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?
When my paid Paramount+ subscription included unskippable ads.
I loathe the trend where I pay money and they still expect me to sit through ads. That’s why we all left cable to start with.
What’ll really aggravate you is that way back when cable was first rolling out, it was billed as paid TV service without ads (as opposed to the ad-supported OTA local networks). Obviously that promise didn’t last long.
It’s a tale as old as time. Its happened before, it’s happening now, and it’ll happen again.
Why limit yourself to subscriptions if you can do both and earn even more money? 🤑
PS: Microsoft perfected this with Windows bloat ware, adverts and tracking. Why did they need to integrate that, if you already paid ca. 150€ (Home) or 250€ (Pro) for a licence? Those prices are integrated into the prices of hardware purchases too, in case anyone is wondering. Purchase a laptop without an OS and it’s generally about 100-150€ cheaper. Anyone interested in Microsoft 365 and Windows 365?
That’s why people switched to cable to start with. Broadcast TV had ads and cable didn’t.
People have depressingly short memories and a depressingly long patience for megacorporate thievery.
Ads on cable channels first happened in 1971. I doubt most people on here were born yet then.
by the time I had my own money I didn’t even think of getting pay tv because it was already running more ads than free to air.
Never had subscription fatigue because paid services have never been better than the free option in my experience.
What’s the point of paying for a subscription if you still get ads 🤷🏻
Marvelous strategy model.
Luckily I did the 6 month free trial and learned. 6 months is generous, ads are not.
I’m still refusing to pay for P+ in the UK. They nicked us about so much with Discovery, Picard and Lower Decks all being on Netflix and Amazon, then started pulling the rug from under us with Dis S3 and it appears maybe LD S4 this year. I’m not paying for a whole new service for one franchise no matter how much I love it. At least Disney got Marvel, Star Wars and all the Fox content before trying D+.
Yeah it’s such a shameless cash grab, I know corporations mug us off every day but it’s disrespectful when they’re so desperate about it.
Even worse when it’s regarding Trek, a franchise that’s always been critical of capitalism.
Imagine how we feel over here in NZ when we wanted to watch S2E1 of GH we actually got S1E3 of DOOL instead! Boy when the NPD were told about this I bet they ASAP’d their pants!
I hate acronyms.
I still haven’t forgiven Paramount+ for making me watch that train wreck of a Halo show.
Nobody made you watch that but you lol.
They tricked me! They said it was about Halo! I had no clue!
Adobe Reader needing a 5€ subscription for rotating pages. Fuck techno feudalism.
Oh my god I didn’t even know about that one. Why?? Browsers read them fine
Reading a PDF is something, editing is a whole other thing. For a while I had an Adobe Reader subscription it was the only one I know of that can edit a pdf were I can delete entire columns from a table. (It was a PDF generated by shitty sales software I was using)
I mostly edit PDFs to fill out documents. I know browsers can do that but they don’t save the progress until you download (or I’m to stupid). Recently found out that Google Drive has a “fill form” PDF editor that works pretty well. But to my blood pressures detriment that works only on Android and not in your browser where I have a proper keyboard. Google fucking enrages me with their complete arbitrary shit sometimes.
Sejda is really good for a fee PDF editor
Adobe: “You need to pay us over and over to edit PDFs! Suckers!”
Inkscape: “Hold my beer.”Found this open source, docker based, self hosted app for editing PDFs a few months ago. Works well enough for basic operations the last time I tried it (though not sure if it can delete columns from tables): https://github.com/Frooodle/Stirling-PDF
Figured I’d post the link here in case it helps you or anyone else.
Yeah, I went with stirling. It has a lot of great features, but it’s lacking in actual editing. Adobe allows you basically to edit a PDF like a word file.
The default Preview app on Macs can rotate PDFs by default…but if your PDF is a fillable form, it’ll fuck it all up.
Yeah, Mac preview is surprisingly one of the best PDF viewing applications available on the market, it’s nearly as good as Acrobat. That’s really strange to me
Alarm clock apps that require a subscription. Basically any app that doesn’t require backend server infrastructure to function should not be subscription based.
There are alarm clock apps requiring a subscription now? Good heavens.
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.
Bro. RetroArch, gambatte or MGBA core. Thank me later.
if you truly need something web based, eclipse is completely free.
This
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
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?
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.
How do you process the automated requests? That’s my dream for my little slice of things.
There’s an *arr app that oversees requests.
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!
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)_/¯
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.
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.
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.
If you have kids, the PBS Kids video app is pretty alright. And free (in the US of course)
I think the one that did it for me was Xbox game pass. I’ve never been much of a fan of digital games, but Xbox game pass made me see what the future of games will be.
You will pay an ever increasing amount per month to play whatever Microsoft or whoever decides you can be allowed to play. You will own nothing you play and if you cancel your subscription, your console is worthless. Meanwhile the service will be crammed with ads, the games themselves crammed with ads, and your data harvested and sold for “personalized” ads.
I only buy physical games now.
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
i cancelled youtube premium when they removed dislike count from view, i felt that i was getting a inferior product once they removed that tool from me, it wasn’t worth paying
revanced is better ofc
Netflix saturating their service with self produced garbage with zero entertainment value to the point I’m looking for a needle in a haystack
I’ve observed how these streaming services engage in borderline elder abuse. They make it extremely easy to sign up, and then to cancel, they require clicking through five different settings pages with tiny buttons and dark patterns. They obscure what each charge is on billing statements, and they are constantly increasing price, merging with each other, which creates confusion. I’ve had to help elder family and friends get out of subscriptions so many times, and each time, I essentially have to audit what they’re paying for. I think the Feds should mandate that every website has a giant red “Cancel subscription” button in the corner. The FTC is working on something like that, but it is unclear what it will look like in the final version.
Not really a discovery, bug when Disney Plus made their base subscription have adds like Hulu and then made the add free version double the price. The “Disney bundle” was $12 a month when it released. Now it’s $20 just to get Hulu and D+ without adds. I hold the star wars franchise pretty close, but I’m gonna have wait to see Ahsoka.
Either that or it’s time to get the paper hat out 🏴☠️
Definitely Netflix with the password sharing lockdown garbage. Then I looked closely at my Spotify. I realized my yearly rewind was almost always the same artists at the top, so I pay over $100 a year to listen to the same music every year. I bought the album’s I like and I feel so at peace now that Spotify can no longer tnrow shitty podcast recommendations in my face.
Oh I’m the opposite. I listen to so much music I’d be spending so much money on it.
My dad is the same and he spent thousands on CDs and later on iTunes for his music collection. Spotify and other subscriptions definitely saved him money.
I’m the same. I think Spotify is a great service if you constantly seek new music and listen to a variety of artists and genres. However, I still find it shitty that they constantly remove tracks, especially from smaller relatively unknown artists. Half of my playlists I made 10 years ago have their tracks disabled.
iirc a lot of tracks and albums get removed if it’s later found out that samples or royalties weren’t cleared on the record. For instance Death Grips’ “Exmilitary” mixtape was removed a few years ago because a lot of samples on the mixtape weren’t cleared with their original creators.
Yeah it’s usually copyright disputes, because some of the tracks have stopped being available in my country for some reason or another. But what if I do enjoy that particular remix and it gets taken down? I have tons of tracks like that. Spotify makes a great case of what happens when you’re not the one in control of your music library, and it won’t completely replace music collection for me.
Yeah IP lawyers ruining my music collection is why I started keeping my music offline for the first time in over a decade.
It’s not just copyright issues. When Spotify loses the license to carry the tracks, they’re gone.
YouTube music doesn’t recognize music as music
The important part is that people have options, and as long as these options exist, I can’t complain. But if some day in the future, everything becomes a subscription, then I will riot.
And it sure seems like more and more services are going that route. I want to ditch Adobe for example and use Affinity instead, but if they ever move to a subsciption model too, I’ll change careers and become a garbageman.
Probably pays better than any design agency anyway.
When I couldn’t just purchase a season of a tv show (Drag Race). You should just be able to buy a show or movie if you want to watch it.
The most recent season was exclusively on Paramount +. I guess they had exclusive right because it wasn’t available anywhere else. It was 3.99/month with a discount so I figured I’d keep it as long as the season aired. I was fucking amazed that there could be twenty fucking commercials in an hour show. If I wanted to skip backward or forward I had to watch three more ads first. Two weeks before the season finale they raised the price to 5.99 so I cancelled it. I didn’t need to watch it that badly. Their other content was shit, all nineties MTV and made for tv movies. When I signed up they advertised Yellowjackets so I was going to watch that. But no, that’s another subscription to Showtime.
It was the cheapest subscription I’ve had but the most aggravating experience, because it’s not about the money. It’s about feeling like I’m getting fucked over with every goddamn thing I buy lately.
I really want to watch Mike judge’s tales from the tour bus but it is only on cinemax. I would have no problem just buying the seasons but you can’t, the only way is to ad cinemax to my already paid sub of Hulu. Fuck that
Old school runescape charging $120 a year. I get that they make new content but that’s the cost of a AAA game each year.
It’s only $80 USD if you buy the full year at once but yeah it’s definitely on the expensive side. I get more fun out of some $20 games than I do out of RS.
I would be happy paying $60 a year for my main and then I could justify paying some extra for my ironman to be members.
Pro-tip if you’re sick of paying for streaming: Stremio (app–I run on NVIDIA Shield) + Torrentio. Totally free and will have everything you ever need. For a few dollars, Real-Debrid adds more/faster stream options, but it’s purely optional/nice-to-have.
I would counter-argue for Jellyfin + Radarr-suite. I just like better Jellyfin’s interface.
Both options are valid, I use Plex instead, but selfhosting people need to understand that there is beauty on the streaming route, pirate streaming route.
Honestly, the streaming way is less bothersome and with almost immediate results, so there’s a lot of beauty in it.
I am a picky bastard so I want to make sure I’ll be able to watch everything in 4K, without waits nor interruptions. Plus I watch a lot of old stuff that takes a while to get: American Gothic took me 6 months to get, I tried getting the DVD set first but realized the latter episodes weren’t included.
I’ve seen it mentioned, but never tried it. I’ll have to read up on it, thanks!
