First, ruthless pruning. Second, subscription rotation. My family wants to watch the Battlebots season. We have subscribed to Discovery+ since that's the only

First, ruthless pruning. Second, subscription rotation. My family wants to watch the Battlebots season. We have subscribed to Discovery+ since that's the only place it is. While it's on Discovery+, we're catching up on the other shows we're interested in. We will be cancelling our subscription when we're done. Perhaps some other thing will pop up, perhaps not. Oh, hey, that reminds me, now that the Superbowl is done, I'm done with Peacock... {click click click} OK, that's cancelled. (Seriously. Literally just cancelled it because you reminded me of it.) Third, some things I just won't subscribe to. I've been building my MP3 collection since I got my first CD in something like 1995. I've never gone subscription and at this point I almost can't, in the sense that I would lose too much. Lately I've been building up my Plex system rather than get too stuck on movie streaming. It's nominally more expensive, even, but it's mine, and I'm in full control of the cost rather than a monthly subscription. The best way to avoid being trapped (or feeling trapped) by a service is to never start using it. My plan for the "metaverse", for instance, is to not. Consequently, I will never face a choice between leaving them in disgust but losing all my friends and high scores and purchased content and all the other stuff I didn't actually own, or feeling forced to compromise my principles and stay on a service that takes my money and does things I don't like with it. I selectively break this rule but only for stuff that I know in advance I don't care if I lose. We've purchased some video from Amazon Video, but I only do that for stuff I am very confident we're only going to watch once. I only subscribe to things I know I don't care if I lose, because it isn't even just the control aspect. Something like "Oku", I don't know what that is, I've never heard of it, will it even be there in six months? Will the feature you love get "upgraded" out of existence? I just don't trust these things, and it's not because I'm just a generic old man shouting at clouds to get off my lawn, it's from experience. I've outlasted a lot of these services already. I've lost track of the amount of "content" I've added to my "watch later" list only for it not to be there when I'm ready. I'd rather just own things I can stick on my automatically-backed-up partition and be done with it.