Learned the term recently and really enjoy it, subscription fatigue is the feeling we all have had now where we are just over how everything is subscription based.
Which one was the last straw or most annoying/frustrating to you?
Apple App store. Nearly every app has in-app-purchases. Just charge me upfront ffs
Adobe
I had a free Google Workspace account used for my family email since the inception of the program. Over a few years it went from free to USD$12 per user, with increasing restrictions put upon it.
From that point onwards, I never trusted any product from Google, and will never consider any in future. It’s a company with no internal consistency, and has the motto of “we will do anything that’s evil if it helps make us look better than Apple”.
Yes I’m still salty about it.
Most recently tho, Netflix.
There was never a last straw for me, because I never subscribed to any bullshit. I read and understood the dangers of SaaS as a school kid long before the term was cool and long before privacy community and corporate industry popularised it. Unless something really requires realtime work collaboration, like Google Docs/Office 365, or if there are realtime social activities like multiplayer gaming or messaging/chat/videocall, just about everything else does not require an active internet connection, and should be doable locally on a system. This is why devices like iPhone, iPad, Chromebooks and so on are NOT real computers, but merely rented kiosks.
Chromebooks
You can install Linux on them and make them real computers, though. Right? Right?
You can, but then they lack processing power. But they do become light computing machines.
I read and understood the dangers of SaaS as a school kid long before the term was cool and long before privacy community and corporate industry popularised it.
Ok, good for you, lol.
r/iamverysmart
Tagging communities with r/ don’t work on Lemmy.
You need to clear your foggy head and get some sleep. Your cheeky comment was BS and your comeback was too lame. Strengthen your game if you want to do these kind of replies.
Also someone else downvoted you.
I just thought that your sentence about being the first, was stupid and something a 5 heard old would say. It was admittedly funny.
And then I wanted to inform you that r/ doesn’t work on Lemmy, just in case you didn’t know. [email protected] is the correct format.
No offense meant.
You came here 2 weeks ago. Open and check my account history… (눈_눈)
What does that have to do with your earlier statement?
Not subscription, but the first service I thought “wtf is this money-making model?” was Plants vs Zombies 2. The game wasn’t that good. And, oh, my most recent guilty pleasure is Monopoly Go; it’s entertainingly boring?
Apart from that, I’ve tried to keep subscriptions that I really like or use constantly:
UberPassUber One (mainly for when depression hits)- Deezer (just because I get 20% discount)
- Kagi (first month atm, but it has a minimum % of trash results)
never heard of uberpass, is it like free food delivery?
Correction: The service I referred to was renamed to Ober One.
Kinda. Basically you pay for occasional coupons and credits on UberEats, and a (5%) discount for every Uber ride.
For 70 MNX (~3.5 USD) a month there is no delivery fee on anything you order. It’s obvious their business model is to charge an obscene fee to then roll out a “better” option. But hey, it’s been convenient nonetheless.
I end up ordering from the same few places when I’m on my lowest, so their system usually gives me 100-200 MXN (~5-10 USD) discounts on those specific restaurants. The subtotal almost never exceeds 600 MXN (~30 USD).
Succinctly, it’s not free free. It’s a 5% discount on Uber rides, and a variable 15-30% discount for two orders a month.
Netgear. Being told to “subscribe” for basic customer service made me get a whole new modem cause I’m not putting up with that bullshit
Spotify. It is a mirror of my Youtube Premium and Youtube gives me better value. So I ditched Spotify.
Yeah I stopped using Spotify when I got YouTube premium. Though I never paid for Spotify but still. Like what’s the point of listening to music with Spotify when I only have to pay less than $10 to get both YouTube benefits but also YouTube music.
I do miss Spotify wrapped, but YouTube’s wrapped isn’t so bad.
I kept Spotify for way too long to listen to podcasts, not realizing I can listen to them for free with other apps
HBO Max and Spotify were the only streaming services I paid for. I had HBO Max since the first few months of it’s launch but when they raised the already high fee I cancelled it. Shortly after they changed it to Max, definitely don’t regret it. HBO Max used to feel special but that specialness died.
To be honest, sporify is the only one I actually use. But I get a fuck ton of use out of it. I used to be able to use Netflix without paying for it. Bit it just didn’t really work for me
Netflix, and when they said I’d have to pay for password sharing for my stepkids, because they use my account when they’re at their dad’s.
That was the last straw. I cracked the shits, bought a couple of ex-enterprise servers, and setup … something different. I then cancelled all streaming services (I got wind of the second Disney hike coming).
The cool thing is they now email me with cheap rejoin offers, telling me about all the cool shows I need to be aware of. ;)
How are your kids coping with, uh, something different? I imagine it’s a tad less convenient, even with your server. Also, I haven’t done something different since the rise of Netflix. Is the quality of something different generally higher with streaming services just putting their content on the internet themselves?
Mine are handling oit perfectly fine - and we have the added difficulty of having German as mother tongue, and wanting to keep the English language content in the kids library low. Finding german language torrents is rather tricky.
I’m a native English speaker so take this with a grain of salt.
Usernet? If memory holds there are a few German language indexers.
I self host my stuff with Plex and it’s really not any less convenient than Netflix or whatever else.
Yep, my son put together a machine to use as a PLEX server & I log in and watch things from across town. It works perfectly fine.
I started again since a year or so. And decided to set up a home server (from an old pc) with the whole *arr suite this summer. Automation these days really is marvelous. You just tell it once which show you want to watch. It fetches you all the shows that are already out and also fetches you each new episode every week. And it’s all in good quality. And you can set automatic subtitles straight from the app’s interface.
I admit, last time I tried something different years ago, it wasn’t that good, but thought I’d give it another go. I’d bought a lifetime pass way back, so had nothing to lose by trying.
The kids are coping fine - the apps for something different are all pretty rock-solid now - macOS, iOS, Android, Chromecast GTV. Plus I’m on a decent fibre internet connection, so even full high quality things work just fine when they’re not at home. Honestly, there’s not a lot of difference, except my catalogue of things is better than any single service.
Plus I take requests. :D Actually, I allow automated processing of requests, within certain limits.
Why tf are you guys talking in code
Arrrrrrr.
🏴☠️
No one cares if you pirate…what are they gonna do, track your lemmy account?
Lemmy is banning sea faring communities.
Edit: lemmy.world to be specific
lemmy.world is, not others
You mean lemmy.world? Nowhere else bans it to my knowledge. Pretty sure Lemmy itself doesn’t and can’t ban anything.
Lol - why do you care? If you know, you know. Right?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
How do you process the automated requests? That’s my dream for my little slice of things.
Arrr! I be hearin’ tales of the five hearties of the Dutchman, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, prowlarr, and the most feared scallywag of 'em all: overseer!
These look like my kind of pirates, thanks!
There’s an *arr app that oversees requests.
It doesn’t compress video more on mobile devices, that’s all I need to know. When I connect an iPad or iPhone to the home cinema setup, the compression is much worse then on an old laptop.
If you have kids, the PBS Kids video app is pretty alright. And free (in the US of course)
I used to pay for software subscriptions. I had a subscription to Substance 3D software and then they sold their company to Adobe 🤮 so now I 🏴☠️
also stopped paying for Spotify after the Rogan deal. I still use the free version for the “discover weekly” playlists, and I can’t tolerate ads so I use an app called Mutify which mutes the ads as soon as they start playing which is a godsend
never paid for any streaming subscriptions and never will, VPN+piracy+Plex is an objectively better experience. no ads, no content removal, no paying $$$ to rich psychopathic ghouls
The phone game. Egg inc. It just updated offering a subscription for in game bonuses.
Completely agree, and I’ve paid this game for the upgraded storage and many piggy bank cracks over the last couple of years because I play often and appreciate them keeping the game running and updating stuff. I am not, however, paying a monthly fee to use it
I was happily paying for Spotify and Disney+ with price hikes I said fuck it I am not paying anymore.
This might be a cop-out, but I’m absolutely sick of paying rent, and the open source alternatives aren’t great
Subscribing to a worthless landlord eats up 50% of my meager income every month.
can’t you pirate it? (make it your own and become independent from your providers?) Even if sacrificing a couple of features.
tent not rent!
Too real where I live.
i dont know whether to upvote in solidarity, or downvote because it’s wrong.
You wouldn’t download a car, would you?
It started with the Netflix enshittification. I have had a Spotify and Netflix account essentially since these services were available, and that was great. Now only the Spotify sub is worth it, though I started to loathe that one as well because it at some point deleted all my local files or replaced them with what it thought matched them in their database.
Also every fucking app, no matter how mundane, wants to sell me a subscription. I have a web based game boy emulator on my phone, it works fine but everything beyond the absolute basic functions is paywalled behind a subscription. Not even a one time purchase.
If it requires a subscription, it doesn’t exist.
That attitude has served me well. So far, at least.
I don’t do mail though, I know some do and are successful but mail is too important for me (and everyone subjected to my technical whims) to fuck it up.
I meant software and media. With mail, somebody’s running a server and policing spammers, which costs time and money.
Enshittification didn’t kill Netflix. What killed it was all the studios pulling their content licenses so they could start their own Netflix. Enshittification happened afterwards as Netflix desperately tried to make itself constantly profitable. They killed a lot of good shows and messed with the algorithm that showed people what they actually wanted to see.
I know what happened, I was there… Guess I should have used a different term for all the content being in one place for a good price shifting to being in a dozen places for exorbitant prices each than enshittification.
I’m torn between feeling bad for Netflix because they tried to do something cool and got the rug pulled out from under them as soon as it started to work, and mad at them for fucking up their algorithm and studio so badly
Bro. RetroArch, gambatte or MGBA core. Thank me later.
This
if you truly need something web based, eclipse is completely free.
Man, I already had subscription fatigue with the very first thing I subscribed to with my own money as a kid. Ultima Online. My friend recommended the game to me, not telling me it required a subscription. I bought a boxed copy at the store, not seeing the super tiny print where it mentioned the subscription. I was then upset when I was installing it and it asked for a CC#. I was 12. I didn’t have a credit card. I had to ask my dad to set it up and give up my allowance for it.
As soon as I found out about emulated shards (shards being what servers were called) that were totally free, I started playing on those. And having way more fun because they kept the game the way I liked it, while EA kept trying to make it more like WoW.
Man I can’t imagine getting a game that young and finding out after the fact that I’d had to give all my allowance to play it.
Similar story here, but it was EverQuest.
Yeah I briefly did eq. Ugh
