Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash | Hacker News Reader

Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash

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Adobe runs what must be one of the largest deceptive rebills. The vast majority of users signing up for a monthly plan do not realize that it is actually an "annual plan, billed monthly" and thus that if they cancel after one month (for example) they'll be billed for the remaining 11 immediately. I honestly don't know how they haven't faced FTC action for this, as it's been their primary model for 5-10 years now.

> actually an "annual plan, billed monthly" and thus that if they cancel after one month (for example) they'll be billed for the remaining 11 immediately

I don't know if this is a recent policy change, but it is not the complete amount but only 50% of the remaining annual amount as per their website[1].

If it were something involving physical goods or services I can understand, but 50% penalty is still a crazy amount for a hosted software service.

1. https://www.adobe.com/legal/subscription-terms.html

Out of curiosity I went to their website to understand how they sell it, because it wasn't clear...

https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/plans.html

I am not sure why this should face FTC or any similar mechanism to prevent "deception".

It's written right there:

US$22.99/mo Annual, billed monthly

And if you slightly scroll down the very first question is how much it costs:

> There are several Creative Cloud plans that include Photoshop. You can purchase it as a standalone app for US$22.99/mo. for the annual billed monthly plan or opt for annual billing at US$263.88/yr.

Buying it with the annual billing would save you 1$ per month.

I have seen this model used elsewhere: if you opt in for the yearly subscription, you still pay per month but you save X% over the monthly subscription.

Not sure what could they do to make it more obvious, besides writing big: we only offer yearly subscriptions, although you can pay monthly..

Edit: if you click on buy it, it leads to another option too, the monthly one. Is this the scam one? Because it says you cancel any time...

Edit again: it seems that they did quite some nasty stuff in the past and then US sued them, so now they are more transparent about their subscriptions.

God bless such organizations that sue the hell out of such bad actors until they behave well.

We successfully stopped paying for a collection of Adobe products that were for a student license last year. We randomly were charged again in January and February of this year and when I called they couldn't find any records of charges. They recommended contesting the charges on the card and we've not been charged since. Still, crazy that they couldn't even verify they charged my card.

I don’t get it, honestly. It’s very clear. You get a discount for an annual commitment and they let you pay monthly. It’s super clear which you’re signing up for when you do it. I’m in the UK, and there’s a 14 day cooling off period on the plans too, unless you buy the full blown annual one.

I’m no adobe supporter generally, and sure they could do more, but they take an awful lot of flak for people who won’t read two lines of text and then scream bloody murder.

When I tried to cancel a regular monthly subscription, they tried to force me to pay a fee to be able to cancel the subscription, and they don't let you disconnect your payment methods. Luckily, I used paypal so I could unauthorise them on paypal. If this happened again to me I would be contacting the consumer rights organisation my country has.

I posted elsewhere in this thread that when I tried to cancel, and discovered that I was actually paying for an annual plan on a monthly basis, I told their support person I'd be speaking with the local consumer affairs regulator[1]. They instantly waived the cancellation fee. I'm tempted to think they've had some trouble with regulators on this issue before.

1: https://www.fairtrading.nsw.gov.au/

I just went back through the sign up process to check and it seems pretty obvious these days? I got three options at checkout annual billed monthly, monthly, annual.

I hate annual billed monthly but the wording isn't hidden.

Yeah, that whole "annual plan billed monthly" thing feels intentionally shady

Almost every single one of Adbobe post on HN has a top comment about this evil subscription plan.

I fell for it once. But I’m in India so I just cancelled my debit card and that was that. Good luck to them to chase me through legal means in India. It was still bit of a hassle though.

I looked at their plans a few years back and it was very clear that they had 3 payment options: Monthly, Annual, and Annual billed Monthly. Of course if you get the third option, getting out of the contract is going to cost you. Otherwise what would ever be the point of choosing the Monthly plan when both Annual options have a discount for going with a longer subscription period?

It seems like this would/should be covered under Australia's unfair contracts law, which requires the term to have a legitimate interest as well as being transparent (which I dont think would be met if they are charging 50% of the remainder, when they would have been happy for you to get a monthly subscription and cancel after a month, only having spent a fifth of what they would charge for termination)

Wasn't there some action around this like a year ago? Can't find it now, but I thought it was investigated at some point.

I found this out the hard way…

But you know what? Karma’s a bitch. I think I am likely not alone in having used a cracked version of photoshop for far, far more time than I ever did an actual paid up copy.

I’m not unaware that piracy was part of their strategy for market penetration, and I guess it’s now a case of “we have the market cornered, let’s monetise”.

Yeah this is terrible, I remember for creative suite there used to be some weird workaround where you could switch your plan to the cheapest one (I think it was Photoshop+Lightroom) and then cancel, and then it would not charge you for the remaining time. I wonder if that still works.

I would love to know how this goes in the Netherlands where we have strict rules on this. If it's not really clear rules dictate the customer is right, so that yearly subscription is simply a monthly subscription.

I have one of those "annual plan, billed monthly". How the hell do I figure out when I initially signed for it? Along the way, I got two free months for getting a Logitech mouse, does that change my annual month?

> I honestly don't know how they haven't faced FTC action for this

FTC Takes Action Against Adobe and Executives for Hiding Fees, Preventing Consumers from Easily Cancelling Software Subscriptions

June 17, 2024

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/06/...

this literally happened to me

I still don't see why this is a point against Adobe. When you select a plan, they very clearly give you 3 options. Monthly, Annual billed monthly, and Annual prepaid. The Annual billed monthly is just flat-out better for end users over prepaid. Why do people want to get rid of it? Because some people FAFO when trying to get an annual price while still being able to cancel any time?

I do not like Adobe in the slightest, but it's not because of their billing practices.

Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care. The AI features in Photoshop are the best around in my experience and come in handy constantly for all sorts of touchup work.

Anyway I don't really think they deserve a lot of the hate they get, but I do hope this encourages development of viable alternatives to their products. Photoshop is still pretty much peerless. Illustrator has a ton of competitors catching up. After Effects and Premiere for video editing are getting overtaken by Davinci Resolve -- though for motion graphics it is still hard to beat After Effects. Though I do love that Adobe simply uses JavaScript for its expression and scripting language.

> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care.

It's because nobody actually wants that.

Artists don't like AI image generators because they have to compete with them, not because of how they were trained. How they were trained is just the the most plausible claim they can make against them if they want to sue OpenAI et al over it, or to make a moral argument that some kind of misappropriation is occurring.

From the perspective of an artist, a corporation training an AI image generator in a way that isn't susceptible to moral or legal assault is worse, because then it exists and they have to compete with it and there is no visible path for them to make it go away.

Most artists would prefer not to compete with an AI image generator that has been trained on their own artwork without their permission, for obvious reasons.

I went through a phase of using the A.I. tools to touch up photos and thought they were helpful. If I needed to add another row of bricks to a wall or remove something they get it done. I haven’t used it in a few months because I’m taking different photos than I was back then.

> or to make a moral argument that some kind of misappropriation is occurring.

They can also make a legal argument that the training set will fully reproduce copyrighted work. Which is just an actual crime as well as being completely amoral.

> because then it exists and they have to compete with it

The entire point of copyright law is: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Individual artists should not have to "compete" against a billion dollar corporation which freely engages in copyright violations that these same artists have to abide by.

>Artists don't like AI image generators because they have to compete with them

I always wonder why people make statements like this. Anyone that knows more than one artist knows that artists uses these tools for a variety of reasons and aren't nearly as scared as random internet concern trolls make them out to be.

> From the perspective of an artist, a corporation training an AI image generator in a way that isn't susceptible to moral or legal assault is worse

That's ignoring the fact that an AI image generator trained without infringing on existing works would have way worse quality, because of the reduced amount and quality of the training set.

I don't think all artists are treating this tool as such an existential threat.

I'd say that is a bit of an ungenerous characterization. Is it possible that it could be both? That while artists maybe do feel under attack in terms of competition, that there is a genuine ethical dilemma at hand?

If I were an artist, and I made a painting and published it to a site which was then used to train an LLM, I would feel as though the AI company treated me disingenuously, regardless of competition or not. Intellectual property laws aside, I think there is a social contract being broken when a publicly shared work is then used without the artist's direct, explicit permission.

Adobe isn't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be more legally compliant, because they see that as a market opportunity. Otoh, artists complain about legal compliance of AIs not because that is what they care about, but because they see that as their only possible redress against a phenomenon they find distasteful. A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.

Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something. There are all kinds of things people and companies do which I dislike but for which there's no just basis for regulating. If Adobe properly licenses all their training data artists don't have a right to say "well i think this is bad for creativity and puts my job at risk, ban it!!!" Or more precisely, they have a right to say that, but no moral justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it.

I hate Adobe's subscription model as much as the next guy and that's a good reason to get annoyed at them. Adobe building AI features is not.

> A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.

Quite an assertion. Why exactly would this be true?

> Adobe isn't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be more legally compliant

Is the implication of this statement that using AI for image editing and creation is inherently unethical?

Is that really how people feel?

The ship has sailed, but I can understand artists feeling that no matter how any AI is trained prospectively, it was only made possible because the methods to do so were learned through unethical means - we now know the exact model architectures, efficient training methods and types of training data needed so that companies like Adobe can recreate it with a fraction of the cost.

We obviously can never unscramble that egg, which is sad because it probably means there will never be a way to make such people feel OK about AI.

> Adobe isn't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be more legally compliant,

Ethics (as opposed to morals) is about codified rules.

The law is a set of codified rules.

So are these really that different (beyond how the law is a hodge-podge and usually a minimum requirement rather than an ideal to reach for)?

I'm curious why you think it would be worse for everybody? This argument seems to depend on the assumption that if something makes AI less viable then the situation for human beings is worse overall. I don't think many actual people would accept that premise.

“A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.”

Care to elaborate?

Also, saying artists only concern themselves with the legality of art used in AI because of distaste when there are legal cases where their art has been appropriated seems like a bold position to take.

It’s a practice founded on scooping everything up without care for origin or attribution and it’s not like it’s a transparent process. There are people that literally go out of their way to let artists know they’re training on their art and taunt them about it online. Is it unusual they would assume bad faith from those purporting to train their AI legally when participation up till now has either been involuntary or opt out? Rolling out AI features when your customers are artists is tone deaf at best and trolling at worst.

> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care.

It's sad that it's funny that you think Adobe is motivated by ethical consideration.

They don't have to be motivated by ethics. I'm fine with them grudgingly doing ethical things because their customer base is all artists, many of whom would look for an alternative product.

Where did the poster say they think Adobe is motivated by that? They said Adobe is operating that way.

Probably want to look good to their customer base - artists

A strawman argument so you can condescendingly and snarkily lecture someone? I can see you were among those mouthing off at Adobe on Bluesky.

Or that generative AI is ethical at all

While I agree about Adobe behaving more ethically, I suspect they simply talked to their customers, and decided they didn't have much choice. CELSYS, who makes Clip Studio, suffered a backlash and pulled their initial AI features: https://www.clipstudio.net/en/news/202212/02_01/

Probably didn't help that Clip Studio is predominantly used by Japanese artists, and virtually all models capable of producing anime-style images were trained on a dataset of their own, stolen pixiv art.

Talking to customers is a good thing.

Let's normalize it.

For their pricing and subscription practices alone, they deserve far more backlash than they get.

I would describe my business relationship with Adobe as:

"hostage"

They annually harass me with licensing checks and questionnaires because they really hate you if you run Photoshop inside a VM (my daily driver is Linux), although it is explicitly allowed. Luckily, I don't need the Adobe software that often. But they hold a lot of important old company documents hostage in their proprietary file formats. So I can't cancel the subscription, no matter how much I'd like to.

I am so happy that my Win32 CS3 Master Collection still works fully-offline and will continue to do so for as long as I care to keep using it :)

Even if they’re “trying”, it’s moot if the result isn’t clearly more ethical, and with the proliferation of stolen imagery on their stock image service (which they use to train their models), the ethics of their models are very much not clear.

If I saw news of a huge purge of stolen content on their stock image service with continued periodic purges afterwards (and subsequent retraining of their models to exclude said content), I might take the claim more seriously.

Now that would have been a really interesting thing for them to start a conversation about on Bluesky. They would have got some genuine engagement if they wanted it.

Much better than the transparently vapid marketing-speak

I think, part of the fiasco is about that engagement posters are not really welcomed on Bluesky. And, "What’s fueling your creativity right now?” is a pure engagement post, contributing nothing on its side of the conversation. Hence, it's more like another attempt to harvest Adobe's subscribers. — For X/Twitter-bound marketing it's probably fine, at least, much what we had become used to, but it totally fails the Bluesky community. (Lesson leaned: not all social media are the same.)

> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical

Adobe is cannibalizing their paid C-Suite artists by pumping out image generators to their enterprise customers. How is that ethical? They are double dipping and screwing over their longtime paying artists

I will forever miss Fireworks. I dont do much with graphics but Fireworks was the best thing I ever used. Now I do zero with graphics.

End of the day, the hate is: “The software is great, but these jerks expect me to pay for it!”

Their sales went crazy because everyone was relentlessly pirating their software.

The best? I tried the Photoshop AI features to clean up a old photo for the first time this week and it crashed every time. After a bunch of searching I found a post identifying problem - it always crashes if there are two or more faces in the photo. Guess someone forgot to test on the more than one person edge case.

Step 1. Make a stock photos library for everyone to upload. Step 2. Use that stock photo library to train your AI without letting users opt out. You couldn't remove photos without accepting the licence. Step 3. Allow users to use AI generated art on said stock library, even further ignoring artists by regurgitating art from other models. Step 4. Force new licences to users that use any file as potential training data. Step 5. Act shocked when everyone is mad.

For reference, here is Adobe's approach to generative ai:

https://www.adobe.com/fireflyapproach/

(I work for Adobe)

Yes and this is what I was worried about in my essay on AI.

They have burned so much of goodwill that the community is not willing to engage even with positive things now.

This broadly is happening to tech as well.

> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data

I was actually contacted by someone at Adobe for a chat about disability representation and sensitivity in Japan because they were doing research to gauge the atmosphere here and ensure that people with disabilities were represented, and how those representations would be appropriate for Japanese culture. It really blew my mind.

What it implies is, it's not really about ethics per se, just like it's not really about 6th digits per se. People hate AI images, cut and dry.

Law is agreeable hate, in a way. Things that gets enough hate will get regulated out, sooner or later.

I remember pixelmator being a breath of fresh air.

There are a lot of good photoshop alternatives. Most are better at individual use cases than photoshop. For example, nearly all the alternatives are better at designing website comps because they are object-based instead of layer-based.

What can Photoshop AI do that ipadapter / controlnets can't and haven't done for the past two years?

"Get artists to use it" is the free square :)

If they are trying to be ethical, all it takes is one look at their stock photo service to see that they are failing horribly.

ACME is the one major company trying to be ethical with its orphan crushing training data and no one even seems to care!

SUPER ethical to try and put artists and entire industries out of business to be replaced with Adobe products.

I'm not pointing fingers in any specific direction, but there is a lot of importance in AI leadership, and with that you're going to see a lot of bot activity and astroturfing to hinder the advancement of competitors. We also see companies such as OpenAI publicly calling out Elon Musk for what appears to be competition-motivated harassment.

So while I think we're all pretty aware of both sides of the image gen discussion and may have differing opinions about that - I think we can all agree that the genie can't be put back in the bottle. This will naturally lead for those that do take advantage of the technology to outpace those which do not.

Also I applaud Adobe's approach to building their models "ethically", yes they are inferior to many competitors, but they work well enough to save significant time and money. They have been very good at honing in what AI is genuinely useful for instead of bolting on a chatbot onto every app like clock radios in the 1980s.

To people who care about ethics wrt. "AI", there is no such thing as ethical "AI".

To people who are on board with the "AI" hype train, there is no ethical problem to be solved wrt. "AI".

Neither side cares.

They're making money off it.

At least Meta gives their models to the public.

The problem isn't their specific practices, but more that they're in general one of the companies profiting from our slopcore future.

Uh, not sure where you’ve been but Adobe is slavering over using the content its locked-in users create to train its products. It only (seemingly) backed off this approach last year when the cost in terms of subscription revenue got too high. But you’re naive if you think they aren’t desperately planning how to get back to that original plan of owning an ever-growing slice of every bit of human creativity that touches their software.

> Anyway I don't really think they deserve a lot of the hate they get

The dark lesson here is that you avoid hate and bad PR by cutting artists out of the loop entirely and just shipping whatever slop the AI puts out. Maybe you lose 20% of the quality but you don't have to deal with the screaming and dogpiles.

Ethical? You realize most of their training data was obtained by users forced agreement to a EULA with the intention of their art being sold on Adobe’s marketplace without it ever being made explicit their art was going to be used for AI training until much later, right?

Subscriptionware is cancer. They deserve all the hate they get.

This Adobe. They don’t care about ethic. And frankly fuck them.

There’s no evidence that their generative tools are more ethical.

Even if you believe everything they say, they are lying by omission. For example, for their text to image technology, they never specify what their text language model is trained on - it’s almost certainly CLIP or T5, which is trained on plenty of not-expressly-licensed data. If they trained such a model from scratch - they don’t have enough image bureau data to make their own CLIP, even at 400m images, CLIP only performs well at the 4-7b image-caption pair scale - where’s the paper? It’s smoke and mirrors dude.

There’s a certain personality type that is getting co-opted on social media like Hacker News to “mook” for Adobe. Something on the intersection of a certain obsessive personality and Dunning Kruger.

because customers don't want generative AI in their products, ethical or not

You are assuming that there is an ethical way to use AI. There are several ethical concerns around using AI, and Adobe is perhaps concerned with one of these (charitably, respecting artists, or a little more cynically, respecting copyright).

Many would argue, myself included, that the most ethical approach towards AI is to not use it. Procreate is a popular digital art program that is loudly taking that position: https://procreate.com/ai

Yeah, they posted this:

> Hey, we're Adobe! We're here to connect with the artists, designers, and storytellers who bring ideas to life. What's fueling your creativity right now?

> Drop a reply, tag a creator, or share your latest work—we'd love to see what inspires you!

That's such a bland, corporate message. It feels totally inauthentic. Do Adobe (a corporation) really "love to see what inspires you" or do they just want engagement for their new account?

I'm not surprised in the slightest that it triggered a pile-on.

I'm not surprised but disheartened that people have so little going on in their life they thing trying to boycott a bsky corporate account is a good use of their time.

I think it's rather the opposite - there's way too much going on in their life, specifically stuff that they have no control over, so they vent all that stress wherever they can.

I’m pretty sure the amount of time and energy it took you to write this post is more or less equal to the amount of time and energy energy it took somebody else to write a post making fun of the Adobe account

Takes two seconds to call somebody a wanker.

So what did you do this friday?

Much like you leaving this comment?

They want engagement for their new account, it's what anyone who posts on social media wants.

Yes, but it's not what social media users want. How about posting tips, small micro courses, behind the scene stories about what motivated some choices in the app, anything useful or endearing? Not just harvesting likes and account names?

Right, but you need to be a whole lot less obvious about it. Adobe's message here is a case study in what NOT to do.

This type of vapid nonsense simply isn’t very welcome on Bluesky. Or really, increasingly, _anywhere_ (except LinkedIn, the most absurd of all the social networks); I think its day has largely passed.

It gives "how do you do fellow kids" vibes

It’s so bland I don’t understand why it elicited any response at all.

The general mood on Bluesky is very opposed to AI, especially AI art. Since Adobe now has AI integrated into their products, people on Bluesky hate them.

From what I've seen Bluesky is kind of the Twitter for artists who dislike AI and don't want their art scraped by Twitter. That one of the most hated companies in the art space decided to appear there too was obviously not going to be received well.

It's likely both. In most large organizations I've worked with, there is a split between true believers and cynics. And often the true believers are so bought in they have trouble recognizing the cynics. There are likely earnest folks behind every bland social media post. Doesn't mean their product is worth anything either way.

I don’t disagree, but what are they supposed to post otherwise?

Post something interesting!

A profile of an up and coming artist doing cool stuff with Adobe software.

A video interview with an interesting team lead at Adobe.

Or just stick to product announcements like various other brand accounts to.

Pretty much anything that doesn't come across as fake engagement bait would probably have been fine.

Meh. Adobe is a large corp. You'd want want them to masquerade as something they are not? Why would that be better?

I am so over pile-ons by people who see themselves as being SO important.

Also: it feels really weird to defend Adobe.

Adobe's post was an attempt to masquerade as a relatable company.

The left has spent the last decade proudly bullying everyone for wrongthink, including going after employment and family members. It should come as no surprise then that corporations wouldn’t participate above the bare minimum on a predominantly leftist forum.

I feel like you are misrepresenting things (intentionally or not). I've heard this narrative from really dishonest people, but I don't know you so can't judge. Maybe it's just a coincidence and you really think that.

As a lurker on both Bluesky and Twitter, I find Bluesky is a much more hostile place. Twitter is much more absurd but there is not as much anger.

Yeah, I'm surprised by how many here are responding with weird Adobe rants. They posted fairly innocuous stuff, were attacked, and ultimately chose to abandon the platform as a result.

This sounds like a bigger indictment of the platform than anything to do with Adobe.

Since when did a damn website have to be a "platform"? Did anyone ask to chat with Time Warner on the public AOL chatrooms of the 90s? Were Digg users interested in hearing from Blockbuster in the 2000s?

Adobe could try to offer virtual "office hours" with employees helping people learn to use the software, give something back to their users. Instead they immediately treated it like another marketing channel with a formulaic and lazy engagement bait question that I'm sure they thought would work the same way it does on Twitter and Instagram.

Maybe the people on the platform don't want it to get filled by bland corporate accounts like twitter did

I'm pretty left leaning and I don't like Bluesky. For me, it's too hostile and too much of an angry echo chamber. X is scattered wildly but I with muting I have been able to shape to get a more reasonable feed.

I don't understand why people struggle with either site. Follow only people you want to see. Both sites allow you to only see posts from those accounts. Problem solved.

Same here. I'd agree with many of the political positions on Bluesky but it looks like the left equivalent of what Truth Social is on the right - Bluesky recently started publishing home addresses of DOGE employees, with the intent seeming to be to target them with violence.

X is a cesspit. Bluesky is a cult and echo chamber. Both should be avoided if you care about your mental sanity.

Social media was a catastrophic mistake.

As is the case with most ideological echo chambers, they devolve into struggle sessions. You find the same thing happening in the niche right-wing movement sections of twitter, it's just "this person is secretly indian/jewish" instead of "this person is secretly a racist/xyzphobe".

Twitter has the advantage of a broader range so you can escape that while bluesky is almost exclusively used based on strong ideological motivation. It's raison d'etre at this point is basically and highly political so this was bound to happen.

Likewise here, the amount of just pure made up crap/misinformation on X has definitely increased (perhaps because accounts get paid for views/engagement now) or the algorithm seems to push it more, but it's not an echo chamber.

I have at least 100 words on my X muted word list and it's just about usable.

This is a weird argument because Bluesky doesn't have a "feed"... by default you see only the people you follow unless you subscribe to specific other feeds.

So you followed a bunch of people you didn't like? That says more about you than the platform...

I got an extension to hide every blue check user, twitter is wonderful nkw

So far, Bluesky hasn't been inserting alt-right nutjobs into my feed like Twitter has.

Bluesky seems to focus on curating your own feed, to the point where mass blocklists will block hundreds or thousands of accounts, and not every blocklist is reliable. The "block first, ask questions later" approach is very freeing and I've been practicing it on social media long before it gained traction on Bluesky.

I expect the platform will be very painful for people who believe everyone should be subjected to their opinion (the people who will cry censorship because Reddit shadow-banned them). Good riddance, I'd say; they can be happy on Twitter with the rest of their kind.

On average, my experience has been a lot better. I'm guessing that's mostly because I had to fight and subdue Twitter to exclusively show me content from the people I follow, combined with social media's general attraction to alt-right nutjobs (and of course, Twitter's owner being an alt-right nutjob doesn't help either).

I find that the extremes of hostility are worse on bluesky, but the average skeet is much less hostile. And there's just straight up fewer skeets to be angry about.

Being familiar only with the street slang for "skeet" and not Bluesky's relatively recent adoption of "skeet" to mean "Bluesky post", my parser really had to do some work to try to understand this sentence.

Hello username neighbor

I didn't get much negativity on Twitter, and after moving the Bluesky the same is true.

The experience of a person following fantasy football stuff, and another person following politics, will be totally different, regardless of website.

I don’t use either lately because I’ve found that to be better for mental health overall, but to me it seemed that Bluesky was generally better about staying “on track” when it comes to showing relevant things, once trained. Xitter really, really likes to veer off course and so much as stopping scrolling for a second while an undesired post is on screen is enough for it to start showing more of the same type.

Bsky doesn’t have blue check replies which is a major point in its favor too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worthwhile blue check reply, it’s like if one purposefully dredged up the worst YouTube video comments they could find and pinned them at the top.

Yes, the elephant in the room is Bluesky itself. In my experience, it's way more toxic than Twitter/X.

I just looked at twitter and it seems the sentiment is similar across both platforms. I think this was more of an adobe think than a bluesky thing.

Bluesky currently has the kuro5hin "A Group Is It's Own Worst Enemy" effect going on. People who think they claimed land first believe that they get to define the future of the service for everyone else.

It's obnoxious, and if the service truly offers a real alternative to Twitter it needs to squash these brigading groups. I get that people don't want to see the posts of brands...so don't follow them. It's incredibly simple. I don't want furry content but I don't run around the platform complaining that some do.

Maybe it shouldn't have been surprising after Democrats removed abolishing the death penalty from their party platform, but all the Mangione stuff on bluesky was pretty sad to see.

Mario Bros. did nothing wrong

It figures. One's knee-deep in censorship and the other one is more or less free-for-all, so you get high levels of hostility and an extreme range of ideas respectively from the get go.

So after the honeymoon with Bluesky ends, what will be the next friendlier social media platform? And after that one? Will this just keep repeating?

If a new a Twitter/Bluesky replacement is to promote civil discourse, it will need to _restrict_ reach as a core feature. Which... seems antithetical to a social media platform. But as long as "enragement = engagement" holds true, each new social media platform will eventually devolve into the same kind of cesspool as its predecessors.

Yes, because angry rants and lynch mobs have an inherent advantage when it comes to which content spreads better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

See A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy: https://web.archive.org/web/20080708220307/http://shirky.com...

People will just go back to Twitter/X, again, because despite all the falling-sky predictions it remains the single most important social media platform of our day. Governments around the world announce actual world-changing news on it - kind of all you need to know.

Not surprisingly because the community was populated by people who are angry that twitter changed.

It’s a community of unhealthy social media addicts

The Bluesky community is left-leaning and mainly consists of early adopters - basically, a group of active idealists. It's unsurprising that they are highly hostile toward a company with a history of exploitative behavior. Additionally, the current political situation significantly affects their emotional stability, negatively.

I mean, yeah, the place is a kind of minefield these days, but I don't blame people. It just happens.

Bluesky is the worst of old Twitter concentrated into one place. It's some weird mixture of the hall monitors of Mastodon crossed with wannabe members of the weather underground. Like a leftwing Gab full of only Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz types. This sort of of faux outrage at adobe is par for the course - its awful over there.

X is much more of an ideological mix.

My X experience was far more partisan than Bluesky. Not being able to get away from seeing the latest thoughts of user numero uno was also a turn off.

I've heard it described as Digital Canada, which I think is just the perfect description.

I have a much different experience on Twitter. It has a much higher tolerance for racism, misogyny, gay/transphobia, and wild conspiracies. It got much worse after the election and I finally bailed on it after the inauguration. I have not missed it.

Bluesky has all that but just in the anti direction. I was hoping for a more absolute of not disparaging anyone based on their race, gender, or sexual preference.

In my experience, that is completely untrue. I think it is more of "you are the company you keep" situation. Bluesky is obviously more socially liberal and therefore, IMO objectively smarter, nicer users and community. On Bluesky you have more control over your experience which makes me wonder how genuine your post is.

I've seen worse. In terms of the most hostile, Mastodon takes the crown.

It's kinda sad to see it become Truth Social But For The Other Team.

The last time I logged into my twitter account (which I use maybe once or twice a year to post about tech or complain to a customer service account) the first thing I saw was a paid ad espousing white nationalism and The Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

I have a very hard time believing that Bluesky is more hostile than Twitter.

frankly in some ways the audience for bluesky is more similar to HN, but in like a bad way.

Well yeah Bluesky is predominantly left wing, and the left wing is angry right now.

Bluesky’s users love drama.

The phenomenon at work here is: if product being produced by a profit-seeking enterprise can be rented instead of being sold, said enterprise will eventually find a way to do it, then over time, rather than a single bill, it will attempt to rent out individual aspects of the now product-turned-service, followed by cost cutting that degrades the default service level while introducing additional service levels for which the consumer will have to pay additional fees, and finally making switching away to competitors progressively difficult for the consumer. This is a natural outcome of profit-maximization.

This is the primary reason why creatives despise Adobe despite some people here arguing that it's for the AI art generation. They hate that too but the biggest pain point by far is the toxic business relation you have to maintain to continue to use industry standard tooling.

Single bill for modern software doesn't make sense economically anymore.

Do you want updates? You want new versions? New features? Support?

Single bill it's like buying an IPhone once and then you expect to get a new one for free each year.

>Do you want updates? You want new versions? New features? Support?

No. This was a solved problem decades ago. Purchase includes minor version updates, then you keep it for life without updates. Upgrading to the next version is a choice.

Why did we collectively agree that customer choice does not matter?

All the digital artists I know don't use and want new features in Photophop. And more generally, most non-tech businesses values more stability than having new features.

Single bill makes a lot of sense for many users.

It depends, what are you charging for the new features in the update/version? Twenty years ago, you'd put out a new version and I could go find what new features it had and decide for myself whether those were worth the price you ask to get them. If the answer is yes, I pay and I get the new features. If the answer is no, I don't pay and I keep using the program I already bought.

Why do you think the company is automatically entitlted to rent seeking and the removal of user choice just because they tweaked the ui?

Does a JetBrains style license not address this exactly? You buy the current version and one year of updates. If you want updates after that you have to renew.

You don't get to play cute, fun, friend to creators and have the most odious licensing terms in the history of software.

Actually if you'll read the fine print, you're obligated to be friends.

Autodesk is at least boxing in the same weight class, but I do think Adobe is worse.

All big companies do that for few years now - either with used language or graphics (namely Corporate Memphis and its various uncanny variants) or with both. It's enough to look at patch notes for mobile apps: these are exactly cutesy, fake friendly. 99% of the time you won't learn what was changed or fixed but instead you get these unrelated comments trying to show how cool company xyz is. It's unironic "hello fellow kids" meme approach.

I think this is a great one sentence encapsulation of the situation.

As a photographer, I have a love/hate relationship with Adobe. I’m not a fan of many aspects of their business, but Lightroom is a (sometimes) excellent product.

On the one hand, I don’t have much sympathy for Adobe. On the other hand, this whole situation is why I am not on social media these days with the exception of HN and niche subreddits.

Even if much of the criticism they receive is warranted, the social media climate is just so incredibly toxic that I want no part of it.

Feels like there has to be a better way to be social on the Internet, but as time goes on I’m increasingly not sure if humans can handle it once a certain scale is reached.

Yup, I prefer Lightroom to Capture One, especially for film-related workflows.

But I just can't go back to their predatory pricing practices, and the absolute malware of a programme that creative cloud is.

I switched to capture 1 due to how poorly adobe handles fujifilm raw file even today. Workflow wise it is basically the same functions just in different places. Doesn’t take long to get up and running.

Online communities have an inherent death spiral dynamic, unless you actively moderate away toxic people.

These people drive away normal folks creating an ever more distilled community of unpleasant folks.

How many normal people are going to hang around places like reddit and bluesky that are seemingly now filled with hate and conspiracy theories.

What a great idea, scaring companies probing bluesky. That surely won't backfire and will cement bluesky as a Xitter alternative.

Maybe, just maybe, the platforms that we use to engage socially with other human beings don't also have to be organized around engaging commercially with brands.

So you think Adobe would get a resoundingly warm welcome on X?

Pretty sure they trashed their own brand with their subscription model. They're finding that out now.

I jumped to Affinity apps years ago when Adobe required a subscription — never looked back.

No, the moral is different: if you’re a company notoriously hostile to creatives, don’t ask in a post “What’s fueling your creativity right now?” - and if you do then don’t be surprised when you get honest answers.

Bluesky audience is certain kind, more left leaning, finding corporations evil. Adobe's experiment shows that it is unlikely any big corp could go there any time until the audience is more diverse, less cancel culture.

The presence of obnoxious brand accounts is very far down my list of desires from a social network.

Maybe the Bluesky selects the community they want and that is why people are enjoying it.

I personally am more likely to use a social media site without brands.

> What a great idea, scaring companies probing bluesky.

you make that sound like a bad thing

I'd say this is less to do specifically with BlueSky and more to do with posting tone-deaf marketing spiel.

yes!

It isn't "an idea", it is a justified response.

Crocodile tears for the poor company that got drunk on enshittifying its own brand and now has to sleep in it. Adobe's takeover is like it freebased Private Equity and now complains that it has no friends. The TOS change to have AI train on all your art is really what broke people.

The public yearns for formulaic engagement slop /s

It's already a Twitter alternative that's superior by virtue of being in its pre-enshittification era.

It may never be a Twitter alternative in the sense of making anyone a billionaire, but I'm okay with that.

> “What’s fueling your creativity right now?”

Hilarious thin marketspeak. But sure, blame the social platform.

I've become so disenchanted with internet vitriol that it's surreal seeing these trolls attack a social media presence that's geniunely deserving. Still, I wouldn't invite any of these people to my house.

> Still, I wouldn't invite any of these people to my house.

I think this is one of the most profound statements I've read all year. Perfectly sums up all the quiet backlash by middle America against the trolls that have pulled the party into extremes.

It's not that they're bad people, they just get over excited and nobody wants to deal with the headache right now.

I see it at work in the lunch room conversations where someone starts spewing passive aggressive hate and it really kills the vibe.

Negative people should be terminated after a few days of confirmation that they are negative. The dose makes the poison so you have to get them out quickly.

I had to call it a day and cancel this year. Yearly sub approaching $700 per year just to open photoshop files a few times per year and maybe edit a pdf file? Fk it I’ll find another way.

Affinity Photo is excellent, indeed Designer (Illustrator alternative) and Publisher (InDesign alternative) are excellent as well.

Qoppa PDF Studio is a great alternative to Adobe Acrobat.

Both offer perpetual licences.

They have a photoshop plan for 10$ / month.

Like you I rarely open Photoshop, maybe once or twice a month.

krita is the way

Adobe has perfected digital blackmail.

After using and promoting their products for years to create our work, the switch off access to view or print any of it unless we keep paying blackmail monthly fees.

I don't want to edit my old work, but to lock me out of viewing it is nothing short of BLACKMAIL. As people change jobs or retire, they lose all access to their work. Sick.

Hey were a big company here to take your feedback and engage with you.

Ogh, nvm, lol this platform has real users that actually engage about their opinions?

dips out

Companies should stay off social media … Unless they are social companies. Companies that try to advertise on social media to their consumer base do harm to the social aspect. This is why twitter and Facebook and instagram went from healthy social interactions to just marketing fluffs giving the media companies heavier valuation

Notoriously user-hostile companies should, at least.

In my country, what Adobe is doing is punishable by imprisonment for a period of 6 months to 8 years. Yet, for some reason, they operate in this market without the slightest problem.

“Whoever, with the intention of obtaining financial gain, causes another person to enter into a financially disadvantageous arrangement, or otherwise dispose of their own or someone else’s assets, by means of deception, or by exploiting a mistake or their inability to understand the nature of the action undertaken, shall be liable to imprisonment for a period of 6 months to 8 years”

That sounds like a huge stretch.

I remember pirating photoshop in the late 90's for the every now and then I need to edit a photo (usually something dumb or screwing around). I was never going to pay anything let alone the real cost to use it for random crap I needed it for, so when they began CS with subscriptions and such, I simply moved to The Gimp. For 25 years Gimp has been "good enough" for me, and now it's truly good enough for professionals too as I have family that do graphic design and now use it where prior they were Photoshop snobs.

Adobe ought to be glad anyone still cares about them.

Sadly what I know them mostly for now is their vermin web services major eCommerce companies seem to love to use (sad for the consumers stuck using this garbage). I see "adobedtm.com" domain show up constantly in noscript plugins, and I know nothing good can come from them, but NOT allowing it usually breaks the websites. I really, REALLY try not to do business with companies using adobe in their web services for this reason.

No love for Adobe. I have fond memories of their Updater downloading 1GB plus "updates", even though my trial EXPIRED.

Charging a subscription fee is crazy for a product that is very expensive. I do not know why they are still around.

I pay $20 a month for the educational discount and my kids get access to every Adobe product. It is an amazing deal.

When you are an adult not in school you probably don't need "all apps" and it is relatively inexpensive to get just the product you use.

Anyway, they are still around because they still have some of the best set of features, and are industry standards, though this may change in the future and in some areas is already in progress (and I welcome that! They need competition to push them)

No, it's not crazy, all the companies making expensive software are moving to subscriptions and they love the result. It is a lot easier to sell and to get people to renew their licenses.

And 20$/m is not what I would call "very expensive" in the context of a professional product used by people and companies who make a profit from it. By comparison, Autocad and Revit are 350$/m each

I hate it too (and never had to use it) but $20/month is peanuts for people who use it professionally, unless they're from third world countries (which likely pirate it anyway)

Muscle memory. I could probably get by with something cheaper but I have been using photoshop for thirty years at this point, I know hot keys and workflows at a spiritual level at this point.

I have this popup in Win 10 that will not go away, out of nowhere "DING" "Would you like to use Adobe PDF?" It's built into Windows like wth

Enterprise-level budgets.

People don't want to use Gimp, which is the next most powerful photo editing software :-)

As mush as I enjoy shitting on Adobe, I also want to encourage companies to embrace platforms other than Twitter. Simply because at times it's the best way to get customer service these days.

I think I would have had more respect for Adobe if they had left the posts up.

I just don't get how Adobe didn't get dethroned after being so unpopular for so long. There are so many Photoshop competitors, many of which are quite good, they seem to be ripe for disruption. The last version I used was CS6, which came out more than a decade ago, and even that had more than a good enough feature set.

Blender is slowly taking over 3D, why can't 2D be disrupted similarly?

I'm pretty sure it's because just about every applicable art school has enforced their student's output to be done in adobe's products - meaning that Adobe has a firm grip on the educator's market. As the saying goes, hook them in when they're young and they'll be too lazy and vested to move away from their products for a lifetime.

That is how free market capitalism is supposed to work.

If you do not like products you switch to a competitor. That is the fundamental assumption on which the system is built

This was fascinating to see unfold. What if there was a social network that had taste and rejected things that suck?

Is it a failure of Bluesky to never become the global town square, if it means being a place where a brand can't find it a safe space to promote itself?

Can a social network thread the needle of having enough traffic to be worthwhile but not so much as to attract the Eternal September?

Maybe a better question is whether we even need a global town square. I've had Twitter and Bluesky and the difference between them and a real town square is that you're always performing publically to an audience you can't possibly know. I've found far more rewarding relationships posting on niche forums and even subreddits because you get a sense of the people who use and administrate them, and you're safe in the knowledge you can't easily find virality.

>Is it a failure of Bluesky to never become the global town square,

No, because that's an oxymoron. There is no such thing because a precondition for a town square (which in reality is a community of people, not a place) is that there exists shared set of values, context and conduct between its members. The state of nature on a global platform, just like in a megacity is to be an anonymous, atomized individual who ideas or products can be sold to.

The problem is the microblogging format. No microblogging site can be a good town square. It’s not designed for discussion. It’s designed to allow people to shout into the void, hoping that someone hears them, so that they feel for a moment that their lives have meaning.

Not exactly related, but i enjoyed this tiny slightly funny clip about this topic:

Every "AI" artist right now - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sjnr_tLLKQ0

I keep a list of alternatives to Adobe software (for posts like this):

https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/alternatives-to-adobe/

Has anyone actually stopped using Photoshop?

What are they migrating to?

Krita and Photopea. I use image manipulation programs occasionally to work on paper figures and presentations. Years ago, I used photoshop because alternatives like Gimp have abyssimal UX that I can't get over, even for free.

With Krita and Photopea, my need for photoshop, previously paid by my employer, is gone.

I still own a copy of the last version of Photoshop before they went to subscription, CS6, but these days I find myself using either Pixelmator or Krita.

Affinity Photo. It has an inexpensive perpetual license, and supports all the use-cases I previously needed Photoshop for.

I have Photoshop, but I use Affinity Photo for 99% of what I do (make digital art, AP is used for assembly and effects). I use Photoshop for a few special effects, but often it's not worth the effort.

1) Switched about 4 years ago

2) to Affinity Photo & Designer (perpetual license)

I use a copy of Photoshop Elements 10 from about a decade ago. Still works great and prevents me from over-editing my photos with crappy "looks" that make them "pop".

Affinity for most editing and Krita for digital painting.

Photopea

Any number of AI apps out there can easily replace 95% of Photoshop’s usecase.

Somehow Adobe can say thank you, for free they get honest feedback about the crap they do without having to hire an expensive consulting firm or a survey company.

Now they can know why their sells are platoning at least and people would churn as must as possible.

As per those leaks, Adobe employees are already very aware that everyone despises them.

Bluesky isn't representative of Adobe's userbase, so this reaction doesn't really matter.

The people who decide to write a scathing reply to Adobe's Bluesky account are irrelevant outside of their Bluesky bubble.

Social media really brings out the best in people doesn't it? Dogpiling, self-congratulation, mimicry, dehumanization, scapegoating. It's so lucky for society that many people spend hours a day on there!

I don't trust them at all. The amount of traffic to various domains is incredible coming out of their desktop apps.

But mostly, when they first started the subscription model I wasn't furious about it - until I realised I was stuck on a yearly plan, and I'm usually pretty good at detecting when I'm being tricked into that. A part of me doubts I was ever asked correctly.

> there would be no respite if I paid annually, nor could I receive one of those special invitations for a 35% discount

Offering a discount to new customers while no discounts for existing, loyal customers always seemed backwards to me. Back in the Zortech days, we'd offer upgrades to existing customers at a steep discount.

> we'd offer upgrades

That's part of the difference. With a subscription model, you don't need customers to want to buy your upgrades (they're forced to pay for them), you benefit the most from locking them into your ecosystem as best you can. Adobe doesn't want to make existing customers happy, they want to make it difficult for unhappy ones to stop paying every month. At that point, discounts to new customers makes sense, since it traps new people into paying you.

Another great reason to drop the great „For Profit (Creative) Software“ video[1] for insight on why Adobe‘s and Autodesk‘s hostile business practices hurt creative professionals so much

[1] https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc

Adobe charging subscription is one of the most asshole moves I've seen in software.

I understand that you can charge monthly if you provide a service. You can charge monthly for SaaS or PaaS, but charging monthly for a desktop application can't win the goodwill of the people.

    > has left Adobe’s standing with many photographers in shambles

What does this mean? Do normie photographers have any realistic choice except Adobe products? Are their sales falling? I doubt it. This quote reads like sour grapes.

Here's a really great video detailing just how much Adobe (and Autodesk etc) hate their users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4mdMMu-3fc

They'd get a lot less pushback if the annual plan was billed anually like other services, they wouldn't even need to refund part of the remaining time when users cancel auto-renew.

Controversial take: I'm happy they went monthly paid subscription. You think a budding graphic designer of one year could afford the $1,500+ up front cost? The seven seas were the only option.

HOWEVER, 60 a month is too high for a product quality that is tanking. I was okay with it the first few years, but PS and Illustrator's performance noticeably have gone straight to shit for absolutely no benefit except for a little stupid gimmicks that offer zero productivity boosts. Indesign, they've mostly left alone, which I'm happy about because it's like Oreos. Stop fucking with the recipe, you made the perfect cookie. There are no more kingdoms to conquer. Simply find performance boosts, that's it. The reliability of my files and getting work done is more important than anything else. Truly. That's what Adobe USED to stand for. Pure raw UI intuitive productivity and getting shit done. Now, it's a fucking clown show that cares about their social media and evangelism.

I hear on the video side they've super dropped the ball, but I'm not much for motion graphics outside of Blender.

Stop with the bullshit "telemetry" garbage that bogs down my computer and AI scrapping of our data. Old files that used to run fine on my older computers run like shit on my new one. I know damn well there's bullshit going on in the background. That's 80% of the issue. The other 20% of problems are running of the mill stuff.

I am perfectly happy paying for functional, productive software. 60 bucks a month for that is fine as a freelance graphic designer and marketer. However creative cloud is quickly becoming dysfunctional and unproductive. That's the problem.

I don't really agree with the cost argument when the subscription is more expensive in the long run. Nobody needs to upgrade Photoshop every year, they're going to go 2-3 years (if not more) between upgrades. And when you do that, it's much cheaper to buy up front.

Renting software is just plain a raw deal for the users. It's more expensive, plus you don't get to keep it after you stop paying. The only one who wins is the vendor.

>You think a budding graphic designer of one year could afford the $1,500+ up front cost?

Yes? It's pretty normal to take out a loan or use a credit card to purchase tools to setup your career for years to come. That budding graphic designer probably spent $2000+ on a new Mac. Honestly though subscriptions only make sense for business customers, they really fuck over the home users that would like to buy the software once and use it for several years. Hobby photographers and such are either priced out of the market, or stuck with old computers running older versions from before the subscription push.

The first comment seems to be interesting:

> I don't like subscriptions but that's not the biggest problem. The biggest issue is Adobe's software has been getting worse as the years have passed. It's slow, incredibly buggy, their new features are often an embarrassment, and Adobe seems to do nothing other than increasing prices. And therein lies the issue with subscriptions - the user keeps paying higher prices and the company has zero motivation to fix bugs

I wonder how hard it is to create the core functionalities of Adobe Photoshop. Maybe many people have different definitions of what are the core functionalities, thus turning making a replacement software very tough.

There’s plenty of replacements which are fine. Many are better to use for many tasks. The problem is lock-in in professional contexts. Having a problem with some feature in a PSD? “I don’t wanna pay for Photoshop” isn’t usually an acceptable excuse.

If open source projects and other companies had gathered around an open file format, maybe there would be some leverage, but they all use their own formats.

Alternative social media contains alternative personalities

"Join our site if you're enraged" users act enraged.

Artists who hate Adobe should actively support the development of open source alternatives. That is the only way this situation is going to improve.

> “Adobe couldn’t explain why it let its once excellent relationship with photographers and media lapse, only that it is sorry that happened.”

Maybe shouldn't have listened to asshat MBAs and overpaid management consultants that infiltrate your boardroom with their "haha number go up" bullshit

They haven't figured out yet that you should make software for customers, not for your MBAs/Product Managers.

Nicely done, people on Bluesky! clap

I still use PS7. No adobe creative cloud, and all you need to accomplish some awesome stuff.

When companies take actions hostile to their user base obvious things happen.

Man, this was fun to see in real time. A site whose earliest adopters were Twitter refugees who hated the crypto/AI/NFT boosters, created actual art, and ultimately left Twitter because of rampant fascism and bigotry, effectively cyberbullied the company and its Head of Social Media so badly the latter left the site entirely.

You have to be pretty bad at your job to misread the room so terribly. Just taking a casual look at Clearsky’s block rankings would show how many lists are specifically blocking and targeting brands, griftos, fascists, and bigots of various stripes, and likely dissuade you from approaching the community without some form of battle plan.

Treating BlueSky like a “new Twitter” is a dangerous mistake to make, something Adobe learned the hard way. To make matters worse, they also poisoned the community well to the point there’s a fresh witch hunt out for brands and companies to add to block lists, thus harming everyone else’s “engagement”.

This is a spot on analysis. Bluesky and Mastodon are full of people that felt and continue to feel disenfranchised and excluded. They embraced Bluesky because it reminded them of what Twitter used to be and had found themselves what they felt was a relatively safe space.

Companies like Adobe and other major tech players have enabled the hostile environment we see growing every day. It’s no wonder that disingenuous posts like this from predatory companies receive such a backlash.

I'm happy with kdenlive and gimp TYVM...

I’m always the first one to criticize companies for exploitative and evil business practices. Adobe is far from innocent. However, I will argue their subscription model itself is actually better than the previous model.

The reality is that Adobe has a large team of engineers to create and maintain several high end professional digital art creation tools. They also frequently add new and excellent features to those tools. That costs money. This money has to come from somewhere.

With the old model Creative Suite 6 Master Collection cost over $2600. They updated that software every two years. The maximum Creative Cloud subscription today costs $1440 for two years. They even have a cheap Photography plan for $20 a month with Photoshop and Lightroom. That’s $480 for two years. Photoshop 6 cost $700+ alone all by itself with no Lightroom.

Why would Adobe allow for much lower prices, even considering inflation? Because they get reliable cash flow. Money keeps coming in regularly. That’s much easier for keeping people employed and paid than a huge cash infusion every other year and a trickle until your next release. It’s just not feasible to sell software that way anymore.

Of course the argument is that with the old model you didn’t need to update. You could just pay for CS5 or 6 and use it forever without ever paying again. That’s true. And I guess that’s viable if you are want software that is never updated, never gets new features, and never gets bugfixes and support. I would argue that a user that can get by without updating their tools, and has no use for new features, is not a professional. They can get by with free or cheap competitors, and they should.

Professional digital artists do need and want those updates. They are the kind of people that were buying every version of Creative Suite in the old model. For those users, paying a subscription is a huge improvement. It keeps the updates and bugfixes coming regularly instead of rarely. It funds development of new and powerful features. It keeps Adobe solvent, so the software doesn’t die. It lowers the overall price paid by the user significantly.

Plenty of things we can criticize with Adobe. Bugs they haven’t fixed. Crashy software sometimes. Products they come out with and then give up on. Doing dark patterns and fees to prevent people from unsubscribing. But the subscription model itself is a net positive compared to the old way.

> than a huge cash infusion every other year and a trickle until your next release

It’s a very good incentive to keep the entire company on their toes. Adobe will have to keep making new features for people to justify paying for a new version, instead of rehashing the same software, and then rent-seek with a subscription.

There are plenty of successful subscription based models that allow you to fallback on a perpetual license for the last annual version that you paid for, e.g. the Jetbrains model.

As a "professional" I have zero interest in renting the tools of my trade.

I mean, the stunt they pulled to effectively release CS2 as free-to-use abandonware was pretty good. Still use it to this day, still works fine.

> Adobe’s unpopularity can be traced back to a decision it made over 10 years ago when it shifted from perpetual software licensing to subscription pricing.

My understand is that Adobe deliberately made it difficult to cancel. I don’t even use Adobe, yet am well aware of their antics, indicating how far bad behaviour spreads via word of mouth.

A reminder that photopea.com is a great photoshop alternative and it's web-based

Photopea is great, and you can do a lot, but it is not near the functionality of Photoshop. However, most people do not need most of that.

Was about to mention photopea as well...I should add that i'm by no means a person who uses this type of software on a regular basis....But whenever i need it i reach for either GIMP or photopea, and last few years, its been photopea far more often.

Honestly, i wish Adobe would still offer the conventional license, but with an additional hosting option that consumer can *choose* to activate and pay more for, or not...so that, basically:

* I pay a one-time license to use photoshop offline - and for however long i wish (understanding that after its end of life i may not eligible for security updates, but that's fair)

* Now, for storing of files, i would need to of course store them locally on my machine.

* But, if i *chose* to pay an ongoing subscription, that is when Adobe would host files for me....so i can still use their product offline, and they only charge me for use of online file storage...and i wouldn't mind if there were a premium on that charge, since i get that i would be paying for an ongoing storage service.

That gives me choice, it gives them money (both for licensing and ongoing hosting subscription), and i would figure everyone would be content....

...but, i guess the current world does not work that way, eh? So, i guess i will continue to avoid their products, heading towards alternatives like photopea, Gimp, etc.

Well this seems needlessly hostile.

> “Go back to the fascist-owned site where they enjoy supporting AI-generated art like your brand does,” wrote Evlyn Moreau.

Yeah this is why Bluesky will never be a serious and widely used social platform. It's the same sort of cesspool as the right-wing alternatives that popped up a few years back, just more self-righteous.

There's a whole mute list for this sort of person: https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/lists/3kp6zdqoscy2x

You can also run Blockenheimer on likes and reposts for any especially toxic anti-AI takes to catch huge chunks of them: https://blockenheimer.click

Good. Keep this corporate PR nonsense away from Bluesky.

Pirate their shit.

Honestly, Adobe deserves it. Their early cancellation fees is atrocious.

I pay the extra cost to make sure I can cancel after my project's done. I only ever use Photoshop/Premiere and After Effects a few times a year, so it's easier for me.

What did Adobe possibly think they could gain by posting on a communist web site?

They really didn’t think this one through.

Bluecry is it's name-o #NA

BlueSky can be brutal! I wonder how it got a reputation of being the kinder, gentler alternative?

People interact with brands differently to how they interact with humans.

BlueSky is a very kind place in my experience. I don't get people asking me to justify my existence like I do on Twitter.

Seriously, people on Twitter demand I debate them about the validity of my life. That has yet to happen on BlueSky.

It's kinder to people, especially kind people.

Adobe isn’t a person.

A company who who has a shiny thing that it charges money for, posting on a site specifically created for the expression of the malcontent characteristic of toxic malcontents, and the output is predictable.

Undoubtedly Adobe has legions of users who take a more nuanced view of Adobe and who would also be the type to use Bluesky. And yet.

I'd consider the complaints to be essentially the emotions that come up when people covet unaffordable privately created property.

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