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.
When enough individuals ignore a law, it becomes soft nullified. For example, everyone doing ~30 over the speed limit. Even the cops where I’m from will tailgate you if you’re not going fast enough.
I salute non-VPN’d torrenters. Thank you for your service.
But did anyone ever say that you HAD to subscribe to everything? No.
I must be one of the few people in a group who have a better control in what they feel they can subscribe to.
Adobe expects me to pay monthly for Photoshop? No, fuck you, I’ve got GIMP and a number of other paint and photo manipulation programs.
Microsoft expects me to pay for Office 365? No, fuck you, I’ve got LibreOffice and your older Office software still works as good. Your word processing program, Word, hasn’t really changed that much since 2007 or even 2003. Hell, maybe not since 1997!
I understand this video highlights some of the more draconian practices of subscription services and they deserve to be. But also, people really really need to learn about alternatives instead of feeling like they’ve got to subscribe to something that they never had to in the first place.
Also, no, you do not need smart-everything. Leave all of the smart-appliance shit for the richies who happily throw money down on that and let them waste their time and money on the susbcriptions involving them. You don’t need them, have some self-respect and know that the dumb versions of those smart things still are just as good and effective.
I think the subscription overload has to do with the whole 90s kids are the only ones who know how to build and fix computers. We know how to go out and find alternatives or roll our own services. Hell we invented digital piracy so we are comfortable with not subscribing.
I only subscribe to two services, Google storage so my family’s mobile devices can auto backup and Spotify because I like the suggestion engine and it’s easier for my kids to stream music. For everything else there’s piracy.
So then there is this new generation that are clueless in tech so these companies can nickel and dime them because they don’t know any better. I know I try to teach my kids how to use tech but they just don’t have an interest like I did.
Lol bruh, have some self reflection. People do it because it’s easier. If you have the time to have all the hobbies that other people have and to roll your own home servers that’s great, but that means you have an above average amount of free time. Otherwise, other people have hobbies that don’t include server OS updates and choose to spend their time there and pay for someone else to manage their servers.
Thank you so much for this comment
IDK, a kid not knowing how to pirate is weird too, at least where I live. That would mean their parents actually buying them media, which, in my experience, is not that frequent of a sight. I had classmates who had subscriptions just to feel good about consciously paying for the content (they were also upper-middle-class). The rest didn’t really think about ethics and just pirated, the information on how to do it spreads through kids’ collectives pretty easily. It seems to me that many of them don’t even know that what they and their families are doing is “piracy”…
It seems to me that many of them don’t even know that what they and their families are doing is “piracy”…
Yes🐸
90s kids are the only ones who know how to build and fix computers.
Aww dude
I have a bunch of smart devices - light bulbs, wall plugs, etc. They all connect to Home Assistant running on my own server and I don’t need to pay any subscriptions.
IoT is not the problem, corporate greed is.
I do agree that it’s pretty cool that HA can be used for free, but if you like something and use it regularly please find ways to contribute.
You can contribute with giving your voice: https://ohf-voice.github.io/wake-word-collective/#ok_nabu
That’s one way. Or you can contribute code, help others in the forum, file bug reports… OR if you’re the lazy one like me you can actually give them money.
Don’t like subscriptions? Ok by me, but please don’t think that complete teams will be working on great and secure software for free. That’s not something that can be maintained for a long time.
If you like something, contribute to it.
Microsoft expects me to pay for Office 365? No, fuck you, I’ve got LibreOffice and your older Office software still works as good. Your word processing program, Word, hasn’t really changed that much since 2007 or even 2003. Hell, maybe not since 1997!
So I moved to foss probably about 20 years ago and have been going back and forth between libre office and open office.
A couple of years ago my wife wanted me office, so I got the subscription…and man it’s so much better than either of those two, and to suggest that maybe it hasn’t changed since 1997 is mindboggling.
I’m a big proponent of not signing up for these services, but this paragraph really misses the mark for me.
Disagree. E.g. Word typography is not as advanced as LibreOffice. And words document master is buggy as hell.
But yes. Excel can handle big files now. Still sucks at im- and exporting different csv formats…
But… Because it’s integrated so we’ll with windows, is faster most of the time.
In reality: of course word should be a better program and it does get lots of loving from redmond. Only because: if no new features, no new sales. And since word is mostly a solved problem, redmond invented new problems…
Working with a LO user and a sub par program always beats working with a word user who can’t use styles, review, and merge documents.
As much as I hate Google. I think they are king with document collaboration and sharing.
Yes. But thats not word. Thats something else entirely which atleast my employer would never use (security, long term support, offline, integration with 3rd parties etc)
To me office is the bonus to the cloud storage and syncing. Yeah I know it’s easy to run a NAS but the UX of having to manage it is a headache and quite frankly it gives me more piece of mind to pass the buck of getting pwned to Microsoft or Google
This. Office 365 offers 1tb for 5 accounts plus office for cheaper than just storage from Dropbox or Google drive.
Office is just a bonus
Just use Google Docs then. Yes, it’s Google. Yes, it will somewhat tie you into their ecosystem but Google Docs are free, get regular updates and are pretty good overall. I’ve been using Google Docs for many years now. I occasionally use Office365 for work and Google Docs is just as good, if not better.
Hell, maybe not since 1997!
Office 2000 was peak office: it had the definitive version of Clippit, and every actually useful feature you’ll probably ever need to type and edit any sort of document.
…I will say, though, that Excel has improved for the weirdos that want 100,000 row spreadsheets since then, but I mean, that’s a small group of people who need serious help.
This has nothing to do with anything, but whatever.
100k rows is a small data set for a lot of what I look at, but that is at work.
Let me split it down.
For work use, 100% has to be Excel. For personal use, either of the FOSS is more than enough.
I think that’s where the divide is, and why my employer pays for everyone to have Microsoft Office but I use a free office suite. I simply don’t need the extra capabilities for my own personal use.
…Good god, someone actually called him Clippit. I never thought the day would come
I do, but I also never have reason to refer to him.
I don’t know exactly when the features arrived, but things like xlookup, power query, live data connections, etc have been welcome improvements in Excel.
Heck, even textbefore is a great QOL improvement.
Microsoft expects me to pay for Office 365? No, fuck you, I’ve got LibreOffice and your older Office software still works as good. Your word processing program, Word, hasn’t really changed that much since 2007 or even 2003. Hell, maybe not since 1997!
Yeah, it’s a word processor. I don’t need a newer with more features that I will never use. Some of these might make sense for a business with collaborative projects and such, but your average home user doesn’t need it.
Adobe expect me to pay for Premire Pro? No, fuck you, i’ve got Kdenlive and it feels like premium-quality app
My subscribtions are Protonmail, Mullvad VPN and ChatGPT. On top of that I’m paying a voluntary monthy donation to a podcast.
That’s it. If I had to guess, YouTube premium will be the next one but so far adblocking still seems to work.
In theory open source can help you escape subscription hell but Gimp and LibreOffice do not have feature parity with Photoshop and MS Office and have significantly inferior UX. Maybe for word processing, LibreOffice or an older version of Office is fine, but that is not true at all for spreadsheets. So much the case that I would rather use Python Dataframes + Juypter notebooks than LibreOffice Calc.
This is also the case for Indesign vs Scribus, Illustrator vs Inkscape, Autocad vs Freecad. Audacity is fairly powerful but again horrible UX. That list goes on I am sure.
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?
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.
swim should deff get it backed up but if merchant provides value, there nothing from with a subscription but swim should always hedge ;)
Boycott rent seeking companies
That’s all of capitalism.
yes it is…
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.
Adobe still has lifetime purchases?
yeah, https://1337x.to
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.
I am a tech consumer and enthusiast first. I am a corporate shill sellout second. I wish for bad practices in the tech community to die, even if it’s my own company doing it.
My concern as an engineer is that the product gets made well. I have no say or control over how the business cretins and marketing scumbags decide to destroy the company through terrible unethical practices like charging SaaS for completely self-contained software.
The short term view is that you need to keep a company afloat. Businesses should fail if they deliver products in awful ways. Yes, if the company fails, I will lose my job, and that is okay. It would be through no fault of my own, or really even the customers who wouldn’t pay for my company’s product. It would be the fault of the business decisions that were made. And the product landscape would then open up after my company’s failure. For example, if Adobe would finally fucking die then we may actually see better products on the PDF, and photo/video editing market. No more monopoly on sub-par creative cloud products.
The more realistic long term view is that software engineers will be okay if their company fails. The overwhelming majority are smart, get paid extremely well, and exist in a field that needs their manpower. They will be able to find a new job much easier than other fields. The tech community will not be okay long-term if bad companies cannot fail.
Completely understand your viewpoint. I’m also aware though that there is a heavy saturation right now (at least in the DMV, which has historically been a bellwether for the greater economy) of both IT and bioscience/biotech industries. Both fields that also require very smart, educated, and experienced workers. So, I’m saying that things can shift quickly, and workers are always on the losing end, so it pays to note how the winds are blowing, regardless of current status.
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
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.
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.
That’s why I used Kodi, a Plex server, and modded youtube. Fuck ads and fuck subscriptions
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
Thing is, corporations twist ethics so when we obey we lose and when they fuck us over they win
How did you have the patience for that? Is immediately nope out
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.
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.
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”.
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?
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!
100%
Your local library usually has a host of FREE media types. Including regular ol books, which thankfully still remain ad-free.
(But also movies, and digital readers, and news articles, etc).
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.
But how do you apply this to a platform like YouTube? I don’t want to have to buy each video I watch.
Sell “seasons”.
Put a prize on all videos released during each year. But once that’s paid I can have those videos forever.
No point on having to pay a monthly subscription forever to watch a video made 10 years ago from a youtuber that’s no longer active (maybe even alive).
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
well stop fucking streaming and let me buy the damn content
