I'm very close to returning to the high seas for content... A personal recent anecdote. I wanted to watch Interstellar again a few days ago. Beginning of the previous month I saw it on Prime/Netflix or both (can't remember). A month later when I wanted to actually watch it it was gone from both services... I got really pissed off, but I rented it from Prime, because I wanted to watch it with my family "now".
Your app that does random thing "X" does not need a subscription. Stop. Doing. This. This rent seeking behaviour doesn't pose well for any of us.
> Your app that does random thing "X" does not need a subscription.
I don't think it's quite that straight forward. Software is undervalued - people are not prepared to pay a real sustainable price for it, while also expecting constant updates and maintance. Users who paid $5 for an app five years ago will expect an update for the new iOS to add widget support, for example.
Subscriptions better ensure incremental income for incremental updates.
It's a strange mix of simultaneous under- and overvaluation. Single applications are undervalued, but the entire industry is overvalued. Our innovative user exploitation tactics have enabled the profitable creation of tons of software with no underlying value.
The software us undervalued compared to what it costs to produce, but overvalued in terms of what it's worth to users.
Good software doesn’t need constant updates or maintenance.
Personally I hate the culture of incremental updates, shipping halfbroken beta versions, bolting on security as last measure because who gives a fuck about dataleaks. Everyone trying to build an everything app and sucking up all the data they can get their hands on.
The sad thing is nowadays most software „engineers“ or product „managers“ can’t even imagine an alternative to this.
Write a program that does one thing well and you don’t need to constantly update it.
> Good software doesn’t need constant updates or maintenance
It does though. Unless your software just play a perfect 440hz A. Even a simple homemade tuner (my first and only android app) can't run on new phones without having to be updated (sadly. I use an ad-riddled one now :/)
I don't think this qualifier is useful here. My very simple app needed 'constant' updates to avoid falling behind and needing a huge rework after 8 years.
Constant here meant regular. Following android Api updates is constant work. It can also mean that the intensity of work needed is the same, but I don't think it's the idea there (if it is, I disagree with the idea too, for different reason).
I think his idea was that good software exists in a nutshell and does not need upgrade. Which is true for embedded, like the arduino that manage the doors of my father's chicken coop (ideally. The photoresistor disagree here when I think about it, but the software is bad so that kinda prove GGP's point). Not as true for software with complex human interfaces though.
GNU grep is 100k lines of code (including header files and tests). That's probably just as complex as any random Android application. Yet I don't expect it to need a huge rework after 8 years. In fact, if it changed interface in any meaningful way, it would immediately be forked by impatient users who have jobs to do. I cannot wait until the mobile ecosystem is anywhere near that useful.
However subscriptions often set the expectation that you must consume incremental updates, when really I would often be happier to stay at a particular version. Often made worse by the implicit assumption that since you are paying something has to change, leading to changes without clear purpose.
Exactly this. More often than not with proprietary software, I'd rather spend £20 once and expect stability than pay £1.99/month and find that things are constantly changed/broken/"improved"/worsened for no reason.
I actually don't dislike the model that TablePlus etc use also, where my purchase grants me updates for a year. If I want more updates after that, I pay again. If not, I sit still on the version that I'm on forever more.
This also properly aligns incentives. You continue to pay as long as updates provide value to you. As soon as updates provide no or negative value you can just cancel payments and stay on the version you like.
...So long as whatever auto-update mechanism the software has can recognize where your paid support ends. I've had a problem in the past (I'm afraid I no longer recall what the software was offhand) where I paid for something with a model like you describe, but then after my support ended, the auto-updater updated me to a version that I hadn't paid for—and I was dumped back onto "free trial" mode.
The auto-updater also needs to not notify me of updates that I can't get without paying. That's just spam at that point.
Apart from that, I generally agree that that's a decent model to follow.
Stability updates to deal with API changes, perhaps. New features like widgets? I'm not so sure.
I've paid for an MP3 player app six years ago and the APK still works fine, although the UI looks a bit wonky on a phone screen four times the size of what I had back in the day. I don't expect anything more than an update in case MP3 playback somehow breaks.
Maybe this is different in recent years, with iOS putting the burden of backwards compatibility more with the developers and Google now following suit in their attempts to add decent privacy restrictions to a previously unrestricted API, but I think consumers don't expect all that much from one-time purchases.
You'll lose market share if you don't add new features, as well as new customers if your app is falling behind others, but that's a separate problem.
On the other hand, the moment you ask just a single euro per year as a subscription, people expect to be up to date all the time. After all, you're still charging them even, so why wouldn't the app ever improve?
Everyone knows a software business does better with recurring revenue instead of single purchases, but customer expectations are also higher if they're still paying you five years down the line.
I've bought a game recently. It's pretty nice, but it has one problem - a big multiplayer universe which requires some servers to keep up, but the game is not subscription based. The result - quotas on the one small server cluster, so every evening there are constant "Blue Cobra" or "Taupe Python" or similar errors which are just "we don't have enough money for more servers, don't like it don't play, we have your money already".
The prices are usually set mich higher tho. That app that costs 5$, for which the user perhaps expects an update 5 years later won’t move to a subscription model for 1$ per year, but probably 1$ per month. Over 5 years that’ll be a tenfold increase.
`2.` is a big one. I want to be able to filter out crap I'm not interested in. I want to be able to set something as watched that I've already watched outside of your particular service. I want to be able to set something as unwatched because I'm going to do a re-run. I want to be able to set individual episodes as unwatched because I fell asleep with it on and want to actually watch it (maybe a few days down the line). I really want control over the library.
The current model of most (all?) streaming services is just something I don't want to deal with.
I want to like Jellyfin. I've been running it in parallel with Plex for at least 3 or 4 years. It doesn't work well most of the time for me though - mostly client-side issues like bad rendering, issues with subtitles, videos hanging during seek, many others... I could live with some of the issues I've found but every time I hop on JF I run back to Plex. As much as I hate some things Plex have been doing and the lack of troubleshootability when things go wrong, it mostly works most of the time. JF mostly doesn't work most of the time (again, for me - it seems it's excellent for a lot of people!).
Well yes, Jellyfin works well enough for me: installed on a NAS via Docker, accessed from desktops, Android and iOS devices, without issue.
It does seem a little fragile at times and some things are annoying (managing playlists in particular). But the way Plex does business is not acceptable to me, so I didn't even try to install it.
If you are talking about being scummy as the root reason, shouldn't the plethora of AAA games released in a beta state count? Add in the DLCs and possible subscriptions for "features".
After reading the first few paragraphs, my first thought of the future was a dystopian police state rather than concern for "renting" vision.
The federal law enforcement apparatus in America has a long history of pushing for more power and pushing the boundaries of its power. Warrantless data collection is at an all-time high. Most of us brush it off as no concern since we are law-abiding citizens.
I'm beginning to see it as a real threat after the last election. It made me feel less secure in the stability of our political system. It's conceivable that someone could come to power and abuse law enforcement for political purposes on a large scale. I recognize that some people believe it's already happening but I'm not one of them.
The Dept of Homeland Security, established after 9/11, has been involved in copyright violations of all things. When I read an article about that I was kinda shocked.
This post is a bit messy. The author starts talking about ads and algorithms manipulating us before quickly saying that subscriptions are similarly harmful, except that link is not really explained. It's randomly shoehorned in.
The author likens John Deere and Netflix but quickly brushes aside the fact that digital media and physical tractors are very different things to own.
Finally, the author suggests that paid subscriptions are bad because they can restrict our access to material and steal our data. I concede the first point but not the later. Reading my news subscriptions is significantly better than reading "Google News" and other ad-driven media suggestions.
Overall I am disappointed in the quality of the argument. This person does actually have a PhD which makes me want to talk to this person in a long form conversation where they won't feel constrained by this specific medium (pun intended).
I promise you I did not! But I have recently started changing my "prose" to be more clear, layering information thoughtfully, and spending more words on filler (e.g. The Author Suggests). I definitely learned part of it from reading chat gpt. I like it better than some of the more math-y or academic writing which I will sometimes use but only if I need to be hyper specific.
It's not the amount of thought that brands it as something that could be mistaken for a chatgpt emission. Rather, chatgpt writing has a very formulaic style that is hard not to instantly recognize once you have seen it a few times.
It's not super surprising to me that people who use it frequently begin to unconsciously imitate the chatgpt style in their own writing after a time.
It makes my job at writer much easier. If I don't want to think about prose I can copy chat gpt and get 80% of the way there with very little effort. Most stuff I write is for my coworkers or Hacker News so I don't mind. When I write for fun or for my family I like to be more thoughtful.
I don't like it. Now I need to parse much more before I get to the interesting part.
It seems that ChatGPT learned from Recipes webpages. Include a story on how the author's parents had sex on a beach in Maui which sparked the author's desire for Mango Passion Fruit Cakes.
In fact, just like I have a limited amount of keystrokes in my lifetime (which incidentally I'm spending on this post) I have a limited amount of time to go through text.
I used to agree with you, and to an extent I still do, but being able to carry the reader through the text by providing filler makes my writing appear more clear even if it's actually has lower information density.
I do this with speaking, too. I used to be a bit of an abrasive engineer and just "tell it like it is" but after hitting a communication wall I started to coddle the listener and people really like it. I personally think it's unfortunate but it is what it is.
It’s not very common in HN posts, though. I also suspected assistance from ChatGPT. It’s interesting to read that the author is consciously learning from it.
It's also becoming normal that these subscription services make you jump hoops to terminate the contract (tried to close your vpn subscription recently?). A few years ago I could just let my paypal run dry and that would stop the payment and end the contract. Nowadays I can no longer make paypal payments without linking my bank account, which means you have to jump the hoops to end the payments.
'subscribe with your credit card' is yet another trap, therefore we need legal terms to be able to cancel in the middle of the period, and a proportional amount of money should be returned.
But still this is psychological barrier to cancel, as FOMO kicks in
You can manage/terminate individual autopay/linked merchants at paypal. It's at the bottom of the settings>payments page, follow the automatic payments link.
The revolutionaries and people opening your eyes are loo lazy to setup and host their own blog. Plus some ad income is good too, to sustain their revolutionary writing.
The argument is often made you can get the ‘better’ product if you pay for a ‘product-as-a-service subscription. Even for simple hardware like say a washing machine. Sure you can get the cheap one, but I’ll break almost immediately after the warranty expires and it will use so much more water and energy… or you could get the efficient one that won’t break down, because the company selling those wont have to worry about their quarterly sales.
The argument has been proven false many times however. SiriusXM provides an ever worsening product with more and more sponsored stations showing up to replace their diminishing licensed library, Adobe continues to introduce bugs to their software because there's no incentive to fix anything if people are so deep into the ecosystem and have no way of going back to a more stable version, and Nest provides no local storage options for video because it denies them access to the data and doesn't allow them to put a barrier between you and the video files. Increasingly subscriptions are there so a company can do something once and coast for months or years afterwards. It continues the tradition of trying to get as much money for as little effort as possible.
Interestingly, hearing aids are often rented due to their high out-of-the-box cost and have been for way longer than SaaS's existence. Fortunately, none of what the author predicted here has happened because governments would probably not tolerate this.
We're already heading that way with housing.
Normal houses in places where jobs/opportunities are available are trending into the million dollar range.
One of the solutions floated to the nursing shortage around here was to build housing owned by the hospital. Sounds great, strike and risk losing your job AND house when there is no housing availability.
It will just get worse from here. If someone can find a way to monetize something, it will be monetized, and the money will be leaving your wallet for some quadrillionaire who simply needs a yacht and wants it built in a dry dock that will require destroying historic architecture to launch.
I don't think "slaves" is the correct word here, but there is something going on that I can't put into words. Capitalism++ where instead of businesses providing services in exchange for a fair amount of currency, everyone is just fighting to pull as much currency from others as they can, while everyone else tries to pull as much currency as possible out of them.
it has stopped being a symbiotic relationship and has started to become adversarial. extremely adversarial in some ways. it's exhausting and I don't see how it can continue.
in capitalism there is somehow this idea that future growth is uncapped, and that the line on the graph must always trend upwards and that is just not realistic. ..everything is finite. the lines simply can't continue to trend upwards forever. but everyone is acting like there's just infinite money, and all you have to do is ask people for it.
The number of times per day that I must say "no" to ads and subscriptions and offers and all of those things surely must be in the thousands.
Per day.
It's wearing my soul down. There is no chance that I'm alone, here.
Don't worry, you're far from alone, and the number of people who think this way is going to grow the longer this goes on, the more they're squeezed, for less and less value. Unfortunately the economy can remain batshit longer than any one person can remain solvent. Detach as much as possible.
Tangentially related but copyright is broken and needs urgent reform.
It does not serve its intended purpose anymore and this is just one symptom of it.
The issue isn't your views on copyright (I'm not tracking what they are, but I'm sure they're fine and no doubt plenty of people agree with you). Rather the issue is that you've been posting about this repetitively and excessively. That's not allowed on HN. It adds noise rather than signal, and we want signal here.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll stop doing this in the future.
Hey dang,
Apologies I missed your earlier warning…
I see that this was the wrong approach and noisy.
I’ll work a bit on steel manning my arguments for reform and write a blogpost instead and share it with HN after to focus the discussion, been spending a bit too much time to write these comments anywhere.
Please unban me dang I won’t do it again ^^
Your app that does random thing "X" does not need a subscription. Stop. Doing. This. This rent seeking behaviour doesn't pose well for any of us.