Learned the term recently and really enjoy it, subscription fatigue is the feeling we all have had now where we are just over how everything is subscription based.
Which one was the last straw or most annoying/frustrating to you?
When my paid Paramount+ subscription included unskippable ads.
I loathe the trend where I pay money and they still expect me to sit through ads. That’s why we all left cable to start with.
That’s why people switched to cable to start with. Broadcast TV had ads and cable didn’t.
People have depressingly short memories and a depressingly long patience for megacorporate thievery.
Ads on cable channels first happened in 1971. I doubt most people on here were born yet then.
by the time I had my own money I didn’t even think of getting pay tv because it was already running more ads than free to air.
Never had subscription fatigue because paid services have never been better than the free option in my experience.
What’ll really aggravate you is that way back when cable was first rolling out, it was billed as paid TV service without ads (as opposed to the ad-supported OTA local networks). Obviously that promise didn’t last long.
It’s a tale as old as time. Its happened before, it’s happening now, and it’ll happen again.
What’s the point of paying for a subscription if you still get ads 🤷🏻
Marvelous strategy model.
I’m still refusing to pay for P+ in the UK. They nicked us about so much with Discovery, Picard and Lower Decks all being on Netflix and Amazon, then started pulling the rug from under us with Dis S3 and it appears maybe LD S4 this year. I’m not paying for a whole new service for one franchise no matter how much I love it. At least Disney got Marvel, Star Wars and all the Fox content before trying D+.
Imagine how we feel over here in NZ when we wanted to watch S2E1 of GH we actually got S1E3 of DOOL instead! Boy when the NPD were told about this I bet they ASAP’d their pants!
I hate acronyms.
Yeah it’s such a shameless cash grab, I know corporations mug us off every day but it’s disrespectful when they’re so desperate about it.
Even worse when it’s regarding Trek, a franchise that’s always been critical of capitalism.
Luckily I did the 6 month free trial and learned. 6 months is generous, ads are not.
I still haven’t forgiven Paramount+ for making me watch that train wreck of a Halo show.
Nobody made you watch that but you lol.
They tricked me! They said it was about Halo! I had no clue!
Adobe Reader needing a 5€ subscription for rotating pages. Fuck techno feudalism.
Oh my god I didn’t even know about that one. Why?? Browsers read them fine
Reading a PDF is something, editing is a whole other thing. For a while I had an Adobe Reader subscription it was the only one I know of that can edit a pdf were I can delete entire columns from a table. (It was a PDF generated by shitty sales software I was using)
Found this open source, docker based, self hosted app for editing PDFs a few months ago. Works well enough for basic operations the last time I tried it (though not sure if it can delete columns from tables): https://github.com/Frooodle/Stirling-PDF
Figured I’d post the link here in case it helps you or anyone else.
Yeah, I went with stirling. It has a lot of great features, but it’s lacking in actual editing. Adobe allows you basically to edit a PDF like a word file.
Adobe: “You need to pay us over and over to edit PDFs! Suckers!”
Inkscape: “Hold my beer.”I still have not found a competent (free) program on android that lets me mark up a pdf. They all claim to, but most (including fully-paid Adobe) won’t let you turn off finger marking. MFers, I have a stylus; I want my fingers to pan/zoom and my god damned stylus to make a line. Why is that so foreign?
Because most phones don’t have a stylus.
This might be a cop-out, but I’m absolutely sick of paying rent, and the open source alternatives aren’t great
Subscribing to a worthless landlord eats up 50% of my meager income every month.
can’t you pirate it? (make it your own and become independent from your providers?) Even if sacrificing a couple of features.
tent not rent!
Too real where I live.
i dont know whether to upvote in solidarity, or downvote because it’s wrong.
You wouldn’t download a car, would you?
I’ve observed how these streaming services engage in borderline elder abuse. They make it extremely easy to sign up, and then to cancel, they require clicking through five different settings pages with tiny buttons and dark patterns. They obscure what each charge is on billing statements, and they are constantly increasing price, merging with each other, which creates confusion. I’ve had to help elder family and friends get out of subscriptions so many times, and each time, I essentially have to audit what they’re paying for. I think the Feds should mandate that every website has a giant red “Cancel subscription” button in the corner. The FTC is working on something like that, but it is unclear what it will look like in the final version.
When I couldn’t just purchase a season of a tv show (Drag Race). You should just be able to buy a show or movie if you want to watch it.
The most recent season was exclusively on Paramount +. I guess they had exclusive right because it wasn’t available anywhere else. It was 3.99/month with a discount so I figured I’d keep it as long as the season aired. I was fucking amazed that there could be twenty fucking commercials in an hour show. If I wanted to skip backward or forward I had to watch three more ads first. Two weeks before the season finale they raised the price to 5.99 so I cancelled it. I didn’t need to watch it that badly. Their other content was shit, all nineties MTV and made for tv movies. When I signed up they advertised Yellowjackets so I was going to watch that. But no, that’s another subscription to Showtime.
It was the cheapest subscription I’ve had but the most aggravating experience, because it’s not about the money. It’s about feeling like I’m getting fucked over with every goddamn thing I buy lately.
I really want to watch Mike judge’s tales from the tour bus but it is only on cinemax. I would have no problem just buying the seasons but you can’t, the only way is to ad cinemax to my already paid sub of Hulu. Fuck that
Alarm clock apps that require a subscription. Basically any app that doesn’t require backend server infrastructure to function should not be subscription based.
There are alarm clock apps requiring a subscription now? Good heavens.
Around the time when netflix started to suck, and new subacription services popped up everywhere.
Then a lot of other things that shouldnt rely on a aubscription started getting it. Random apps with a pro mode. The pro mode was now a subscription… its dreadful.
I refuse to get a subscription i would “need” to keep around fpr years.
Here we have 1 video streaming service for a month or two every once in a while. Never two at the same time.
Here we have 1 video streaming service for a month or two every once in a while. Never two at the same time.
This is exactly what I do. Every once in a while I get a subscription to Netflix, watch a handful of shows, cancel the subscription, and a few months later start a subscription to another streaming service for a month each. The only service I ever stayed subscribed to for more than one month per year is crunchyroll, but even that’s no more than 3 months in a year.
I had it when Adobe started it with their suite. Let me just buy access to a major version and all patches and minor upgrades.
It started with the Netflix enshittification. I have had a Spotify and Netflix account essentially since these services were available, and that was great. Now only the Spotify sub is worth it, though I started to loathe that one as well because it at some point deleted all my local files or replaced them with what it thought matched them in their database.
Also every fucking app, no matter how mundane, wants to sell me a subscription. I have a web based game boy emulator on my phone, it works fine but everything beyond the absolute basic functions is paywalled behind a subscription. Not even a one time purchase.
Bro. RetroArch, gambatte or MGBA core. Thank me later.
if you truly need something web based, eclipse is completely free.
This
If it requires a subscription, it doesn’t exist.
That attitude has served me well. So far, at least.
I don’t do mail though, I know some do and are successful but mail is too important for me (and everyone subjected to my technical whims) to fuck it up.
I meant software and media. With mail, somebody’s running a server and policing spammers, which costs time and money.
Enshittification didn’t kill Netflix. What killed it was all the studios pulling their content licenses so they could start their own Netflix. Enshittification happened afterwards as Netflix desperately tried to make itself constantly profitable. They killed a lot of good shows and messed with the algorithm that showed people what they actually wanted to see.
I know what happened, I was there… Guess I should have used a different term for all the content being in one place for a good price shifting to being in a dozen places for exorbitant prices each than enshittification.
I’m torn between feeling bad for Netflix because they tried to do something cool and got the rug pulled out from under them as soon as it started to work, and mad at them for fucking up their algorithm and studio so badly
YouTube premium raised their prices. I had got it back when Google music was the thing. Then they raised the price. Then they raised the price again. Then they raised the price again. The last price raise gave me the motivation to check out Spotify and newpipe.
I haven’t looked back.
Check out InnerTune on Android or https://beatbump.io , you can listen to yt music gratis thanks to free/libre software!
I did exactly the same thing. I miss Google Music. I also miss Songza which they bought, integrated into Google Music and then killed it off anyway.
I’m still grandfathered in from the Google Play Music days, paying $7.99/mo for YT Music + YT Premium. I will never interrupt that subscription and lose that price, haha.
You likely lose that price in December. I got an email telling me so and I believe it applies to all of us grandfathered in. Here’s the relevant part of the email:
As a long-standing and valued member, you are currently paying a lower rate for Premium than the rate available to new subscribers. To show our appreciation for your loyalty, we’re giving you at least three extra months at your current price before the price increase will impact your plan. Your price will not increase before your December billing date. Don’t worry, we’ll be sure to notify you again at least 30 days before the new price is effective.
Hmm, what was the subject of that email? I don’t see one like that, but I want to be sure.
“YouTube Premium Price Update”
July 20
Yeah, interesting, I don’t have that email. I guess I’ll find out if my subscription rate increases in December!
Use InnerTune and you can drop the price to 0 ;-)
Pardon my ignorance, I don’t mean to insult, but how does a python library drop the price to zero? Do you have your own app built using this library?
I’m sorry, I could’ve been more clear. There is an app called InnerTune (F-Droid is an app store on Android that contains only free/open source software) which lets you stream and download all of yt music for free. You can also use the website beatbump.io to stream.
Youtube Premium is also unnecessary when you use the adblocker Ublock Origin on Firefox. On Android, NewPipe is also a great app to watch and download the videos ad-free.
That is possible because Google badly protects its content APIs.
Huh, thanks for the info! I will definitely need to read up on all this.
*legacied
The term grandfathered in has a pretty fucked racist origin.
Had to investigate, and turns out you’re right about the origin. The original grandfather clause was meant to exempt blacks from voting. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause
I’m not a fan of term banning, however. We still use the number 9 even though Hitler said it a lot.
Yeah but Hitler did not create the number 9. Slight difference. There is also no other term to express the number 9.
Legacied means the exact same thing and does not have the racist origin. There is certainly no ban on using ‘grandfathered in’ but there is no real reason to use it since it does not convey anything that the term legacied already does.
Old school runescape charging $120 a year. I get that they make new content but that’s the cost of a AAA game each year.
It’s only $80 USD if you buy the full year at once but yeah it’s definitely on the expensive side. I get more fun out of some $20 games than I do out of RS.
I would be happy paying $60 a year for my main and then I could justify paying some extra for my ironman to be members.
I’m subbed to YT premium, Spotify, and Amazon Prime. I primarily use Steam. I pirate via torrents for movies and series. No streaming services interest me. I’ve used a free trial for Netflix way back when and I was disappointed that some content was not available to download for offline viewing. With torrenting I can watch content in a better quality, I don’t have to worry about buffering, I don’t have to worry about discs and menus, etc. All I really want is just the mkv file and that’s it.
Be sure to set up a Plex/Jellyfin server so you can stream your content to your devices
I’ve heard about Plex, but Jellyfin is new to me. I’ll check both of those out, thanks.
I got to the point where I was downloading shows to put on Plex that I already had access to via a streaming service just to avoid using their app. I eventually decided to drop the service too.
Check out torrentio + realdebrid. $3/month, no need for a VPN or local storage for all the torrents you used to download.
That’s a sweet deal. I’ll check it out, thanks.
Netflix, and when they said I’d have to pay for password sharing for my stepkids, because they use my account when they’re at their dad’s.
That was the last straw. I cracked the shits, bought a couple of ex-enterprise servers, and setup … something different. I then cancelled all streaming services (I got wind of the second Disney hike coming).
The cool thing is they now email me with cheap rejoin offers, telling me about all the cool shows I need to be aware of. ;)
If you have kids, the PBS Kids video app is pretty alright. And free (in the US of course)
There was never a last straw for me, because I never subscribed to any bullshit. I read and understood the dangers of SaaS as a school kid long before the term was cool and long before privacy community and corporate industry popularised it. Unless something really requires realtime work collaboration, like Google Docs/Office 365, or if there are realtime social activities like multiplayer gaming or messaging/chat/videocall, just about everything else does not require an active internet connection, and should be doable locally on a system. This is why devices like iPhone, iPad, Chromebooks and so on are NOT real computers, but merely rented kiosks.
I read and understood the dangers of SaaS as a school kid long before the term was cool and long before privacy community and corporate industry popularised it.
Ok, good for you, lol.
r/iamverysmart
Tagging communities with r/ don’t work on Lemmy.
You need to clear your foggy head and get some sleep. Your cheeky comment was BS and your comeback was too lame. Strengthen your game if you want to do these kind of replies.
Also someone else downvoted you.
I just thought that your sentence about being the first, was stupid and something a 5 heard old would say. It was admittedly funny.
And then I wanted to inform you that r/ doesn’t work on Lemmy, just in case you didn’t know. !communityname@example.com is the correct format.
No offense meant.
You came here 2 weeks ago. Open and check my account history… (눈_눈)
What does that have to do with your earlier statement?
Chromebooks
You can install Linux on them and make them real computers, though. Right? Right?
You can, but then they lack processing power. But they do become light computing machines.
💀
Ugh. Every Christmas they send me a catalogue.
