Tfw I paid for a subscription to access my textbook this semester.
Granted, it’s not just a textbook. My Spanish classes use VHL Central, which includes a textbook with videos, audio files, virtually endless practice assignments, and pretty much all of our assignments and course material.
It’s a really great tool, I guess I just wish I could keep access to it after I graduated. (I think you can purchase a textbook, but definitely not the full program.) Ah, well. ¯\(ツ)/¯
That kind of model is unfortunately common for university courses. I had it for my language courses, and a couple of the core maths courses.
The online platform justifies a subscription by providing additional resources, homework grading, etc. Fair enough, honestly, if they want to charge you $15 or something reasonable. But when textbook access gets rolled into the bundle, it tends to inflate the subscription cost and also have the convenient-for-the-publisher side effect of temporary access to the text. Lose-lose, from a student perspective.
I had a course that required we buy a license to Pearson’s service in order to submit homework. $100+ to view a pdf for a semester and submit homework through a buggy form interface. I still hold a grudge against everyone in the department for that decision.
With that model the company can afford to offer far more content than with a pay-once model. With a pay-once model they only generate enough income to be able to offer a book, and maybe a smattering of supplementary material. Go subscription-based however, revenue increases, so output increases and now they can afford to create and maintain a whole lot more while keeping the price affordable to those who need it during the period that they need it.
It’s a similar principle to renting vs buying. If they were to offer all of those materials as a one-off purchase at a price that would allow their business to be sustainable, it would cost more than most are able to afford.
If we go back to one-off purchases, we go back to getting less for life as opposed to a lot for a limited period of time. It’s a trade off, and clearly one that most people are willing to make.
People get so angry (OP) about the way things are just because they’re unhappy in general and looking for something to blame. Not all companies are fair with their subscription models, but most are. Not every company cares about their customers, but most do. Some companies are run by sociopaths, but most are run by normal, nice people.
As everyone else here, I think piracy is illegal and immoral. We should accept that we don’t own our services and software and we should never doubt that corporations have our best interest in mind.
Therefore you should never have a Plex server, never use protonmail, never use AdGuard Home, never use AdGuard DNS for private DNS.
Also you should never use Firefox with UBlock origin sponsorblock and consent o magic.
Lastly you should never ever use re-vanced and x-manager, and God forbid don’t use a VPN
It’s interesting to see that subscriptions are forced upon users everywhere.
I only game on mobile in games that are basically f2p. When I like something in that game or want to do a monthly pass I pay for that, once. I have deliberately no payment option what so ever linked to the mobile account as I don’t trust Google not to sneak in an unwanted payment. (Or a game fritzing out and doing a payment for me)
Yes, games are entertainment and just like TV/streaming, a subscription could be useful for die-hard gamers, but I see digital content being ‘sold’ for buyers to ‘own’ and then the bought items being removed to much. Corporate greed is spiraling out of control.
I already had games tell me I couldn’t spend when I didn’t order anything, so I’m good this way. No payment method linked to my account without a clear intent to spend that exact moment. Link paypal, spend, unlink paypal works perfectly. (or else when I have cash, buy a giftcard when the amount is close enough to what I want to spend.
Correction, corporate greed spiraled out of control long ago. It’s just that more and more of us can see it as time passes.
I figured this out about 7 years ago. I used to do drugs when I was younger (thank God for getting me off that train) and the “drug pusher” behavior of these companies was just too evident. So, for me it was sort of a natural reaction to put as much distance as possible from “ZuckMyBerg” and his crap services, then Microshit and Crapple followed shortly after. The hardest part was moving away from Google (I know, they could easily be the worst offenders, but who’s to say), and I’m almost 100% G-Free. Streaming (audio and video) followed closely.
At first it was a real struggle, trying to self-hosted as much as possible. But with all the amazing FOSS devs out there, it’s also getting increasingly easier.
Yes, it’s a lot of effort to move from all this cloud stuff and subscriptions to using only your own stuff, specially getting family and acquaintances to move away from the mainstream crap, in particular communication services (WhatsApp and the like). In all honesty though, I’m happy with this tradeoff, because only the people that really want to have me around choose to add the secure and private services I’m willing to use, effectively removing irrelevant individuals from my life.
My biggest concern right now are not evil corporations, but governments (democratic or otherwise) backing up all this privacy invasion and abuse.
When shit hits the fan, a lot of people will say (or just think) "damn, he told me about this and I didn’t listen.
We, the ones that keep informed on these matters, have the responsibility to attempt to make others aware. Although it’s really hard since most of us are not on mainstream channels and won’t touch the common stuff with a 10 foot pole.
With piracy mindset, i got an idea, with hacked ps5 and their subscription, you can rip games from their service with hen, download once, then activate hen and rip with ftp, that’s it, if Xbox were hacked then gamepass, ea+, ubisoft subscription, could be ripped in seconds just like that
I honestly just don’t use these services, and never recommend them, entirely because they are subscription-based.
As a model, it is largely focused on trapping the user who forgets to cancel. Many also use sneaky ways to avoid a user cancelling in time, and give no warnings.
The only sub I use is Spotify. I share it across my friends and family and like their vast catalog. They also don’t charge for their API so I can integrate it with Home Assistant.
My friends and family agree downloading songs manually sucks.
Piracy is a service issue. I have no problems with subscriptions as long as the price and service outpace piracy.
If the price gets to a point it doesn’t make sense, I go back to piracy.
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