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Subscription Hell

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Re: Subscription Hell

#201

Post by thechao »

bastawhiz wrote: post #71
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…

There's a difference between charging for updates and charging for continued use. What if Sublime Text started charging a monthly fee just to use it? There's no excuse. > But as far as most software pricing goes, if it's so bad, then people wouldn't pay. And yet people keep paying ransomware for access to their important files.

If the sublime folk offered a “bug fix only” monthly subscription, I’d buy that. My grandfather went through a half day’s paycheck of tooling a month on his own dime. I figure bug fixes are the software equivalent of sharpening chisels, buying new bits, surfacing a mill, etc.

Re: Subscription Hell

#202

Post by makecheck »

scarface74 wrote: post #2

You can't have it both ways. Either you pay for high quality content or you deal with intrusive ads.

You’re overstating the two options here. The choices might be to pay or see ads, but there is NOTHING requiring them to be “intrusive”. They weren’t intrusive in printed magazines, and publishers survived. Over-engineered attention-stealing data-hungry tracking ads are something invented in the Internet age, and I see absolutely no reason at all to include any of those features in the other option.

Re: Subscription Hell

#203

Post by icebraining »

siscia wrote: post #106
bastawhiz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between charging for updates and charging for continued use. What if Sublime Text started charging a monthly fee just to use it? There's no excuse. > But as far as most software pricing goes, if it's so bad, then people wouldn't pay. And yet people keep paying ransomware for access to their important files.

Sorry but nobody is forcing you to use sublime. If they started charging just for use they wouldn't need neither an excuse nor a justification. I really don't see your point. If you could explain further why you think sublime would need an excuse for charging a monthly fee I would really appreciate.

Yeah, I don't see the reason besides "I don't like it" either.

If the problem is access to files, then they could just have a free converter tool to some standard format.

Re: Subscription Hell

#204

Post by petre »

always_good wrote: post #58
techsupporter wrote: post #33

At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments ill…

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…

Atlassian has such a pricing scheme. Pay x amount per year for the cloud version, x-x/10 for the self hosted license and half that amount yearly for updates and continued support. Of course you can still use the license without updates and support. The 100x) with price going down with numbers until you hit the datacenter versions which are priced differently. I think it's very flexible and covers just about every use case.

Re: Subscription Hell

#205

Post by kaybe »

wafflebear wrote: post #40
fjsolwmv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is has two parts: 1. Free chitchat 2. Links to content. HN isn't much without the external content.

To be fair it's the comments that count. HN could randomly generate topics with a markov generator and still retain 80% of the value for me :)

We could also take turns in inventing titles and then vote on them.

Is there any metric for people clicking the external link compared to unique commenters?

Re: Subscription Hell

#206

Post by Paul-ish »

PrunJuice wrote: post #179
lsc wrote: post #171

I actually think the root of our 'fake news' problem is that credible sources charge for content, while crank sources don't. And credible news has always spent more on content creation than niche news. The cost of content creation has not fallen, while the cost of distribution has fallen dramatically. So, it's completely natural that the price difference at the consumer side between high and low quality news would ha…

Check out Blendle https://blendle.com/ They aren't Apple but they do the pay per article thing.

Ive used blendle. I wish there was a browser extension that would detect paywalls and let me use blendle to see the article. Right now I have to open a new tab and search the article on blendles website. That adds friction that causes me to use blendle less than I would.

Re: Subscription Hell

#207

Post by jogjayr »

matthewmcg wrote: post #24
dopeboy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me and three friends worked on a similar idea at the YC hackathon a couple weeks ago. You'd pay us $10/month and we'd buy a lot of subscriptions to different newspapers. You'd install our chrome extension and when you came across a paywall, we'd autofill credentials that are just valid for one day. We didn't win but it definitely piqued the interest of the crowd and the judges (Sam, Michael, and Adora). We're not pur…

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

If it gains sufficient traction and was found to generate equal or more revenue for publishers I could see them willing to come to the table.

The problem I see with bringing publishers to the table is: How do you distribute revenue? Pageviews? That's what you don't want papers to optimize for right now. Equally? Hardly seems fair. Who decides which publishers are on Netscoopx? What ratio of subscribers to paper subscriptions should Netscoopx maintain?

Overall the idea reminds me of Grooveshark and Aereo simultaneously.

Re: Subscription Hell

#208

Post by tlrobinson »

brockwhittaker wrote: post #170
tlrobinson wrote: post #111

Not to be that “just add blockchain” guy, but this would be a great usecase for permissionless cryptocurrency micropayments, e.x. Lightning Network. Create an open protocol, build it into browsers, let content sites ask you to pay $0.01 (or whatever) to view an article. Maybe you could set your browser to automatically pay for the first N articles or M dollars per site per day. Or maybe a site could offer an unlimite…

Blockchain isn’t necessary. You can have a debit account system and change cents per article without the high friction cost of making people buy some cryptocurrency.

Of course, but then it's not open, decentralized, and permissionless like the web is.

In that respect there's always been an impedance mismatch between the web itself and the payment systems you could use on the web. Cryptocurrency has the potential to change that, which I find interesting.

Re: Subscription Hell

#209

Post by reitanqild »

DontGiveTwoFlux wrote: post #50
ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

I am not sure why it is so fundamentally difficult for publications to understand what people want. The issue many people, myself included, have with subscriptions are that you pay $x / month whether or not you read that month's product. And whether or not you read every article or just one. So for me, as a consumer, my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity (pay but read zero articles). Now the pa…

One con of the pay per article is that it siphons money into the money making kinds of stories. The sports and celebrity pages can do a lot of funding for the slow grind investigations that are important for holding those in power accountable. It’s not like an a la carte model couldn’t also fund profitless journalism, but I think it might push things even more in that direction. I think they do understand what people…

Actually I am more likely to pay for investigations than for gossip.

Re: Subscription Hell

#210

Post by eecc »

"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. T hat “quality” costs enormous sums in engineering and design talent, not to mention massively increasing bandwidth and storage costs."

Really? I thought "consumers" just want another shot of dopamine fueled bullshit, prettily packaged of course but crap nonetheless.

The realization that so much "engineering and design talent" goes wasted for this bullshit reminds me of what I said of - when I was 8 years old, 8 years. and people call me a cynical but I softened up loads since then! - the engineers sweating it out to run the Italian national broadcasting infrastructure. All that effort just to run a program the whole Sunday afternoon where a blondie that became famous for showing her thighs would ask people calling in from all over Italy, how many peas there were in a big glass jar: https://youtu.be/tRZ5y9seiLA

Of course they were waiting for the nuclear holocaust any day at that time, some maybe even wishing for it, given the situation...

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