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Comment by MostlyStable | Hacker News Reader

And what does the author think the alternative is? He mentions the collapse of advertising, so they clearly don't think that ad-supported models are the way of the future.

I am completely unconvinced. The fact that the "average/median" income from these models is low is completely unsurprisng. We should expect that the vast majority of the income would go to the very top performers. This is not an indication that subscription doesn't work, just that it's going to end up looking like acting, music, and professional sports. Those are all real careers that have persisted for a very long time where the "average" wage is extremely low.

This article does a bad job clearly stating what the author thinks the problem is (just vaguely gesturing at average wages without explaining why that should matter), doesn't suggest an alternative at all and instead seems to snidely be sniping at non-mainstream journalists and creators.

I am deeply unimpressed.

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Years ago I subscribed to a daily newspaper (still subscribe to a weekly news magazine), I subscribed to insurance for my car, home, etc - still do. I subscribed to cable tv, I subscribed to my phone line, I subscribed to my apartment by paying rent, I subscribed to a transport service by paying for a season ticket. As recently as 5 years ago I subscribed to a milk and bread service.

Subscriptions are nothing new. Those subscriptions (short of cable tv) would be nothing unusual 100 years ago.

His examples of beer and cinema are odd as I current consume both, neither through a subscription, however mail order wine clubs date back 100 years.

What is new is the subscription to things you already own, the “heated seat” debacle for example.

> What is new is the subscription to things you already own, the “heated seat” debacle for example.

Yep, and that is what’s going away. BMW recently decided to stop offering heated seat subscriptions.

>What is new is the subscription to things you already own, the “heated seat” debacle for example.

Enabling additional functionality (or limiting it) for hardware you've already purchased isn't unheard of in business products--including computers--where the unit margins support it. But consumer unit margins are usually thinner and most consumers don't really accept it as a "fair" practice.

Yup and that's not something new either -- it's been pretty standard practice for many decades. But similarly "controversial" from the start for consumers (while basically a non-issue for corporate customers).

I worked for a long ago minicomputer company that sold a scaled-down version of their first SMP system in 3 flavors--and the only difference was microcode that throttled the performance of two of the models.

And when I was an analyst, many people were always surprised to hear all the games that IBM played with mainframes (and to a lesser degree with POWER servers) to sell you the same compute capacity that was cheaper when only used for certain workloads (like Linux) or that was inaccessible until activated "on demand."

IBM is a well known rent seeking megacorporation. That shouldn’t mean that it is OK to do this. Now they are selling open source software with per CPU licensing, but want to prevent others to sell the same software. This should not be accepted by the society.

It’s not a consumer unit problem.

Heated seat subscriptions are bad because by not paying for them, the heated seats are objectively costing you. You are paying for extra weight, streets are paying for extra weight, materials are extra mined and produced so the environment is paying for extra weight. Etc.

It is directly and indirectly objectively negative for you to have heated seats that you don’t want and are not subscribed for.

I doubt that's anyone's complaint. It's more likely they'd have been annoyed to have had crippled seats in a car they'd bought and have to pay an on-going fee for no reason beyond greed. There are no other on-costs for manufacturers unlike other subscription-based products.

It's a very clear signal that the entire market is broken and there isn't competition there.

I just realized that by paying toll yearly, I subscribe to my country's motorways.

And by paying taxes you subscribe to several governmental services on both local and national level.

True, but it feels less like a subscription because it's not a flat amount per month or year.

I doubt subscriptions will entirely go away, but maybe some of them will. Things like software as a service often don't make sense to me. It seems like companies who used to make software and sold it as a complete package realized that people aren't going to consistently buy their software again if what they have is working for their needs. So now instead of writing software and selling it they have to constantly justify their continued existence by making ever-increasingly niche changes and persuading people that they need the update. This seems unsustainable to me.

That leaves out a lot of the story. Those purchased packages often went out of date after a couple years, I remember being stuck on a different version of omnigraffle than other people I worked with because it was a pain to go through procurement to buy a new version. This was a giant headache.

There are also new truly useful features that people have come to expect that doesn’t work well with packaged software. Online collaboration, syncing across devices, etc.

> There are also new truly useful features that people have come to expect that doesn’t work well with packaged software.

Supports the latest iOS version...

for mobile, sure. IOS and Android moved fast and odds are software you buy 5 years ago simply won't work if not maintained. Because that's a design choice of the mobile OS.

Meanwhile, Windows and Linux focused a lot on backwards compatibility. Not perfect, but you can trust that 99% of software from Windows XP onward will work on Windows 11 with zero tweaking. Microsoft Word '00 and Adobe's CS1 suite (2003) were complete packages sold at a single cost and should still do their job in 2023.

>There are also new truly useful features that people have come to expect that doesn’t work well with packaged software. Online collaboration, syncing across devices, etc.

That is one fair point. Featues that require upkeep of a server make sense to monetize as a subscription.

Yeah, I wish the mobile OSes cared more about backwards compatibility

It really varies. (And obviously the dollar amounts matter.)

Subscribe to software that is an ongoing part of my regular workflow(s) and is regularly being enhanced? I'm mostly OK with a subscription to that--see Lightroom/Photoshop for me.

Subscribe to some utility I maybe pull out for a task once a year? Nope.

Software is never really finished and often has to be hosted and maintained on an ongoing basis.

An ongoing stream of smaller payments just seems like a natural way of paying for an ongoing service, even if the benefits are weighted to the vendor.

> Software is never really finished and often has to be hosted and maintained on an ongoing basis.

I have no problem paying for updates, as long as the product would keep working without an active subscription (what happens if there’s no connectivity, servers are down, the provider goes bakrupt or change its terms?)

That is one great thing about how Jetbrains monetizes. You "subscribe" for a year of some IDE and after a year's worth of subscriptions you keep the 20xx version that you subscribed to. So you can use 20xx as a standalone or subscribe so that you get updates for 20xx + 1.

>Software is never really finished Tell that to my grandmother’s rock solid install of MS Word 2010 that she still uses. It’s okay for businesses to want more money, but people didn’t forget how reliable software was just 10-12 years ago.

Be honest.

I think thats because you are looking at the poor performers; the real goal is finding a way to turn your product into a service (and thus ongoing purchases) because doing it well becomes a license to print money. Doing it poorly becomes more like wheedling or strong arming.

The reality and hard truth of the matter is that not everything needs to be a service, but capitalistic structures will try and force everything to pursue that model. The reward for such kinds of products should be that you gain trust for the next product launch that you also sell as a lump cost.

But I guess Pandora's Box was long opened on that.

Most software was sold with annual maintenance/upgrades anyway.

A lot of software business models may have been overly influenced by interest rates the last few years.

At a low interest rate, the time value of capital is low - a company can defer revenue almost indefinitely with minimal cost. Hence, a subscription business like SalesForce can spend handsomely on onboarding, and expect to make money back over the course of 5-10 years. To a certain extent, the same applies to ad supported business models.

If interest rates are higher, then a lump sum upfront payment may be a better bet. This may effect how software is written as well as how it is purchased.

Or we'll just see a steady increase in subscription costs.

Right. Isn't this just the Pareto distribution at play, which seems to be in effect in all domains of creative human production? In any particular field, roughly 20% of individuals achieve 80% of the results or success in that field. The author hasn't demonstrated this is unique to writing. None of this is to say the author is incorrect about the current subscription model in writing being unsustainable (I don't know if it is or isn't, though I suspect it's not), just noting what I think is missing from their argument.

Yeah, the idea that rent-seeking behavior will magically dry up requires an exceptional argument, which is not presented here.

What's worse is that the author fails to acknowledge is that these writers have the opportunity to cater towards niches and global communities. There are vast, global audiences who would definitely pay for content and commentary from people who represent them and their interests.

Moreover, online creators don't always have one source of revenue. This practice is employed widely by YouTubers: they supplement their ad revenue with merch, patreon, Twitch streaming, and so on.

The average earnings on a single platform mean absolutely nothing.

> It is an idyllic, almost utopian, perspective. There is an imagined logic at play, entirely divorced from reality. In the world where Substack were an expeditious route to “more people” being able to “make a good and profitable career out of writing”, we would also live in a world where you bought your lamp chops from a butcher, your baguette from a bakery, your stilton from a cheesemonger and your wine from a vintner, rather than just everything from a supermarket.

What an incredibly odd quote. I do buy my lamb* chops from a butcher, bread from a bakery, cheese from a cheesemonger and I don't drink wine but I buy beer from a brewery. I don't live in an "idyllic utopia", this is normal.

I would consider it an privilege for the rich and wealthy that few can enjoy. It is far from normal.

Really?

Maybe it's location dependent...

I live in an European city, I have multiple butchers, bakeries and fruits and vegetables shops within walking distance.

My area is most certainly not an upscale area, quite the reverse in fact.

Huh? My butcher sells meat cheaper than the supermarket. The bakery is about the same price unless you only buy total garbage bread. Breweries sell their beer cheaper than supermarkets sell the same brand.

Congratulations. It took you some time, but you finally figured what most of us have discovered a lot of time ago: we are rich by any objective standard when compared to most of the population

What?

>This article does a bad job clearly stating what the author thinks the problem is (just vaguely gesturing at average wages without explaining why that should matter)

I mean, it should matter. if you can't make a profit off a subscription, you don't do business. Hence, the "end of the subscription era"

>This is not an indication that subscription doesn't work, just that it's going to end up looking like acting, music, and professional sports. Those are all real careers that have persisted for a very long time where the "average" wage is extremely low.

it was low but still livable. The bigger problem is that minimmum wage itself isn't a living wage anymore, and subcriptions aren't even close to meeting that anymore. This may not matter to hobbyists, but if you ever had hope of high quality content then you're going to end up in a desert. Or fixated on professional organizations who have negative incentive to properly deliver that content.

I could see pay-as-you-go being an alternative.

Some credits based system where you purchase hours or articles and if your account has a rebuy threshold, it auto charges you. The rebuy would be opt-in.

How is this not a thing yet? If I could pay a tiny amount per article on Medium that I currently can’t read, I totally would. Surely there’s a system for these micropayments? Why hasn’t it taken off?

> there’s a system for these micropayments?

Brave content creators. https://creators.brave.com/

> Why hasn’t it taken off?

I wish it would gain more website adoption because it works well to tip content creators and is convenient for me as a consumer.

even gym memberships persist, funded by the folks who signed up january 1st, went for a few weeks, then never returned.

you just described 99% of internet writing. vague, stating of the obvious.

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