The article about the “subscription” HP ink made me realise something.
Subscriptions aren’t a new idea at all. You could subscribe to paper magazines. And you got to keep them.
I’m just clearing up my old house and it’s filled with tons of old tech magazines. Lots of useful knowledge here. Wanna know how Windows and Mac compared in 1993? It’s in here. All the forgotten technologies? Old games, old phones, whatever? You’ll find it.
Now, granted. You’d only get one magazine a month. Not a whole library of movies or games or comic books.
But still, the very definition of subscription has shifted. Now, the common meaning is “you only get to use these things as long as you’re paying”. Nobody even thinks it could mean anything else.
Besides, it doesn’t only apply to services that offer entire libraries. Online magazines still exist in a similar form as the paper ones. But you only get to access them while your “subscription” is active. Even the stuff you had while you were paying.
BTW I’m not throwing my old magazines away. I won’t have the space, but a friend is taking it all. If they wouldn’t, I’d give them to a library or let someone take them. The online and streaming stuff of today and tomorrow? In 30 years it’ll be gone, forgotten and inaccessible.
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There is an advantage to the “new” model - when you subscribe, you retroactively get access to all past content as well.
Obviously for a newspaper or similar time-sensitive content this is not a very useful feature, but for other media/services it can be worth the trade-off of losing access after your subscription ends.
That’s not really true anymore either. Now e.g. the streaming video services keep removing stuff all the time, and shift focus to producing new stuff. Their intent is to keep you subbed for the new content.
But even so, the limitations before was natural. You can’t ship a truck of magazines to everyone every month. You could still access old issues in a library tho. Cable TV couldn’t have everything all the time, but reruns and niche channels kept trying to fill the blanks.
Now the limitations are purely artificial. “You can only access what we say you can. Shut up and consume.”
haha… no, not really. not in most cases anyway. In a lot of cases you are forced to update to the newer app that has “an improved user experience” which usually means it got nerfed
Kind of similar to how people gradually stopped using the phrase “social network” (implying the main point of these sites was to connect with other human beings) and shifted to calling it “social media” (implying the main point is to passively consume content).
Just think customer vs. consumer.
Granted, I think there is an important distinction between the two. I’d call stuff like Discord and Snapchat “social media”, in they’re mediums with “Web 2.0” socialisation elements, but not Facebook/Twitter/Friends Reunited sorts of things like “social networks” tend to be.
Social media is just a broader catch-all. If you look at literature actually studying these things, distinctions are made between SNSs - Social Networking Sites - and other forms of social media.
SNSs are a subset of social media sites that usually involve mutual follows. Think Facebook or LinkedIn. Those are the sorts of sites that are based around social networking. But the majority of the social web is not made up of SNSs, and networks are much looser or even poorly defined on the rest of the social web, so it’s difficult to call it “social networking”.
Exactly, and that’s a very, very, very bad thing. We all signed up for social networks on the promise they’d help us make new friends and stay in touch with our old ones. Now, ten years later, we’re walled off into lonely bubbles being fed ads and propaganda in between posts from strangers we didn’t even chose to follow, but some algorithm decided we should see posts from anyways.
If social media had looked the way it does now when it’d first been invented, no one would have ever signed up for it. Instead, we were frogs in a boiling pot.
And on YouTube subscribing means: “We’ll probably show you some videos from this channel every now and then. If you don’t click on those videos, we’ll think you don’t like that channel anymore, but forgot to unsubscribe, so we’ll just stop showing those videos. Actually, we might just stop any time if we don’t like that channel. It’s pretty random TBH.”
Meanwhile, it will insist on showing you awful recommendations from channels you have never watched no matter how long you ignore them or how many times you click “not interested”.
What you’re describing is the home page, not the subscription page. If you want to see content from your subscriptions, go to your subscription page. I prefer my home page to be a mix of things I know and things I don’t know. Found tons of interesting content that way.
Yeah, the subscription page totally works. No problems there… Although some people claim that YT has removed some subcriptions without consent. Never happened to me though, so I don’t know if it’s actually true or not.
One of the reasons I don’t even bother with a Youtube account and instead track my subscriptions with Invidious.
Hmm… I don’t think this has been my experience. My subscriptions page on YouTube has always shown all the new videos from all of my subscriptions. It’s recently changed to also include “shorts” which I hate, but they’re all there whether I’ve watched any of their content or not.
Home page is a different story, but I don’t really scroll there. I always go straight to subs.
I don’t know for sure, I’m not an avid watcher, but I’ve seen several pretty big channels talk about this in their videos and ask people to check their subscription because it does apparently happen.
Correct. Home page is a complete disaster, while the subscription page works the way it should.
Another thing about subscriptions now is the part about “saving money.” It used to be that you got a real discount on magazines if you subscribed to them. The idea was to pay more up front now but pay less money per issue. Online subscriptions try to convince the consumer that it’s cheaper to subscribe to a streaming, gaming, or e-book service because you have the entire catalog at your disposal. The problem is that you’re not really saving any money. You won’t be interested in using the entire catalog, only a few items from the catalog. I’m not going to read all the terrible books on KindleUnlimited, for example. This is also a flat-out lie. Items get removed from the catalog all the time. Netflix, KindleUnlimited, Xbox, et. al. don’t keep things there indefinitely. It’s also important to consider how things you might want to use are not in the catalog, so you’d have to pay the subscription fee plus buy an item that isn’t in the catalog. In the end, it’s all more money for the company and less money for the consumer to save.
💀
The idea of products “as a Service” has really taken off in the business world, and that really should be all you need to know about it. If the “short-term-profit-damn-the-long-term” crowd likes it, I’m gonna start off assuming it’s bad.
GOG and piracy for video games
Linux and open source software for computers
piracy for everything else until/unless things change
This is why Homer’s dad was yelling at the cloud
Yes that’s me
You should post this in the memes community, it’s great!
Ok I did, but I’m shy so if if it won’t do well, I’ll blame you :p
Ahaha oh yay!!! I’m gonna pop over and give it a like right now 🥰
Edit: Well you definitely didn’t need my help 😆🎉
🤘
Reading this reminded me of the pc magazine I used to buy when I was in middle school, it always had interesting articles and it came with a CD full of free games and software! Oh, the nostalgia.
Now, granted. You’d only get one magazine a month. Not a whole library of movies or games or comic books.
I feel like it didn’t matter as much back then, games used to last longer, we’d replay them a lot and it was common to share them around with your friends. Nowadays a lot of people just rush to finish a game (without really enjoying it) so they can go to the next one. It’s a pseudo-job.
BTW I’m not throwing my old magazines away. I won’t have the space, but a friend is taking it all. If they wouldn’t, I’d give them to a library or let someone take them.
Even if no one wants them, there’s always the option of giving them to the Internet Archive.
Thankfully Humble Choice exists and is the older idea of a subscription, which is why I keep it active even in the crummier months.
So true
