Dropbox, Spotify, and a VPN are worth it: fight me.
Sure, Spotify doesn’t pay artists enough and I miss having Neil Young available for streaming, but what are the other options that work well in the car? I’m not going to go back to using discs or plugging in MP3 players to the aux port, and I don’t mind paying the bands directly for merch/albums if I’m really a fan. Considering I mostly listen to vinyl at home, I’m not paying Spotify for music; I’m paying Spotify for the convenience of being able to not listen to terrestrial radio and to be able to listen to what I like in the car or at work without the need for Youtube.
And my personal Dropbox account that I also use for work is well worth 15$/mo for 2TB of storage. It’s saved me so much grief to be able to back up phone photos, access my work files from any computer, keep records of my personal documents, etc., and the software is both more cost effective and better designed than Google Drive or OneDrive. PDF’s of my RPG books/characters/maps? Dropbox. Grocery list text file? Dropbox. Place to stash tabs/sheet music that is easily kept organized without the need for a physical copy? Dropbox. Phone number of that parent who saw my partner’s car get tagged in the parking lot at school? Wait, I think I have her phone number in an spreadsheet from when I coached her daughter in tee-ball…gimme a sec…yep, it’s in my Dropbox. In a side note, Dropbox may have turned me into a digital hoarder.
But the rest of this subscription-based garbage can get bent.
Fuck Amazon but it is not like the others in the meme
Amazon lets you acquire physical items, of insane variety, delivered to your door, often for a price lower than you can find it in physical stores. Often delivered same day and almost certainly same week.
That’s an insane value compared to something like a game company that’s like “teehee you can pretend to own this until we get bored of hosting it and then poof fuck you!”
If a subscription would be as good as just having the file or software offline… I might even pay for it. Yes I mean including DRM-Free backups like www.gog.com
Honestly, if the service respects my privacy and isn’t littered with ads, I don’t mind paying at all. Like I wouldn’t mind paying a monthly fee for services provided by Proton, for example, for email, online storage, vpn, etc. I think it’s fair. There’s a lot of infrastructure behind it and employees. Things don’t just run by themselves for free.
But when I pay for a subscription and they publish ads as well for extra income, not only does it make my experience unpleasant, but it’s incredibly greedy. And when I get charged for a service that exploits all my private data to create a user profile that can be sold and used to push targeted ads and other fake information with the goal of changing my opinion on important democratic topics, then that’s when I start completely avoiding that service altogether.
Phone bill - no choice
Internet bill - no choice
Insurance - no choice
World of Warcraft - sue me
Costco membership - worth it
VPN - worth it
I don’t pay for any others. Paid for lifetime Plex for the convenience of not needing to pay for a website domain like I would for jellyfin, and self host my own music, tv, and movies
Furthermore, Costco employees will never push you to get the executive membership, if your previous year did not have enough spending on it to at least pay back the difference.
We actually had the Costco customer service Tell us to cancel our executive membership, because we didn’t earn enough over the year
3 of those are services. Most subscription shit we see these days are products that they want us to treat like services even though there is no on going consumption. All of these software subscription services are just grifts.
I expect to use the product or functionality provided by x on a regular basis
The use of x has no added utility
The functionality and/or feature set (e.g. content) of x may degrade significantly without warning and/or recourse
Unavailability of x is likely to render it completely useless
If most of these conditions can be regularly sufficiently true, then searching an alternative that incorporates proper ownership is a good course of action.
You’re paying for the content in the case of the newspapers. It is a similar cost to print on newsprint as to run a website. It saves them no money. Most of what you are paying for is for the journalism, writing, editing, etc. Content costs money.
Exactly. The reason I cancel my subscriptions is because there’s been a nosedive in content that I enjoy, which has tipped the scales to it costing more than it’s worth to me.
I’ve moved to a Plex setup, but even then I don’t watch many shows at all. The ones I do watch are all on different platforms though, so it would be X many subscriptions just to watch the few shows I like.
Are streaming services that different from cable TV? You’re paying for access to new content. If you want specific content to own, don’t they all let you buy them? I know I was able to buy GoT discs when I wasn’t willing to pay for an HBO subscription. Has that changed?
yup, the very popular stuff you can usually (but not always) buy on disk. the less popular stuff you can sometimes (but not often) buy on disk if the creator really pushes for it
It doesn’t make a difference. He still wants you to get comfortable with that. It doesn’t matter how he dresses up his sentences his thought process is the same, thats how he got to CEO.
The point of the dishonest article is to make you believe the CEO feels entitled to gamers becoming OK with subscription models. What he actually feels is a hope that subscription models will take off. It’s rage-bait. Did it work?
Add comment