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Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

There is a myth that if you are a paying customer then you are not a product. As we see, for more and more companies like Wacom, Microsoft or Apple you are a product no matter if you pay or not.

Have some self respect and vote with your wallet against such companies.

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I thought the phrase was that, if you’re not paying, you’re the product. “If you’re paying, you’re not the product” doesn’t follow from that.

It's not true anyway, because of FOSS. There are also services that exist to provide a social good without a profit motive; that's why nonprofit designations exist.

That phrase has always seemed like an overly cynical take that normalizes antisocial/exploitive behavior by setting an expectation that free services should exploit the user in the first place.

So is it "with proprietary software you're always the product, but some offer you to pay for the privilege"?

Do Wacom tablets have any relevant competition?

I have one that I use for hobbyist purposes and when it comes time to upgrade I'd be interested in not buying another Wacom.

Huions are pretty great. Very affordable and very high quality. I'm guessing the premium you pay for Wacom has more to do with the brand name than the actual product.

I'm not a professional artist though, so maybe Huions are bad for pro work. Idk, but I'm happy with my Huion.

I spent a few years with a Huion screen tablet (GT-19 series), but pressure sensitivity response was really bad compared to a Cintiq. However we are comparing a 400€ product to one that is about 3K€; second-hand it can trade for under 1K, and then it is a reasonable alternative.

With a Huion 1060+ the pressure response felt amazing; however that was on Windows, I never got it to work under Linux. For a hobbyist it is a really much better choice than the cheap Wacom (e.g. Bamboo line), because it is important to have a big drawing area, so that you can draw from your elbow and not from your wrist.

AFAIK Wacom drivers on Linux are good & upstream. The various Chinese tablets are much more involved to get running on Linux, if possible at all.

Also, being fully open source I don't think the Linux Wacom drivers do any of the shady stuff the Windows ones apparently do.

I only use Linux and indeed, drivers work OOtB and don't require you to sign any privacy policy. Although you don't have the fancy GUI that they have on Windows.

The Huion GT works OOtB with the Wacom drivers. For the 1060+, I tried all the out-of-tree drivers without any luck, but that was about 3 years ago.

https://digimend.github.io/drivers/digimend/tablets/

(support was added in 2018, so now it probably works after minimal work)

I guess the question is, what data does Huion’s software send back?

Given that Huion is headquartered in Shenzhen, I'm skeptical that the privacy aspect will be much better.

It's much better when the company focuses on the hardware and doesn't have the aspirations to turn into a spyware-driven "cloud-first" megacorp.

> Do Wacom tablets have any relevant competition?

I’m not sure if this counts as relevant competition but I’m migrating away from my Wacom tablet to an iPad + Apple Pencil. As well as procreate, an iPad can act as an external display for a Mac - and when connected, the Apple Pencil works as a stylus in macos applications.

It’s way more expensive though - especially with the Apple Pencil. And macos only.

If you're a product, then there is simply a bigger paying customer.

Companies are ever tending towards surveillance capitalism because the profit the marketplace for personal information provides them potentially far outweighs the profits of mere direct sales. Withdrawing your business from such a company will achieve very little so long as they still have some user data in the bank. Participating in surveillance capitalism provides a great competitive edge at first, but the race to the bottom makes it a necessary component of conducting business. If Wacom simply needs to sell customers' session data to stay afloat, a not-wacom that expressly refuses to do the same probably won't stay in business for long on just sales. They would need some other revenue source, in crowdfunding, venture capital, SaaS, advertisements, a corporate buyout, government or military contract, renting and franchising, anything. Save for crowdfunding, these kinds of alternate revenue sources serve to tap into the lion's share of currency consumers don't hold.

Incredibly inequal wealth distribution prevents money from functioning like a distributed democratic force.

p->q != ~p->~-q

p->q = ~pvq

So, you are a product. No matter you are paying or not.

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