I dread the day when Microsoft will start forcing me to pay a subscription for my OneNote data. Maybe moving to .txt files and using grep for search would be better in the long run.
Subscription Hell
501–510 of 610 posts
Re: Subscription Hell
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
That makes sense, thanks. In the end, though, when I discovered this was how it worked at the end of my PyCharm subscription, it left me quite a bitter taste in my mouth, and I just stopped purchasing any JetBrains products. These kind of details are akin to trying to trick people via putting stuff into EULAs nobody reads, and for me at least, it gives the distinct feeling that they're trying very hard to screw me ov…
So, is what they are doing worse than what most subscription models do (lose complete access)? I've been using them for awhile and I felt they were really up front about what they were doing, but I don't know if they've always been as transparent.
Jetbrains actually wanted to cut off access completely at first.
Initially JetBrains didn't even want to offer rollback licenses when they went to subscription only model a few years ago.
There was a big uproar among programmer communities (including here on HN) and after few weeks of deliberation a compromise of sorts was reached.
Despite offering a nice product line, JetBrains did lose a bunch of goodwill including mine. But goodwill does not pay the bills.
Re: Subscription Hell
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you could pay $40 once for a book: https://smile.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison-Wesley-Profession... I think the greatest loss of the modern web has been this explicit move away from literacy. It's like the dark days of television are back again.
I looked through the table of contents for that 1,088 page book and I didn't see anything that hinted on how to do sorting on table columns. And this is exactly why Rails Casts was great. You would Google "how do I sort table columns in Rails" and find the episode, watch it in about 10 minutes and implement it in your code base. Rails Casts has been dead for years and it still ranks in the top 3 today on Google for t…
> I don't want to flip through 1,000 pages in a book to find 1 specific feature I am struggling with right now. I may never find it.
I'd much rather do that than watch a video about it, where I'm forced to scrub back and forth trying to understand the key concept at the speed the presenter is speaking instead of reading a section multiple times (which can be much faster).
Re: Subscription Hell
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds similar to employers who pay contracted bonuses late, don't pay if you quit before the bonus date, and use bonuses to make up for reduced salaries.
This is really annoying for me, how can I work for a full financial year (and get my shares allocated), receive my performance review but not get a bonus because I quit before October where they pay the bonuses on the last FY?
Hence the wave of resignations the week of bonus payouts. People play the game and wait to get paid, knowing if they prematurely signal their departure, the company will reallocate money to those who choose to stay. I'm not saying it's right but it happens.
Re: Subscription Hell
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I don't think it would be a great loss to forgo most of the advertising funded content.
>Honestly, I don't think it would be a great loss to forgo most of the advertising funded content. Since you clearly haven't put much thought into this comment let's just start listing things that are funded by ads - News - content creators on youtube - music - twitch - search - blogs - websites with tutorials - a thousand different things which I have missed and then facebook, snapchat, instagram, and twitter which…
> - content creators on youtube
I only watch ad-free videos from content creators I fund on Patreon. I'm sick of Youtube's shitty advertising - it's as bad as TV when I was young, right down to running terrible political attack ads when I'm trying to take my mind off politics.
> - music
I don't think this is funded by ads. It's funded by VC dollars, since just about every streaming site is losing money right now. More to the point, my musical tastes are pretty eclectic so I usually have to buy Vinyl/CDs to get the music I want.
Re: Subscription Hell
#506At 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…
It's frustrating, but people wouldn't do it if it didn't work.
You will generally make far more money charging $5/mo forever than you will charging $50 once for identical software. Not to mention the steady cash flow.
An extreme example, but I always pirated Photoshop (as did probably half the people who ever used Photoshop). But now I pay $60/mo for it and a bunch of the other Creative Suite apps. I never would have paid whatever the 4-figure price was even when I was getting paid to make graphics at work. But I'll gladly pay $60/mo to have access to everything now even though I don't get paid for any graphics or video work.
Re: Subscription Hell
#507> 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,…
There are hundreds (thousands?) of commercial content-heavy websites that continually track engagement metrics and A/B test design differences all the time, and virtually every single one of them has chosen to bet their collective livelihoods on richer and more interactive media.
A/B testing is a form of markov-chain-monte-carlo experimentation that makes certain assumptions about the landscape it is trying to find the maximum likelihood in. Specifically, it makes the assumption of monotonicity of the likelihood or that the lack of monotonicity is of the same scale as the changes they are likely to make. A/B testing cannot break out of a local maximum of the likelihood function if the assumptions are incorrect.
A complete rewrite of the application from media heavy to plain is far smaller than the typical stepsize used in A/B testing and has some temporal effects on top of it.
Re: Subscription Hell
#508Earlier 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 flaw in your logic: You assume that everyone keeps using every app they bought forever. If that was the case, pay-once would be unsustainable. However, that is not the case. Everyone stops using your app at some point. So you don't need to support users forever, you just need to support them for some finite amount of time. Some users might use your app for a few years, some use your app just for a few weeks…
> There's a flaw in your logic: You assume that everyone keeps using every app they bought forever. If that was the case, pay-once would be unsustainable.
There's also a flaw in this logic: It assumes that all apps require some kind of server provided by the developer in order to run.
Once upon a time, standalone software was standalone and could run in perpetuity without requiring anything more of the original developer. It's still entirely possible to write software like this, there's just a trend away from it due to the prevalence of always-on internet connections and the ease of keeping some of your application server-side as a form of copy protection.
Re: Subscription Hell
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There are no ads without tracking.
> There are no ads without tracking.
I can definitively say you're wrong because I saw a billboard on my way to work today.
Also, in the early internet days tracking was referred to as spyware and security software would uninstall it from your machine.
Re: Subscription Hell
#510You can't have it both ways. Either you pay for high quality content or you deal with intrusive ads.
And yet we have print magazines where you pay for the magazine and there are so many ads you can’t find the goddamned table of contents. I’m looking at you, Wired Magazine.
Ha ha, I've also cursed Wired for all their ads, particularly at the beginning of the magazine. Them and the subscription card, though at least it can function as a bookmark.