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Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

#671

Post by therealdrag0 »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #135
thot_experiment wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the heck subscription models are you using? In my experience the software gets broken over time and you can't do anything about it, including RUN THE OLD VERSION WHICH WORKED. There's no longer as much incentive for companies to improve because they'll get paid anyway instead of payment being contingent on actually delivering something useful. Yes subscription models are good for developers, no this doesn't make…

Yeah, I'd appreciate updates if they just fixed bugs, security, and the stuff that was broke. Instead, it's often endless addition of features no one asked for and UI redesigns/reorgnization. No thanks. I'd probably be willing to pay a subscription to withhold that part.

“No one asked for”

That’s a huge assumption, likely wrong.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

#672

Post by lunarplague »

Aeolun wrote: post #307
lunarplague wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how come you get podcast content pushed to you, and I have to actively search for podcast content and can't find anything outside of the bubbles I listen to without going to external sources. Also, arguably, shuffle is not broken, it is working as intended, as there is an intended method to shuffle the songs according to popularity, right? Unless they changed that.

I mean, you only have to open the main Spotify page. I also get podcast content pushed to me (half the main page/search results are always podcasts) and I've never even listened to one.

Again, my main spotify page ask me to continue listening to the podcast I already listen to, plus random daily playlist for music(which I actually really like a lot of the time). I don't get new content showed to be all too often, maybe a new artist a week?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

#673

Post by joe_the_user »

esskay wrote: post #636
joe_the_user wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have data in the service in some proprietary format, say.

These days its incredibly easy to find or write something up to extract data from a service. Take Spotify or Apple Music for example - its very easy to export out of either despite neither of it allowing it in their TOS or providing any tools to do so.

I suppose that's easy to get the contents of private Facebook groups, then?

Notice, getting stuff out of Facebook - or Twitter or similar walled-gardens - is double quandary. How you do scan/scrape/whatever the data and how do you avoid being banned for doing so. This given the formats/apis etc constantly and the degree of abusive platform protection also changing (we've seen Twitter's upheavals, imagine a similar abusive dictator buying Facebook and see how much he can squeeze).

And I'm sure someone will "you shoulda know about Facebook but my subscription sure ain't gonna trap me, no". Okay then...

Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

#674

Post by t0bia_s »

I'm fine with monthly payments as long I have time to use it. Which is fine with Spotify, because I use it daily. But I refuse to pay 4 streaming services when I know that I can watch 3-5 hours weekly on their content. It makes 1 hour for one service monthly. So no deal for me.

As long time Adobe user for professional work I'm fine with paying, because I use it daily and make money from it. As tool I like it. What I hate is their development that is more bloated and robust with every update. Also they do not respect users privacy and usage is not possible on linux - which is only reason why I cannot use linux as main OS.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

#675

Post by KAKAN »

It depends on how it's done, I'd say. On one side, there are companies like Sublime Text and JetBrains. Their subscription model is fair, to me atleast. Also, for most software that HN users would use, they'd likely have alternatives planned or data export methods available, so it's not an issue in that respect as well. On the other, there's stuff like Adobe which… well, I've no review because it's too expensive anyway lol

Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

#676

Post by wkat4242 »

izzydata wrote: post #377
solardev wrote: post #47

I actually prefer the subscription model for my software, if the monthly price is reasonable. It gives me faith that they can actually sustain their business and pay their employees to maintain and improve the service over time. I hate the other model, where with Windows and Office you end up getting useless forced upgrades and terrible makeovers because they need that upgrade revenue every few years. Or the ad drive…

Subscriptions forces companies to keep re-inventing the wheel for the 100th time and inevitably break something they may have already perfected. A lot of software doesn't need to do more than it already does.

It also incentivises them to do pretty much nothing and just sit back and cash the repeat payments :(

Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

#677

Post by mattewong »

gyulai wrote: post #572
mattewong wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re car manufacturers using remote "unlock" pricing, I will admit to being horrified when I first heard about it. Unfortunately for my emotions, there is a strong argument to support this new pricing approach-- which might be BS in specific cases but which, from a macro perspective, may nonetheless have merit-- in that fundamentally, all it is, is a mechanism for further granularity of the age-old thing called price d…

> generally viewed as good for both producers and consumers How so? All examples of price discrimination I can think of are basically forms of rent seeking where money is extracted without providing anything in return. Price discrimination is basically a tax levvied by the rich-powerful-and-better-informed entities of the world over the rich-but-powerless-and-poorly-informed. For example, people who gladly pay premia…

If you think it is not good for producers and consumers, you are not disagreeing with me as much as with economic theory. Personally, I think there are many distortions in practice that can lead to exceptions, but that in the bigger picture of things, it nonetheless holds water.

I will not try to recreate the arguments to the theory but here is a basic one to start with from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price_discrimination.as...:

--- Wouldn’t Consumers Be Better Off If Everybody Paid the Same Price? --- In many cases, no. Different customer segments have different characteristics and different price points that they are willing to pay. If everything were priced at say the "average cost," people with lower price points could never afford it. Likewise, those with higher price points could hoard it. This is what is known as market segmentation. Economists have also identified market mechanisms whereby fixing static prices can lead to market inefficiencies from both the supply and demand sides.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

#678

Post by fleddr »

phrom wrote: post #334
fleddr wrote: post #327

A note taking app or password manager in the modern sense is not a product, it's a service. Your content is stored and this costs money. Not only is it a recurring cost, it's also a growing cost as content keeps getting added and rarely removed. It's not illogical that a recurring fee is asked. It's very much possible that a large company subsidizes these costs or runs ads, thereby making it "free". But the costs are…

You are making a subjective judgement on what a modern note taking app or password manager should be like. They could be developed as local desktop apps, just like the office and image editing programs are. Personally, my notes are not going on anyone else's servers. Part of the problem with being tired of subscriptions is being tired of applications that would be perfect to run locally being instead developed as a w…

We live in a multi-device reality. People expect their notes to sync. If you don't need sync, you might as well use notepad and store .txt files on local disk. Fine by me, but then there's nothing to discuss.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

#679

Post by phrom »

fleddr wrote: post #678
phrom wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making a subjective judgement on what a modern note taking app or password manager should be like. They could be developed as local desktop apps, just like the office and image editing programs are. Personally, my notes are not going on anyone else's servers. Part of the problem with being tired of subscriptions is being tired of applications that would be perfect to run locally being instead developed as a w…

We live in a multi-device reality. People expect their notes to sync. If you don't need sync, you might as well use notepad and store .txt files on local disk. Fine by me, but then there's nothing to discuss.

Yeah, I keep notes on org files in local disk and access them through Emacs. I have no need for SaaS to take notes. There's probably nothing an alternative could offer to pull me away from Emacs, even to a different desktop app.

But the topic of discussion here is whether people are getting tired of subscriptions, and why that is. I don't like subscriptions, so that's the perspective I'm contributing to it. You can't limit the discussion to only people who want to use online services and then say you're having an honest discussion about subscriptions.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?

#680

Post by gernb »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #412
gernb wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can go both ways. Upgrades: Plus: Must be compelling so they must come up with new features Minus: Sometimes those new features are bad. Subscriptions: Plus: Keep it working on new OS versions Minus: No compelling reason to add anything.

>Plus: Keep it working on new OS versions // People are running pre-subscription Adobe products, for example, ... what specific software is suddenly breaking with OS changes?

IIRC CS6 was the last non-subscription version. It's installer is 32bit but MacOS no longer runs 32bit executables. Maybe people find workarounds.

This kind of thing is especially true in iOS where every OS release kills off a bunch of software using deprecated and then deleted APIs.

It's likely in 2-3 years MacOS will pull out Intel support (like they pulled out PowerPC support after so many years when they switched to Intel)

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