Tbh, the worst part is when you pay for it and still get ads anyway. Feels like double dipping, but it’s obviously going to happen because wall street doesn’t like when line only goes up a little.
Yeah that’s totally galling. Shrinkflation for online services.
You know some shiny-suited corporate asshole got a huge bonus for coming up with that though.
Enshrinklification of the internet
Welcome to cable TV in the late 80s…
Yeah it’s crazy. We have TV plan with some 100 channels bundled up with internet, and sometimes rarely when I watch TV I’m just baffled by the fact a paid service still is full of ads
Given my entertainment options, I found a small developer that sells an app for a couple bucks that allows me to pull streams through my phone and transcode it and chromecast it to my projector. Juijitsu Kaisen never looked so good.
Brothers, sisters, others, it’s time we return to the old ways. To the high seas. We steal from those who own, but do not pay to own, the content they distribute. We will share this media amongst ourselves until they learn that we were willing to pay with dollars, but not with time.
we shall pirate on the beaches, we shall pirate on the landing grounds, we shall pirate in the fields and in the streets, we shall pirate in the hills; we shall never surrender
We shall pirate in the alleys, in the fields, in the chats and we shall never surrender to the greedy hands of Sony, Nintendo and alike
I miss good old fashioned LAN parties of the 90s and early 00s
YAAR!
I don’t hate subscription based services if they’re priced fairly and make sense.
Paying monthly for a service that then starts giving you less, adds more premium plans, introduces ads, etc. is garbage.
Paying for a game, then having to pay a monthly fee to play (WoW, for example), is garbage.
Paying for software, but then having to pay monthly to use the software, is garbage.
Paying for software, but then having to pay monthly to be allowed to contact support (Blue Iris), is garbage.
But paying for things like Spotify, where you get access to pretty much all songs as they release, have no limit on how much you listen to, and it has a fair student pricing or family pricing, that’s fine. Way better than paying per song.
I mean shit, if I paid for every song I have in my library on Spotify, I’d owe $1430. My Spotify is $17 per month, spit between 4 people, so I pay $4.25. I can either pay for every song in my library and not add any more, or pay for Spotify for 28 years and continue growing my library…
WoW and other MMOs are not just games with slapped on subscription costs. It is a very specific subtype of games which have much higher maintenance cost than an arena shooter. There is a reason these games get shutdown when certain financial thresholds get passed beyond let’s do something more profitable.
Honestly, this.
The economics of the world are such that people need to be paid for the content they produce. Having a direct relationship between me as the consumer and them as the producer is the way we don’t get shit like all of the ad-based spyware that surrounds shit like Facebook. It won’t completely prevent it, but it gives a good business plan for it not to happen.
I’d vastly prefer something that didn’t require some megacorp as evil as Amazon. But… this could actually make as much sense as is possible with our current economic system.
Spotify is the only subscription I still pay for. That’s it. Everything else is whack
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Nah, fuck subscriptions. If I can’t buy it once and own it, then it’s a scam on consumers. Change my view.
I did. Look at my Spotify example. It’s literally more expensive to own the songs than to pay for Spotify.
Unless you only want like 30 songs.
But the minute you dont subscribe, you have nothing and are out all that money
Still cheaper, though.
I’d rather have access to pretty much every song on demand for $4 per month and not own it, than pay per song.
I pay $4.25 per month for Spotify. That’s $51 per year. I have access to pretty much every song, or I could buy 39 songs to own instead.
I save more than 39 songs per month. Financially it makes no sense to buy them. Especially if you consider I get bored of some songs, and never listen to them again.
The way I look at it, is I don’t pay to listen to the music, I pay for the convenience.
Most music I listen to is on YouTube, where if I wanted to, I could just download it and “own” the song for free. However, in the interest of saving time, letting Spotify create playlists based on what I listen to, I just pay a monthly fee. Not to mention that I can share my playlists on multiple devices, whereas if I download music, I can’t.
I also have a family plan with all spots filled up, so that’s 6 people listening to all their music for $20/mo CAD. Far superior to buying an album or individual songs.
Image Transcription:
A crazy trollface stick figure hides behind a crudely drawn square, holding a shotgun and saying “I HATE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES I HATE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES I HATE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES” as an army of harp darps wearing blue helmets with various logos on them come through a crudely drawn door.
Around the harp darps are various statements they are making as they move into the room. At the front left, below a harp darp wearing the Adobe logo, is the text “You can afford it, come on”. To the right of the Adobe harp darp is one wearing the Dropbox logo. Behind the Adobe harp darps is one wearing the Netflix logo, and behind the Dropbox harp darp is one wearing the Spotify logo. Between the front four harp darps is the text “Just $15 bro”. To the upper right of the Spotify harp darp is the text “Limited Ads dude”. Behind the Spotify harp darp is one wearing a Twitter (now X) Verified blue tick, with the text above its head reading “It’s less than a cup of coffee bro…come on”. To the right of the Twitter Verified harp darp is one with the Nintendo Switch Online logo. To the upper right of the Nintendo Switch Online harp darp is the text “It’s just a small monthly payment dude”, and to the bottom right of the same harp darp is the text “You use it all the time Anyway bro”. Behind and to the left of the Twitter Verified harp darp is one wearing an Amazon Prime logo, standing outside the door.
[I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜 We have a community! If you wish for us to transcribe something, want to help improve ease of use here on Lemmy, or just want to hang out with us, join us at [email protected]!]
Good human.
No, fantastic human!
Thank you, fellow human 🤖
Is this AI on steroids?🤔
It’s what capital wishes it could be: an indispensable person
I wish I were an AI 🙁
Lets call this what it really is: asset stripping.
Taking the finances of the many, for very little service, only to make those elites in large corporations so much richer. These corporations should remember the history of Ratner’s
Cancel your subs, be £15 a month better off.
This isn’t a shitpost, this is truth brilliantly represented 🙏
The price of playing skyrim for every minute of my life until I die
With game pass: Over $9000.00
Just buying the game: $59.99
59,99 on every platform the game gets released on because Todd won’t stop
Me but with Factorio and even more hours
2000 hours gang, where y’all at?
Good thing from the current situation is it being the end of times for these services. Constant need for income increase to appease share holders means infinite growth, which is impossible. But individual doesn’t see that, they just want more. So progress of any software towards service model is pretty straight forward.
First they start splitting software into smaller versions and selling both for slightly higher price combined than when they were single piece. Then they start releasing more frequent versions but that has limited impact. So they start introducing forward incompatibilities. Only new software will support both old and new versions of the document, forcing buyers to buy latest. When that reaches its optimal maximum they decide to switch to yearly subscription and force everyone to use those by same ways as they forced them to use newer versions.
Subscription based model is limited. It has no progression other than increase in price and it’s only a matter of testing how much people are willing to pay. Sometimes even go above reasonable price but then go with “exclusive” content as if to justify higher price. This of course works for a while, but exclusive content costs money and is harder to produce consistently at high quality…
And after that, there’s no progression. It’s a battle royale among service provides but they can’t back out because of share holders and can’t revert to other business models. So some of them will stretch themselves thin and burst others will keep on living from that vapor until a new contender comes.
Yep, absolutely. My family still has spotify and netflix subscriptions, but i already canceled prime before the previous price hike. I’d have already canceled netflix if it was my decision and the only service i still see value in is spotify.
Unfortunately, I believe that feeling will change if you look into how Spotify actually harms the artists by forcing them to use their product even though they make slim to none profit. The more you know.
Not really. Fixing systemic problems is not up to the individual. I’m paying for music, which i already only due to the convenience.
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You know, what you can not find on EBay you can find on PBay. Or whatever warez site you prefer.
Mandatory “don’t use piratebay” comment
I haven’t been into the pirating scene for a few years, last time I was active pirate bay was the best. why not use it anymore?
Pretty much everything on there is monitored by the rights holders and anything that’s not is loaded with malware. L337 or torrent leech is what you want these days, for the mainstream stuff. TL requires invites but they’re easy enough to get and it’s got pretty much all the mainstream TV, movies, and software. If you want more niche stuff you’d want to look around a bit more, though.
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Sure. If you want to torrent from a website that the US government uses as a honeypot.
Or you can join 2023 and use a proper website. Also ditch that Malware called uTorrent and use qBittorrent.
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Again, imagine using a known bad website when better alternatives exist.
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“The Pirate Bay / TPB - Site is no longer moderated, so its very risky for software and games” source
https://www.techspot.com/news/99242-pirate-bay-restores-new-user-registrations-twist.html
Spud17, moderator of ThePirateBay says you’re wrong.
I say the time of Torents is OVER. Today Streaming-Warez-Sites are the Kick.
I wouldn’t use a pirate streaming site over torrenting even if I was getting paid to do so lol the releases generally have terrible bitrates and low picture quality, likely because they’re the smallest files the site uploaders could find. They’re convenient if you can’t afford a VPN and don’t care about file quality when it comes to movies and shows, but I prefer being able to select a high quality file with good encoding, quality compression (265, AV1), and known high quality uploaders, like UTR and QxR. That’s only possible through torrenting the file or getting it through Usenet.
Usenet > *
Nope
Those Times where Warez-Streaming-Sites had low quality are long gone. While 4k=3840 releases are rare, we have mostly 1920 nowadays with some 1280 in-between, often Bluray- or Streaming-Rips without re-encoding, at least if the source was H264/H265. Older MPEG2/4 though is still often recoded. You can easily re-encode an old MPEG2-Bluray from 20Gig to H265 4Gig without visibly loss. With more modern Codecs the Data is usually “re-containered” which means the Content itself isn’t changed, only the Encryption and Container are changed.
Overall Streamingz-Sites are pretty good nowadays, Amazon and Netflix take up to one minute to switch to high Bitrate quality for me. With Warez-Sites you have to wait 3-5 seconds but then it immediately starts at Max Quality and NEVER at lower quality. And their Search actually works great and is well organized and everything reacts so much faster because they reduce the eye candy. They also often have bookmarks - which don’t work as good as commercial providers but good enough.
I can only have access to Amazon, Netflix, Joyn and Public Television Media Centres so for other providers your mileage may vary.
Meh. I still prefer Stremio and my custom configured Jackett setup for searching for torrents. Just has more features and more control. I’ve never encountered a pirate streaming site with even half the features Stremio has. I will grant you that anime streaming sites have gotten a lot better over the years, but I still don’t trust general pirate streaming sites. It’s great to hear they got better though. Easier acess to media is always a good thing.
Torrents of all kinds can be easily tracked and its users be sued because they do not only consume but also distribute.
One-Click-Hosters and Streamingz-Sites on the other side are hard to track and their users don’t distribute.
At least by German Law it is mostly “we only care about distribution, not consumption”. The later has an estimated damage of $1 per case, that is not even petty crime. Distribution on the other hand often is handled at $1000/case… I think there was not a single case of a Streamingz-User being prosecuted but already millions of Torrent-Users.
I mean even archive dotorg has pirate material on it…
What’s wrong with pirate bay? I’ve been using it for years with no problems
Larger % of DMCA tracked stuff than other sites. Set your VPN to a Caribbean country and yo ho ho no worries matey
I guess I win. I already am in the Caribbean. Call me Captain Jack Sparrow I guess.
You’re the worst lunatic I’ve ever heard of
Well, you have heard of me.
And now so have the DMCA goons. Blimey.
What are they gonna do, send a British Navy ship with a letter of marque? Yo ho ho matey
Well, Pirate Bay is essentially the defacto website someone thinks of when they hear “This person pirates content.” Because of this, game devs, Hollywood execs, etc end up putting out detectable torrents/illegitimate files onto this most popular pirating source.
“The Pirate Bay / TPB - Site is no longer moderated, so its very risky for software and games” source
TPB is still moderated. They just had news this year about reopening registrations.
Then don’t download software and games
If it is subscription, then wen you lost your stream of income, you lost everything.
That including your house, if you live in subcription house.
Isnt that called rent
Mortgage too
Mortgage you prepay a lifetime subscription though, much better /s
And property tax.
It’s not that I don’t want to pay for the service, it’s just that I hate the automatic recurring withdrawals, even if I can cancel monthly.
I would probably use more subscriptions if I could just pay like three month of access in advance - basically like these gift cards work.
It’s not that i don’t want to pay, it’s just that their “service” isn’t serving me and thus not worth the money.
Give me my cd’s back lol. Let me own what i purchase.
I use an iPod that I’ve modded 128gb into. It’s great. All the convenience of my own high quality music library, without having hundreds of CDs around.
My phone is 512gb and i use about 80 myself, largest part is porn(yeah i’m aware, it’s bad…very bad,i need some time).
I’ve decided to start pirating again as my device has plenty of space to keep my music.
The biggest thing is getting all lf the music, so nowadays i’ll just play what i have and sometimes go: “oh damn i forgot about billie eilish” for example and make a mental note until the next time i’m at my computer with some time to spare.
Slowly but steadily decreasing my porn stock and replacing it with music i would’ve bought as cd’s.
As long as the porn is legal and consensual, then knock yourself out.
Nah, it needs to be brought down a couple notches.
It’s bad.
The porn is legal, just so we’re clear on that lol.
Aren’t most of these services offering 6-12 months plans that are cheaper on average?
Not all of them. Spotify doesn’t, they know that people will just pay monthly, they don’t have any reason to offer a discount
Lmao literally the only “subscription” I have is my phone bill, which I pay yearly. Also maybe you’d consider my insurance a subscription? Sounds very dystopian.
Edit: is rent a subscription? Regularly refilled prescriptions? Where is the line? I have fallen into a quandry.
Do you pay on a recurring cycle? Can you function in society without it? If yes to both: subscription.
You need a phone, utilities, rent/mortgage, insurance (if we’re being realistic) so I wouldn’t call them subscriptions.
Everything is a subscription. It’s the dystopia we have created.
moved my house phone to a Gvoice account. gets mostly spam anyway. voicemails transcribe to email. bye att
I stopped watching network television because of ads, then I stopped watching free streaming because of too many ads (Pluto TV, Crackle), I get a basic subscription to Paramount through Walmart and I stopped watching that because of the ads. I have an Amazon prime subscription because I get it for one half off but I rarely use prime video an if they start showing ads, I won’t use it at all.
If it’s free, you’re the product
But also when you pay, you can still be a product.
Unless you pirate.
Or buy it in a one time payment.
In fact, you’re pretty much the product in every one of these examples, even if you pay
We used to pay a one time fee for software and we paid for big updates. I miss those days
Never pay any of this services BTW, I have no regrets and I never feel that I miss something.
