the only things in life im happy owning is my home, my transportation and my informatics
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
F-Droid… An open source app store with exactly that: Apps without BS
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.
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
Only third party sync, I use Syncthing for that, works great most of the time
I love Obsidian. It blows away every other notes app I’ve used. I use it seemlessly across Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac devices. It’s as customizable as you want it to be, even if that means “not at all”.
I’ve set mine up with all kinds of templates and automation to populate and organize my daily notes, notes on books I’ve read, notes about people I meet, project notes, the list goes on and on…
And if I ever decide not to use Obsidian any more, all of the notes are stored as markdown files on my device(s). So I don’t lose anything. Not even the formatting. Just make sure to back up your vault, in case you lose the device itself.
“If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”
I heard this before and it is becoming more true each day.
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.
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.
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.
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
That’s why I said it depends. What I was referring to is more like the usual leasing(should have clarified that). How many people are buying their car with a one time purchase and not in small rates because that’s easier to handle?
Currently I have hbo max free with my phone plan, plex on nas and my local library. I also have YouTube music family plan, but I started putting songs on nas recently, maybe I’ll replace that too.
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?
start your own reserve fund but this one kinda requires to already gave sufficient assets to eat day 1 adverse event.
Maybe become a sovereign citizen? YMMV.
I made my own “cell phone service” but it only works within 10m of my home.
It’s a start. Keep at it.
How do you get home internet service without a subscription? I’m down to try it.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy!
Can we get communism already?
Next up, (cell) phone plans.
(though fuck landlines phones too)
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
deleted by creator
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.
One-time purchases.
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
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
Boycott rent seeking companies
That’s all of capitalism.
yes it is…
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?
God forbid a programmer be compensated for their labor.
I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with 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.
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?
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.
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…).
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’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 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
Adobe still has lifetime purchases?
yeah, https://1337x.to
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.
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 ;)
