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We are turning into subscription slaves (2023)
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoIronic, because the first popup as I navigated to medium.com was an offer for me to subscribe.
- mr90210 3y agoI thought the same LOL.
- lifestyleguru 3y agoThe revolutionaries and people opening your eyes are loo lazy to setup and host their own blog. Plus some ad income is good too, to sustain their revolutionary writing.
- disqard 3y agoSavage and incisive comment. Even the "thought leaders" who might try to rouse you from your compromised state, are themselves compromised. We're all stuck in this local extreme of ad/rent-supported "free Internet".
- alde 3y agoI stopped clicking on any Medium links a while ago. Why even sponsor this walled garden?
- _hao 3y agoI'm very close to returning to the high seas for content... A personal recent anecdote. I wanted to watch Interstellar again a few days ago. Beginning of the previous month I saw it on Prime/Netflix or both (can't remember). A month later when I wanted to actually watch it it was gone from both services... I got really pissed off, but I rented it from Prime, because I wanted to watch it with my family "now". Your app that does random thing "X" does not need a subscription. Stop. Doing. This. This rent seeking behaviour doesn't pose well for any of us.
- madeofpalk 3y ago> Your app that does random thing "X" does not need a subscription. I don't think it's quite that straight forward. Software is undervalued - people are not prepared to pay a real sustainable price for it, while also expecting constant updates and maintance. Users who paid $5 for an app five years ago will expect an update for the new iOS to add widget support, for example. Subscriptions better ensure incremental income for incremental updates.
- wongarsu 3y agoHowever subscriptions often set the expectation that you must consume incremental updates, when really I would often be happier to stay at a particular version. Often made worse by the implicit assumption that since you are paying something has to change, leading to changes without clear purpose.
- neilalexander 3y agoExactly this. More often than not with proprietary software, I'd rather spend £20 once and expect stability than pay £1.99/month and find that things are constantly changed/broken/"improved"/worsened for no reason. I actually don't dislike the model that TablePlus etc use also, where my purchase grants me updates for a year. If I want more updates after that, I pay again. If not, I sit still on the version that I'm on forever more.
- happymellon 3y agoSimilar to Jetbrains. I do pay annually because there are real benefits with each release, but I'm not doing a subscription for your git client.
- Log_out_ 3y agoThe worst are subscriptions where you pay and a perfectly fine product gets worse over time.
- digitalengineer 3y agoThe argument is often made you can get the ‘better’ product if you pay for a ‘product-as-a-service subscription. Even for simple hardware like say a washing machine. Sure you can get the cheap one, but I’ll break almost immediately after the warranty expires and it will use so much more water and energy… or you could get the efficient one that won’t break down, because the company selling those wont have to worry about their quarterly sales.
- Tanoc 3y agoThe argument has been proven false many times however. SiriusXM provides an ever worsening product with more and more sponsored stations showing up to replace their diminishing licensed library, Adobe continues to introduce bugs to their software because there's no incentive to fix anything if people are so deep into the ecosystem and have no way of going back to a more stable version, and Nest provides no local storage options for video because it denies them access to the data and doesn't allow them to put a barrier between you and the video files. Increasingly subscriptions are there so a company can do something once and coast for months or years afterwards. It continues the tradition of trying to get as much money for as little effort as possible.
- digitalengineer 3y agoI totally agree. Vulture capitalism.
- LargeTomato 3y agoThis post is a bit messy. The author starts talking about ads and algorithms manipulating us before quickly saying that subscriptions are similarly harmful, except that link is not really explained. It's randomly shoehorned in. The author likens John Deere and Netflix but quickly brushes aside the fact that digital media and physical tractors are very different things to own. Finally, the author suggests that paid subscriptions are bad because they can restrict our access to material and steal our data. I concede the first point but not the later. Reading my news subscriptions is significantly better than reading "Google News" and other ad-driven media suggestions. Overall I am disappointed in the quality of the argument. This person does actually have a PhD which makes me want to talk to this person in a long form conversation where they won't feel constrained by this specific medium (pun intended).
- Handprint4469 3y agoOut of curiosity, did you use ChatGPT to help you write this comment? It uses the following format: > The author starts talking..... The author likens..... Finally, the author suggests...... Overall, I am disappointed in.... Which, while a perfectly valid way of structuring a comment, it's more usually found in ChatGPT-style answers than in random comments on the Internet.
- LargeTomato 3y agoI promise you I did not! But I have recently started changing my "prose" to be more clear, layering information thoughtfully, and spending more words on filler (e.g. The Author Suggests). I definitely learned part of it from reading chat gpt. I like it better than some of the more math-y or academic writing which I will sometimes use but only if I need to be hyper specific.
- jeroenhd 3y agoI fear for the future where every comment that has been composed with some thought will be branded as ChatGPT generated. I know most of those suspicions will be correct if they aren't already, but I'm still not very happy about it.
- matthewfelgate 3y agoI'm not sure talking about theoretical problems that don't exist is very useful. Better to talk and question about the present subscription culture.
- ryaniscool 3y agoAfter reading the first few paragraphs, my first thought of the future was a dystopian police state rather than concern for "renting" vision. The federal law enforcement apparatus in America has a long history of pushing for more power and pushing the boundaries of its power. Warrantless data collection is at an all-time high. Most of us brush it off as no concern since we are law-abiding citizens. I'm beginning to see it as a real threat after the last election. It made me feel less secure in the stability of our political system. It's conceivable that someone could come to power and abuse law enforcement for political purposes on a large scale. I recognize that some people believe it's already happening but I'm not one of them.
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- prirun 3y agoThe Dept of Homeland Security, established after 9/11, has been involved in copyright violations of all things. When I read an article about that I was kinda shocked. https://www.dhs.gov/intellectual-property-rights https://www.dhs.gov/intellectual-property-rights
- nunez 3y agoInterestingly, hearing aids are often rented due to their high out-of-the-box cost and have been for way longer than SaaS's existence. Fortunately, none of what the author predicted here has happened because governments would probably not tolerate this.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoTangentially related but copyright is broken and needs urgent reform. It does not serve its intended purpose anymore and this is just one symptom of it.
- dang 3y agoWe've banned this account for posting these comments excessively and ignoring our request to stop (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38849739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38849739). The issue isn't your views on copyright (I'm not tracking what they are, but I'm sure they're fine and no doubt plenty of people agree with you). Rather the issue is that you've been posting about this repetitively and excessively. That's not allowed on HN. It adds noise rather than signal, and we want signal here. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll stop doing this in the future.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoHey dang, Apologies I missed your earlier warning… I see that this was the wrong approach and noisy. I’ll work a bit on steel manning my arguments for reform and write a blogpost instead and share it with HN after to focus the discussion, been spending a bit too much time to write these comments anywhere. Please unban me dang I won’t do it again ^^
- dang 3y agoOk, you're unbanned.
- huppeldepup 3y agoIt's also becoming normal that these subscription services make you jump hoops to terminate the contract (tried to close your vpn subscription recently?). A few years ago I could just let my paypal run dry and that would stop the payment and end the contract. Nowadays I can no longer make paypal payments without linking my bank account, which means you have to jump the hoops to end the payments.
- p0w3n3d 3y ago'subscribe with your credit card' is yet another trap, therefore we need legal terms to be able to cancel in the middle of the period, and a proportional amount of money should be returned. But still this is psychological barrier to cancel, as FOMO kicks in
- harshreality 3y agoYou can manage/terminate individual autopay/linked merchants at paypal. It's at the bottom of the settings>payments page, follow the automatic payments link.
- huppeldepup 3y agoThank you very much for this tip.
- hasty_pudding 3y agoWe're already heading that way with housing. Normal houses in places where jobs/opportunities are available are trending into the million dollar range.
- bonton89 3y agoOne of the solutions floated to the nursing shortage around here was to build housing owned by the hospital. Sounds great, strike and risk losing your job AND house when there is no housing availability.
- hasty_pudding 3y agoLol, going back to those old mining towns where they pay you in company money and you live on company housing
- xigoi 3y agoThe irony of posting this on a site known for nagging for subscriptions…
- naikrovek 3y agoI don't think "slaves" is the correct word here, but there is something going on that I can't put into words. Capitalism++ where instead of businesses providing services in exchange for a fair amount of currency, everyone is just fighting to pull as much currency from others as they can, while everyone else tries to pull as much currency as possible out of them. it has stopped being a symbiotic relationship and has started to become adversarial. extremely adversarial in some ways. it's exhausting and I don't see how it can continue. in capitalism there is somehow this idea that future growth is uncapped, and that the line on the graph must always trend upwards and that is just not realistic. ..everything is finite. the lines simply can't continue to trend upwards forever. but everyone is acting like there's just infinite money, and all you have to do is ask people for it. The number of times per day that I must say "no" to ads and subscriptions and offers and all of those things surely must be in the thousands. Per day. It's wearing my soul down. There is no chance that I'm alone, here.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoDon't worry, you're far from alone, and the number of people who think this way is going to grow the longer this goes on, the more they're squeezed, for less and less value. Unfortunately the economy can remain batshit longer than any one person can remain solvent. Detach as much as possible.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoIt will just get worse from here. If someone can find a way to monetize something, it will be monetized, and the money will be leaving your wallet for some quadrillionaire who simply needs a yacht and wants it built in a dry dock that will require destroying historic architecture to launch.