We are turning into subscription slaves (2023)
medium.com
medium.com
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.
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.
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.
I do pay annually because there are real benefits with each release, but I'm not doing a subscription for your git client.
The auto-updater also needs to not notify me of updates that I can't get without paying. That's just spam at that point.
Apart from that, I generally agree that that's a decent model to follow.
Personally I hate the culture of incremental updates, shipping halfbroken beta versions, bolting on security as last measure because who gives a fuck about dataleaks. Everyone trying to build an everything app and sucking up all the data they can get their hands on.
The sad thing is nowadays most software „engineers“ or product „managers“ can’t even imagine an alternative to this.
Write a program that does one thing well and you don’t need to constantly update it.
It does though. Unless your software just play a perfect 440hz A. Even a simple homemade tuner (my first and only android app) can't run on new phones without having to be updated (sadly. I use an ad-riddled one now :/)
Constant here meant regular. Following android Api updates is constant work. It can also mean that the intensity of work needed is the same, but I don't think it's the idea there (if it is, I disagree with the idea too, for different reason).
I think his idea was that good software exists in a nutshell and does not need upgrade. Which is true for embedded, like the arduino that manage the doors of my father's chicken coop (ideally. The photoresistor disagree here when I think about it, but the software is bad so that kinda prove GGP's point). Not as true for software with complex human interfaces though.
The software us undervalued compared to what it costs to produce, but overvalued in terms of what it's worth to users.
I've paid for an MP3 player app six years ago and the APK still works fine, although the UI looks a bit wonky on a phone screen four times the size of what I had back in the day. I don't expect anything more than an update in case MP3 playback somehow breaks.
Maybe this is different in recent years, with iOS putting the burden of backwards compatibility more with the developers and Google now following suit in their attempts to add decent privacy restrictions to a previously unrestricted API, but I think consumers don't expect all that much from one-time purchases.
You'll lose market share if you don't add new features, as well as new customers if your app is falling behind others, but that's a separate problem.
On the other hand, the moment you ask just a single euro per year as a subscription, people expect to be up to date all the time. After all, you're still charging them even, so why wouldn't the app ever improve?
Everyone knows a software business does better with recurring revenue instead of single purchases, but customer expectations are also higher if they're still paying you five years down the line.
The best indicator of the value of a thing is the price at which free parties trade it.
I never left. I'm only paying for software and games. IP owned by big music and movie studios is free game since they're scummy with their licensing.
Made the jump back a few weeks ago. Incidentally the Intel N100 processor NUCs make a great <$250 Jellyfin server
There are two problems with subscription services that your own server solves:
1. Shows you like suddenly disappear for no reason (as in GP)
2. They contain a huge amount of things you don't care for, that you can never truly filter out no matter how hard you try.
Your own media server contains all (or most of) the shows you like, and only those.
The current model of most (all?) streaming services is just something I don't want to deal with.
I want to like Jellyfin. I've been running it in parallel with Plex for at least 3 or 4 years. It doesn't work well most of the time for me though - mostly client-side issues like bad rendering, issues with subtitles, videos hanging during seek, many others... I could live with some of the issues I've found but every time I hop on JF I run back to Plex. As much as I hate some things Plex have been doing and the lack of troubleshootability when things go wrong, it mostly works most of the time. JF mostly doesn't work most of the time (again, for me - it seems it's excellent for a lot of people!).
It does seem a little fragile at times and some things are annoying (managing playlists in particular). But the way Plex does business is not acceptable to me, so I didn't even try to install it.
No worries though; hell will be fully authorized for those who can't afford purgatory.
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.
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).
> 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.
I know most of those suspicions will be correct if they aren't already, but I'm still not very happy about it.
It's not super surprising to me that people who use it frequently begin to unconsciously imitate the chatgpt style in their own writing after a time.
It seems that ChatGPT learned from Recipes webpages. Include a story on how the author's parents had sex on a beach in Maui which sparked the author's desire for Mango Passion Fruit Cakes.
In fact, just like I have a limited amount of keystrokes in my lifetime (which incidentally I'm spending on this post) I have a limited amount of time to go through text.
Soon I'll start skipping the longer ones.
I do this with speaking, too. I used to be a bit of an abrasive engineer and just "tell it like it is" but after hitting a communication wall I started to coddle the listener and people really like it. I personally think it's unfortunate but it is what it is.
But still this is psychological barrier to cancel, as FOMO kicks in
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".
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.
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.