Do you know if there is a built-in way (even if it’s through a plugin) to sync your content across devices? I didn’t see anything on their homepage about it.
Only third party sync, I use Syncthing for that, works great most of the time
I second the syncthing method, it also works great for a private password manager like keepassxc or keepassdx depending if youre on a computer or phone!
Not only that but they can train their AI’s on all their subscribers’ journal entries. Check F-Droid.org for some free, privacy respecting FLOSS journaling apps.
There is this one app on there called PTO (plain text organizer) that is pretty interesting. It basically just gives you a new plaintext file each day to journal on
Currently I have hbo max free with my phone plan, plex on nas and my local library. I also have YouTube music family plan, but I started putting songs on nas recently, maybe I’ll replace that too.
“If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”
I heard this before and it is becoming more true each day.
I don’t why but the fact this is on YouTube seems hypocritical but I can’t put my finger on it.
That’s not hypocritical. That’s reaching your target audience.
