“If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”
I heard this before and it is becoming more true each day.
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.
You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy!
Can we get communism already?
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.
the only things in life im happy owning is my home, my transportation and my informatics
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.
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”
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
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.
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.
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 :/
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.
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
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
deleted by creator
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?
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 you get home internet service without a subscription? I’m down to try it.
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.
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.
So don’t sign up. Go without.
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.
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 ;)
God forbid a programmer be compensated for their labor.
I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with lifetime purchases?
I’m actually a programmer. There are ways to compensate us that doesn’t force people to pay rent for our work.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
