the thesis is wrong, of course compromising the entire article. you/we aren’t getting previously free content, now for a fee. you are getting content previously paid for with ad dollars, dried up thanks to advertisers abuse (leading to adblock).
Subscription Hell
81–90 of 610 posts
Re: Subscription Hell
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is an interesting issue that I have thought about recently. There are tons of services like this. One analog of this phenomenon are loss leader products in retail. Loss leaders in grocery stores (sometimes produce or in the case of Costco, hotdogs and soda for $1.50). Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. When enormous companies offer products for free, that ot…
Loss leaders have been responsible for putting lots of small businesses out of business. I can't for the life of me understand how the HN success story Dropbox has a long term future. For the same $9.99 a month that you pay for Dropbox's 1TB Of storage, you can get.... - 2TB of storage from Apple for iCloud - 1TB for each of 5 users on One Drive plus access to the entire MS Office Suite for 5 computers and 5 mobile d…
Simple: Apple sucks at cloud services. They provide them because it is easier for a subset of their users not to have to think about getting a third-party service.
Google and to some extend Microsoft want/expect you to do everything in the cloud. Their sync clients are generally less reliable, do not support P2P sync, and do not do block-level sync. Google even syncs placeholders for Google Doc documents, rather than real local office files. Microsoft encourages people to create/open documents directly on/from the cloud (with its standard dialog boxes).
If you want to own your data and reliably sync them between your machines, Dropbox is the best choice. And probably they'll continue to be the best, because sync is their product and not some way to funnel people in other products.
Re: Subscription Hell
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. A subscription to Office 365 comes down to 99 Euros per years. Of course you’d pay maybe 150 every three years or so for a new version back in the days, but still that’s double. Also, I wonder whether this will lead to a slower development of the software. Before you’d have to create a leap forward to impress people to buy the new version, if the old version was still good enough.
It is also surprising how much other subscriptions cost compared with Office 365. Office 365 contains the most complete office suite in existence, probably larger than many operating systems. It also includes 1TB of OneDrive, and free monthly Skype minutes. And the 99 Euros that you quote are for five persons. Most subscription software is a terrible deal in comparison. I have tried to avoid subscription software as…
> Subscription software does not benefit the user.
Depends on software, subscription and benefits...
I think Office and Jetbrains are softwares done "right". They continually release updates - quarterly?... continually add new features...
I think more companies get it "wrong" than get it "right"... but done right, the company has reasons to keep developing - no new stuff? no continued monies. no new monies.
Re: Subscription Hell
#84I 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…
Most people would complain at paying more than 5% for reading 5% or the articles though, and the exact pay for what you use model doesn't cover any costs that are fixed or otherwise not equally spread over each item. While this doesn't count for a fair number of individuals, people as a unit will neither want to subsidise everyone else nor want to pay the fixed costs when they use very little (why should I pay 1x for a unit when it is 2x for 4?). You can present it as a discount for bulk, but only to an extent.
> The issue many people, myself included, ...
> my "price per article" goes from small to literally infinity
This is a problem for the producers too if they try a pay-per-unit model instead: their income could waiver unpredictably between more than enough and literally negative (not meeting the production costs). Either way, someone is gambling.
> Blendle's money back if its click bait policy is the clincher.
That sounds like something I'll have to investigate. Thanks for the pointer.
Re: Subscription Hell
#85A standard for micropayment for content needs to evolve. Our relationships to publishers have changed substantially. I would be willing to pay per read from sources like The Guardian, New York Times, The Economist, etc, but I am not frequent enough to want to subscribe. For the citizen who wants to get their information from different sources across the globe and political spectrum, it gets unreasonable to expect sub…
This is what Blendle offers according to u/ChuckMcM, price per article decided by publisher, ranges from 9c to $1.99, average 25c.
Re: Subscription Hell
#86I don't really see the downside here. You can now literally not buy into another newssite's BS.
Re: Subscription Hell
#87Earlier 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.
Like Webstorm? I do feel that I get value for my money and with the yearly fee I get all the updates (which are important in the ever changing world of web development), but sometimes it still feels like protection racket.
no, not like webstorm. Webstorm is pretty similar to sublime text. You pay a price for a perpetual license. After one year of use, you can decide whether you keep on using the 'old' version, or if you pay again to have the newest one with all the updates. I think the comment you were referring to was thinking about stuff like adobe, where if you don't pay, you don't get anything.
Re: Subscription Hell
#88Earlier 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.
Like Webstorm? I do feel that I get value for my money and with the yearly fee I get all the updates (which are important in the ever changing world of web development), but sometimes it still feels like protection racket.
Jetbrains does not require subscriptions for continued use of any version. Purchasing a 12-month subscription (which is cheaper than their previous "perpetual license") gives you a perpetual license for the current version of software.
This is actually my favourite licensing technique I have come across for software.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
Re: Subscription Hell
#89I wish I could just pay $x/mo for unlimited access to all media. It would get distributed to content creators proportionally based on my time using websites, music, videos, and games. No ads or subscriptions.
I can't imagine how such a system would be implemented though. And I'm sure there would be new unintended consequences with such an incentive structure. But something like that would be nice!
Re: Subscription Hell
#90At 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…
edit: disregard my comment below, as others have reminded me, the yearly charge is for updates and will not stop you from using it completely if you decide not to renew it, you just don't get any more updates. So this isn't the best example > I have noticed this as well, that a not-small number of software programs have turned from "give us one money for this version" to "give us slightly smaller amount of one money…
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