“If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”
I heard this before and it is becoming more true each day.
Found this out when I wanted a decent journaling app for Android. All the most popular ones have subscription tiers that amount to hundreds of dollar over just a few years… for a fucking journal app? what the hell!
Not only that but they can train their AI’s on all their subscribers’ journal entries. Check F-Droid.org for some free, privacy respecting FLOSS journaling apps.
There is this one app on there called PTO (plain text organizer) that is pretty interesting. It basically just gives you a new plaintext file each day to journal on
Definitely feel ya there. I highly recommend Obsidian or Joplin. Not sure what features you’re looking for, but I’ve found Obsidian refreshingly simple. Aso nice knowing that it’s just markdown files on my device that can’t be sold as data.
if you are looking for an Foss alternative for obsidian, check out logseq. it isn’t a 1 for 1 copy of obsidian and its feature set, but the way I use them they are identical, besides the source code availability!
Hadn’t heard of that one. Looks nice! Do you know if there is a built-in way (even if it’s through a plugin) to sync your content across devices? I didn’t see anything on their homepage about it.
Only third party sync, I use Syncthing for that, works great most of the time
I second the syncthing method, it also works great for a private password manager like keepassxc or keepassdx depending if youre on a computer or phone!
I don’t think logseq has fully automated synchronization, at least it didn’t when I started using it. What it does have is the option to automatically git commit changes. You can then synchronize through a remote repo. It isn’t fully automatic and requires a remote repo you can trust with your data but it works great for me
F-Droid… An open source app store with exactly that: Apps without BS
the biggest reason for subscriptions is. 1. consumer laws don’t protect it. and 2. you can quit your job and don’t have to be actually productive and work for a living because your users will just keep on “buying” the product every month indefinitely. and finally 3. subscription basically gives you monopoly in any given area you host it; because the user will usually not look or even have the means to look for options or alternatives once they have already tied a percentage of their monthly income to a company for the software or service they provide - as wallets got spread thinner and thinner until they, now, are entirely swallowed by subscriptions.
the only people arguing in favor of subscriptions are those who don’t want to work for a living while still taking advantage of the capitalist system.
I worked at Amazon and the head of Ring said their best customers were people who bought a subscription and then put the camera in a drawer and forgot about it. They don’t even want to provide you a service. They want you to absentmindedly give them money every month because you forgot to cancel.
Fine, but this is on the buyer not on the seller.
I mean, if you buy a subscription to something and then don’t use it (or forgot to cancel while not using it) is not really a seller fail: you would have wasted your money even you’d have bought it without a subscription.I get subscriptions are (mostly) bad, but it is not always a seller fault and the buyer should be aware of what he is doing or spending money.
I get what you’re saying but the forgetful customer is explicitly what they said they want, which is dumb any way you look at it. Many times you’re forced into signing up for subscription, or coerced under the guise of a free trial. Now this wouldn’t be as bad if they came back and were like, “hey we see you haven’t used our service in a while, do you still need it?” rather than just leeching money from the user. The system is designed to purposely allow the user to make these errors and that’s wrong any way you want to shape it.
I get what you’re saying but the forgetful customer is explicitly what they said they want, which is dumb any way you look at it.
I don’t disagree on that.
Many times you’re forced into signing up for subscription, or coerced under the guise of a free trial. Now this wouldn’t be as bad if they came back and were like, “hey we see you haven’t used our service in a while, do you still need it?”
Maybe, but at this point I doubt that a forgetful customer would pay attention to it. What would really make the difference would be to renew the subscription explicitly. This way you could be forced to sign for a false free trial, but you would also need to confirm a subsequent subscription.
rather than just leeching money from the user. The system is designed to purposely allow the user to make these errors and that’s wrong any way you want to shape it.
Yes, this is another way to see it. But the solution in my opinion is not to eliminate the concept of subscriptions. The solution is to educate the customer.
The only case where a subscription can be good is if you don’t have that much money to afford something(if its a one time purchase), because you would have to save up for some time. That’s the only case where a subscription can be good, but this doesn’t apply to 99% of them
It’s pertinent if you only need something for a short time, or if you want to test something before committing to buying it.
Otherwise, there’s few cases where renting makes sense.
It’s expensive being poor
we need some kind of “subscribers bill of rights” both to discourage and to check the stupid business models.
It won’t make any difference. There’s a gamers Bill of Rights that nobody remembers. It was produced by the owner of a company that now ignores that it ever existed.
You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy!
Can we get communism already?
I pirate everything, own everything and I’m happy as fuck. I even share my Jellyfin server with 20 other people so they can share in my joy.
They should pay you monthly for your costs. (:
Makes me wanna throw out my hp printer I bearly use.
Edit: the printer was discovered broken lolBrother. Get a Brother.
Oh yeah my idea
You should. The next time you want to use it, it’ll probably do some bullshit. Better to be rid of it now than be coerced into giving HP money in the future. If you need a printer, replace it with whatever Brother laser printer is on sale at the moment.
So don’t sign up. Go without.
and if you’re technically capable, self host and share with friends/family. fuck corporate greed
I get the sentiment but this is not really an option most of the time if you want to stick with lawful methods. For instance, I cannot watch most movies or TV series these days without a subscription to some service.
i think its imporant we destigmatize piracy, honestly.
Uh, how? I mean you’d need to make it legal I feel like. But that’s never going to happen and I honestly don’t think that’s fair either. If piracy is legal, how would content creators actually be paid?
the first thing to realize is that most of the cost of a game goes to publishers, not the creators.
weed was destigmatized even being illegal for the longest time.
legal != moral
most of the cost of [anything] goes to publishers, not the creators
My edit obviously. It does feel like that though. I pay Netflix, not the people making the movie. For games it is at least a bit better - I pay Valve (Steam) and the publisher but at least some of it goes directly to the devs. But it could be better still I suppose. But I’d honestly be okay if we got a Steam-like platform for series and movies where I could buy the ones I want without any subscriptions.
only way i’ll be happy with that is if no one owns anything. corporations, people, billionaires. Otherwise might as well burn it all down, why should care if i dont own anything.
This is why fact checks are bullshit. Reuters admits that
a WEF social media video from 2016 that stated eight predictions about the world in 2030, including: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. What you want you’ll rent, and it’ll be delivered by drone.”
Now to make the statement false they bring in a strawman “Stated goal” condition and prove that particular part to be false, then claim that makes the whole thing false.
Such bullshit.
That doesn’t mean all fact checks are bullshit, just that fact checkers are people with jobs and opinions too.
Yes, it is possible to fact check with integrity. Not like this example.
Opinions should not enter into fact checking as opinions are not fact.
In this case the job of these people is clearly to perform damage limitation for the WEF
Fact checkers are all just self-important opinion columnists.
Academic research is the standard that should be aimed for. References and no opinions.
That’s cool, I do not have a single subscription and will never, ever have one. If I can’t buy your product, I’ll sail the 7 seas
How do i pirate insurance?
I made my own “cell phone service” but it only works within 10m of my home.
It’s a start. Keep at it.
Maybe become a sovereign citizen? YMMV.
How do you get home internet service without a subscription? I’m down to try it.
I’m not sure what the logical outcome of this escalating arms race of enshittification will be, but as a career Sysadmin I’ve been able to avoid a LOT of this bullshit through self hosting, which is something a (Non-tech nerd) layman isn’t going to bother with, for as long as existing products (and their subscriptions) are still within “tolerable” levels.
But the thing is, a lot of the convenience with computing devices today didn’t exist in the 90’s, when it was more common for young normies to have what would be considered above average computer technical skills today.
When the entire market turns into inescapable subscriptions, the market for a non-technical friendly appliance box, like Synology came close to doing, shows up to corner the market on hardware you can own and run your own shit on with minimal headaches and no subscriptions.
In short, people with the money to spend can’t be arsed to inconvenience themselves with self hosting or ‘alternative’ sources.
Folk without the money find a way through perceived necessity and maybe learn something on the way.
Then there’s people with the money and the know-how who are just looking to save or do so on principle.
Younger generations grow up with subscriptions and black boxes that are not ultimately under their own control, and lack the knowledge to change it.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but their tolerance for ads and subscription slop keeps attention away from people like me.
Counterpoint - younger generations grow up in the same poverty as their parents (so that any subscriptions are unlikely) and even if they don’t - their media needs may not fully align with what their parents would buy. So children in my experience do find ways to pirate. Maybe not the best ways, but still.
It’s a good point.
I’d hazard a guess that they are more in the minority than before though. Closest I have seen is friend-of-a-friend referrals for nominal cost pirate IPTV services that provide cable channels & movies. Even then they are paid, and most invite trouble by just going at it without a VPN. Current going rate is £50 for a year here - bring your own Fire stick.
Funny you should mention Synology though, ours is running an Emby server for media here. Having everything properly catalogued (and presented with flair) is fantastic.
To the extent you are able to (particularly if trying to stay legal).
So for streaming content, much of that isn’t available to ‘buy’ at all. Even for the stuff you can “buy”, technically speaking in many jurisdictions it’s not legal to be able to rip your DVD or Blu Rays or remove DRM from a digital download.
For certain software, on-premise editions have been abolished or priced into the stratosphere because they don’t want that market to exist anymore. Some of that software has competent alternatives, but sometimes your choice is dictated by your clients and partners, and opting for a less compatible or merely perceived as less compatible option is a non starter. Even among on-premise editions, a lot of software vendors have switched to still having it by subscription as the only legal way to keep using it. Again, maybe for those software you can get away by breaking the law as a workaround, but legally…
This is of course assuming the conversation narrowly applies to software type things. Everyone is also rebranding ‘leasing’ as ‘as a service’ and are copying much of the software playbook, for the same reasons, including making purchase of equipment more expensive to steer people toward the ‘as a service’ revenue strategy.
Then going beyond the ‘tech’ industry, it’s getting really hard to buy a house rather than rent it from some company that has been pouring money into acquiring all the available real estate.
That’s why I used Kodi, a Plex server, and modded youtube. Fuck ads and fuck subscriptions
Plex has started to enshittify as well. I switched to jellyfin because Plex had features behind pay walls and kept going “oops I accidentally changed your settings so you have to look at the plex home screen with ads for our streaming service”.
I chatted with my uncle recently, and he told me about a movie from 2006. I asked where to watch it, he said you can watch it free on YouTube. Stop by my parents house, we decide to watch movie. It was 1 hour and 30 minutes, Runtime. There was 3 minute ads every 10 minutes. The movie was good, but heavily dampered by ADS. To the point you would start to get invested and zone into the movie. Then BAM ADS, the only other option was to buy the movie for $4 on prime or pay for a hulu subscription.
I know subscriptions are stupid and i agree, but its just so infuriating! Pay $7.89 for streaming service which may or may not have the thing you want to watch. For it to most likely to be on streaming service B. Or you go buy the DVD assuming you can. Which now you own a movie that may be CRAP.
You just cant ethically win :/
IMO: Pirate it guilt-free without a second thought. If you enjoy it, and deem it worthy of a rewatch - then buy the DVD/Blu-Ray.
Then rip a quality copy of it, and delete the previously downloaded one.
Then seed HQ version to give back ;)
NOTE: DON’T DO THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING
When movies were on cable they’d at least edit the movie to fit between ad breaks. Modern streaming services have no concern for the content, and will just drop an ad wherever.
Thing is, corporations twist ethics so when we obey we lose and when they fuck us over they win
I wish so much that I could browse what’s on a streaming site before signing up.
You can!
But spoiler: Everything you want is spread across about 5 services, and there’s gaps in it anyway.
…or it’s available on the service you subscribe to, but not in your region.
Or it is available in your region, but you have to pay for it anyway.
Fuck ads and fuck subscriptions
How do you imagine developers and content creators to get paid if neither of these two options is acceptable to you?
My favorite subscription is when I buy a “lifetime license” to a software and then 4 years later they move to SaaS. And now I just pay to beta test the software.
Honestly mate, I am not a tankie or even politically left in my country, but when looking at the insane results for these enormous companies and the ever increasing greed with ads/price hikes, I’ve just had enough.
I know it’s not morally right to steal, but I refuse to support companies like Alphabet paying their CEO 200+ million a year. If they manage to block me out when skirting their ads, then I’ll find something else to spend my time on.
So you’re right, I just don’t care anymore.
I do pay for Nebula though!
Am a developer, please do not pay for any software subscription if you don’t think it’s worth it.
Us devs would love to give the best experience, but if the customer is willing to pay for a shit experience, guess which path management makes you take.
One-time purchases.
Not everything should be for profit. I 'member the good old days when people made poorly designed website to share their passion and help others. I 'member the good old days when people developed freewares, even proprietary softwares, just for the fun of it.
Sure, but it’s also a fact that many of the YouTubers whose videos I deeply enjoy wouldn’t be able to make them if it didn’t make them any money
Which is why I would rather go with spending my money on YouTubers via things like Patreon, Kofi, GitHub Sponsers or even just get some merch. I would much rather go that route than spend money on YouTube to just not have ads. Yes, it’s a subscription, but at least from one of the creators that I watch, even just 1 dollar a month is much more money than what they get from ad revenue from a single person
Sure, I have nothing against that. I, however, still think that whatever platform hosts their videos deserves some compensation, right? So that’s going to be either subscribtion, ads or donations.
You make a very good point there. I’d probably be more inclined to allow ads on YouTube if they weren’t so intrusive to my privacy and weren’t trying to push scams or overly sexualized mobile games every 4 seconds. (Although I’m not sure if it’s still that bad, I completely uninstalled the YouTube app after it got that bad and exclusively use FreeTube now).
The YouTube premium subscription also seems like quite a bit. $13.99 for that and YouTube music, I don’t want YouTube music, I just want no ads.
Theres A difference between running a profitable buisness and ruining the whole user experience to please the shareholders.
Ok, but ‘fuck subscriptions’ is a blanket statement directed at the subscribtion business model as whole, including the hypothetical well run, and non-greedy ones.
Pay por the permanent ownership of the sold product.
As they say. If selling isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.
If a seller doesn’t give me option to own their products I will certainly never steal them.
FUCK CONTENT, LET ALL THE MINDLESS DISTRACTION DIE, WE’D BE BETTER OFF IN THE STREETS, SPENDING TIME TOGETHER, BUILDING SOMETHING, ACTUALLY TALKING TO EACH OTHER!
Says a tiny edgelord in me. I would never write something like this, I’m an adult.You are just three tiny edgelords in a trenchcoat, aren’t you?
I spend LOTS of money on physical media. Like on the order of thousands per year. If a company doesn’t release their media physically, I figure they don’t want my money and just pirate it.
How do you apply this to a platform like YouTube? I don’t even finish most of the videos I start watching there, and the ones I do, I’ll likely never watch again anyway. Subscribtion seems much more logical profit model to a company like that.
Free video sharing platforms are basically not viable as a business model. For a free and open internet to succeed, YouTube has to fail. At the moment, it only exists because Google subsidises it.
The ideal way for video sharing to work is for large content creators to set up their own federated video hosting websites (or pay for someone else to do it for them) and potentially offer some small amount of free capacity for those who want to upload small, not-for-profit videos
That’s fair. Nebula, Patreon, and Floatplane are the three “streaming” subscriptions I keep because much of the money goes straight to the creative involved.
You don’t need to pay a subscription fee to watch YouTube. What are you even talking about?
He was discussing options where people oppose both ads and subscriptions as methods of payment for consumed media.
IMO YouTube Premium is the only subscription that I will probably never cancel as not only does it pay more to content creators than ad revenue does (per individual viewing), it directly financially supports the hundred-odd creators I enjoy (large and small).
If the cost is too high for you to justify, you can band together with friends to split the costs of a Family Plan and/or do as I do and VPN back to my home country where the cost is significantly less than it is where I live now!
by selling me a license that lets me run their software on my own machine, not theirs. Like in the old times
Doesn’t quite work with something like streaming services
It could if they actually let you download the content for a change.
And no I mean original quality, not split up undecipherable files that are hard to organize outside of their platform
I tend to feel that if it’s a streaming service providing access to a wide range of videos, it could be argued that you don’t own them and, therefore, can’t download them either. However, you could still have the option to pay extra to actually purchase the video too. That money should go to the creator, though, who, of course, would also set the price. That could be free too. I, for example, have no issue with people watching my car repair ‘tutorials’ on YouTube for free.
Man Google had it just right with Google music and books. Of course they threw it all away.
I was a big fan of Google music because I was able to upload my own music on to the cloud and they would help me tag albums. The streaming of new music was just the cherry on top and it was awesome when Google told me to check out a new album based on what I uploaded previously. Not only that, but they let you pay for music that you wanted to keep offline as well.
Now it’s all crammed into YouTube, which is horrible for music as it was never designed for music anyway
To this day, I still think this was the best compromise all around and it seemed very ethical and modern to the way we consume music.
well stop fucking streaming and let me buy the damn content
Vote with your wallet. Boycott rent seeking companies that lock away their IP and charge money for access to it.
For example, FOR ADOBE TO DESERVE MY MONEY EVERY MONTH, 100% OF THEIR TECHNOLOGIES SHOULD BE OPEN SOURCE.
The only rent I happily pay for is a good VPN.
jokes on them, i still use CS6.
wankers.
Yea. Still use my full suite $200 adobe from being student. Like what, a decade old at this point?
Boycott rent seeking companies
That’s all of capitalism.
yes it is…
I pay for music streaming on Tidal. I have a pretty big library of music from attempts to get away from streaming (and keep it up on Soulseek), but I use curated playlists too much to get away from streaming
I definitely don’t recommend that you look up Tidal downloaders that allow users to keep the music they want from the service. You definitely don’t want to build a whole digital library that way.
God forbid a programmer be compensated for their labor.
I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with lifetime purchases?
As a programmer, and an open source one paid handsomely, fuck subscriptions and asshole software companies.
How do you get paid handsomely for open source? What’s your funding model?
The customers (multinational and middle size companies, ranging from telecoms, banks, governments, goods and services) pay for support and features of the software. Software has always bugs and CVEs that need fixing, or new features, or needs for securing its supply chain (with SLSA, SBOMs, etc).
There’s a handful multibillionarie companies that follow this approach with open source: Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, VMware, etc. Particularly in cloud-native tech like Kubernetes and all that gets deployed on top of it.
If a technology is not open source it really doesn’t exist anymore. Customers have learned from the last 30 years and run away from vendor lock-in (AWS, AKS, Google cloud services…).
Oh, I program with open source stacks too. I thought you were referring to a specific FOSS app or SaaS.
Well, my employer pays me to maintain 100% of the time a specific security project that is deployed on Kubernetes. The project is donated to the CNCF (part to the Linux foundation), and my employer doesn’t push any of us in the team to work on any specifics, just to keep improving it in general. All development happens in the open, including slack chats, etc. (Would be happy to share the specific project, written in Rust mainly, but I don’t want to doxx this specific Lemmy account :D)
According to Wikipedia, he’s actually a criminal defense attorney in California, and also “The Fish”, original lead guitarist for Country Joe and the Fish.
Mmh, and if I go by your nickname, you are Jason Kaye, influential hardcore DJ and dead since a year.
I also appear on any graph that shows the months between July and January abbreviated by the first letter of the month.
I’m actually a programmer. There are ways to compensate us that doesn’t force people to pay rent for our work.
You buy a pair of shoes, the maker is paid. Why do you have to pay the bastard every month?
Samuel Vimes nodding
I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with lifetime purchases?
This thread is about subscriptions. So I’d assume that when people talk about ‘rent seeking companies’ etc, they are referring to subscription payments rather than lifetime purchases.
I am a programmer, and I get paid whether or not the product is bought. Shovel your dogshit somewhere else.
That’s a pretty short term view though, no? Presumably if an expected revenue stream does not generate flow to supplant the initial capital outlay, said business will not be a going concern for long?
I’m not defending subscription models at all, they’re corrosive to the economy, but your comment had me curious.
you are attempting to align the interest of a wage slave with owner of corporation, corpo owners literally tell workers they aint shit and they are easily replacement.
think game industry crunch and fire practice… after rockstar lays off GTA6 staff, you buying the game does not help the laid off guy
You’re conflating two separate things. I make a distinction between understanding the inherent friction of Labor and Capital along with a broad and deep awareness of the stacked playing field, and also keeping oneself employed by necessity.
wage worker is never aligned long term with his employer… at best short term.
Yeah thanks for the insight
Adobe still has lifetime purchases?
This doesn’t really make sense. Programmers are usually just paid a salary. My salary is the same regardless of how many subscribers there are. I don’t give a shit. If everyone started pirating everything it wouldn’t really impact my job. There’s plenty of dev work to do.
Between you [and] the developer there is a mega corp… Programmer is paid a salary. Corpo pays bare minimum for labour. It doesnt matter if you buy product personally or not.
With that being said if everybody did the same, it would hurt the corpo but thats the goal… They need to get their act together and while idiots keep paying blindly, they wont.
the only things in life im happy owning is my home, my transportation and my informatics
Can someone explain the “be happy” part of the “you’ll own nothing and be happy” quote? I fail to see what is there to be happy about.
It came from a speaker a few years ago at the Davos World Economic Forum. Davos is where the ultra rich gather each year to plot out how to be even more evil.
I feel like someone needs to point out that this saying is often conflated with the idea of 15 minute cities.
The idea of 15 minute cities is that people want their amenities within 15 minutes so they don’t have to drive.
It is not an idea to keep you confined and take away your ownership of things.
I’m not OP but I think it means “Providers are saying consumers should accept subscription-based models without complaint”
