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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

Corporations have essentially enacted private taxation on the public. Sure, you are paying for a service, but does the service you receive really add up to what everyone is paying for?

I'm not even that old, and I still miss the time where you could simply buy software or a digital product and it didn't change out from underneath you all the time. A lot of the time, it feels like you're paying these corporations to test their software for them. For example, we went months while the voice search on our YouTube TV app went away, presumably part of some A/B testing, or when Amazon temporarily (on the order of months) removed the ability to see pending orders and pre-orders.

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A tax is compulsory. You cancel an app whose cost > value. The friction for canceling a government whose cost > value is much greater.

"taxation" is being a bit melodramatic. These services require an ongoing cost on the part of the service provider to keep a backend running in order to be useful. It's not really economically feasible to have a one-time payment and provide infinite ongoing support for it.

Take 1Password for example. If you paid one time you could have a local app that exists on your computer. Want to access your passwords on your phone? Well, too bad, you can't. If you want to do that, there needs to be a server which means 1Password needs to keep paying to keep a server running, hence you have an ongoing subscription cost.

You could host the server yourself if you're technically capable and so inclined, but lots of people aren't so they pay someone else to do it.

Software devs should work for free. Servers should also be free. Electricity, free. Computer hardware, free. Anything that I pay for is a tax.

...I won't work for free though.

I don't think invoking a comparison to taxation makes this a compelling argument.

Almost all of it is spent on entertainment, i.e. something you could theoretically replace with some other subscriptionless hobby.

I saw someone showing off their "vintage Mac" running Mac OS 9 or an early Mac OS X ... and one of the last paid versions of Adobe Photoshop that I remember seeing before they went to a subscription model. It occurred to me what a nice setup that would be to still have around.

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