Subscription Hell • Hacker News Board

Re: Subscription Hell

#151

Post by zerostar07 » Sun, May 06, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

goatherders wrote: post #126

Maybe I'm wrong or in the minority, but I think if publishers want to make people pay for content then they should. Saying that people dont want to pay for something they used to get for free may be correct, but that doesn't make it right. Things that have value can be given away for free. Or they can be charged for. And that decision should be made by the producer, not the consumer.

Content is information which is goods (edit: not a commodity) and nobody has the right to say it is "right" to force others to pay for it. The market decides its price.

Re: Subscription Hell

#152

Post by jonknee » Sun, May 06, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #92

RandomBookmarks wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the website says: Your license comes with a year’s worth of updates. Once that year is up, you can keep using the last version of Sketch you downloaded, forever. That sounds ok to me.

What happens if there is a security hole in your version?

The same thing that used to happen to you before everything was a subscription--you will run insecure software.

Re: Subscription Hell

#153

Post by d2p » Sun, May 06, 2018, 7:13 PM UTC

StudyAnimal wrote: post #60

d2p wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my issue with most subscriptions too. The price has to be set based on the average use, which makes it really expensive for the infrequent user (and ultimately this means less conversions, yet nobody seems to care about this?!). I've had the same gripe with games for years. I stopped paying for Xbox live and World of Warcraft because they're the same - if I only played for a few hours in a month, I've paid ov…

Obviously (in these cases) there are market segments that favor all you can eat subscriptions and those that favor à la carte. It makes sense that for most things the heavy users get the sub and the light users get to pay for what they use. However I thought of a counter example. Spotify. I would normally be a light user of music. I had some CDs in the 90s but lost interest in the whole thing by the time I graduated…

I tend to prefer subscriptions for things where what I'm consuming is somewhat throwaway; so things like TV, films, books (things I'd never want to revisit/rewatch). I don't prefer it for things I might like music though. Some years ago, I ripped all my CDs (yeah, it was a lot of effort) and said I'd spend up to £10/month on music rather than a Spotify sub. I don't spend anything like that, but still tend to pick up all the new music I like. At any point I could stop buying new music and still having a big library, so I think it's worked out well.

That said, if Google Play Music Unlimited was either half the price (£5/mo) or was shareable with my wife for the current price, I'd probably have a different opinion!

Re: Subscription Hell

#154

Post by gkya » Sun, May 06, 2018, 7:14 PM UTC

> Today’s consumers though have significantly higher standards than the original users of the web. Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format.

Citation needed. This comes up quite often, and people like to assume they know what users want all the time. But is there actual, scientific evidence that, given the same content, a plain HTML+CSS web page that's not interactive but well put together is less compelling to users than a JS-heavy, interactive, overengineered, ad-ridden, tracker-infested and bloated one? Moreover, where do we get the backing evidence for the currently-popular aesthetic choices other than the subjective taste of designers themselves?

Re: Subscription Hell

#155

Post by lightedman » Sun, May 06, 2018, 7:14 PM UTC

The only way to stop this is to simply kill SaaS and advertising industries.

As a nice side effect, you'll fix about 80% of what is wrong with the internet today as you do so.

Re: Subscription Hell

#156

Post by ozim » Sun, May 06, 2018, 7:14 PM UTC

lajhsdfkl wrote: post #75

rahoulb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if the service is only marginally profitable without acting unethically it should shut down.

Showing ads is unethical now? >Maybe if the service is only marginally profitable without acting unethically it should shut down. Also I love this neo puritan thinking. I'm sure all the users of these services agree with your ideology and you forcing it down their throats is for their own good correct?

How showing ads is against GDPR? You still can show ads, you just need consent for tracking users. If they are going out of business because of GDPR they were not just showing ads.

Re: Subscription Hell

#157

Post by zerostar07 » Sun, May 06, 2018, 7:16 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #103

mar77i wrote: post #86

I don't really see the downside here. You can now literally not buy into another newssite's BS.

this is actually what I've been moving towards. Over the years I've become addicted to way too many news sites be it tech or politics and given that I've noticed the same trend as the author I went the other way, just prune my consumption habits. I've cut it down to one physical newspaper subscription, use the BBC or DW or other public news sources only once or twice a day, and that's pretty much it. The most notable…

a visit on reddit is enough reading material for most of the day, and its free.

Re: Subscription Hell

#158

Post by TheCoelacanth » Sun, May 06, 2018, 7:16 PM UTC

jstarfish wrote: post #113

matthewmcg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you plan to do when the publishers terminated your accounts for sharing credentials?

Proxy and cache articles using a standard set of credentials from a set list of origin IPs, most likely. The traffic would appear as that of an average reader.

That sounds very likely to get you sued for copyright infringement.

Re: Subscription Hell

#159

Post by orf » Sun, May 06, 2018, 7:18 PM UTC

One thing not mentioned in the article is the engineering cost of altering the subscription and payment features of an app, so it's harder to AB test and experiment with new ways of pricing or things like paying for groups of apps together.

Maybe Bloomberg has a lot more resources to throw at this but for a smaller company that has a hacked together or otherwise inflexible subscription system is a risky proposition. Breaking it for some portion of users can result in a lot of lost revenue and potentially effect your customers if the app downgrades/restricts them while you fix it.

It's also often created early on, and moving to something like stripe which helps with a lot of this still incurs the risks above.

Re: Subscription Hell

#160

Post by Sileni » Sun, May 06, 2018, 7:18 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #91

always_good wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One-time payments for software amount to a pyramid scheme where you benefit from the money of future users. That's not without its downsides either, where your userbase grows indefinitely yet doesn't pay for its own support-email rent. There's obviously a middle ground, like being able to at least use the version you paid for indefinitely but having to pay a smaller price to upgrade. But which direction a pricing str…

The middle ground doesn't work. See MS Windows update hell. The way things should work is like this: Subscription for when you want to use the software and open format data files that you're always easily able to export and download. If a company goes out of business or does something stupid then another one will pop up to handle your needs. This aligns incentives correctly while still allows a healthy dose of compet…

An alternative is intentionally packaging releases into tiers (performance, stability, feature, etc) and sell them as such. Something closer to Windows XP service packs than individual updates. I'd expect small, necessary updates to continue to exist as they do.

A user can buy the base version, then a few months later when you create a release that allows processing widgets through the program twice as fast, they can update for a small fee. This would force the developer to create updates that would be easy to communicate the benefits of to the consumer.

It'd be a bit more difficult to figure out pricing for new users over time and which version they receive, but it would allow they old pricing model without forgoing the benefits of incremental development over time.