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THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.
- the best advice an AI ever gave (too bad it was a fictional AI)
Except when it comes to voting. Vote, please.
Fuckin’ A on this one. Think about how much companies make with entirely artificial scarcity. You can only add 1 license to this, you can only watch on one TV unless you pay us $15 a month. It costs $200 to change where you are in the database table for this flight. Complete bullshit and we need to see it for what it is and stop it. I love how she says all that will be left in their wake is dull capitalists. Exactly. Stop playing their games. Play your game.
this post is 100% right, anyway stop buying phones, you don’t need them.
I wish to go even further.
Also work on not being such a dopamine hound. I don’t need to see new-show this year. Or this decade. I’ll see it eventually. Or never. Who cares.
Know what’s as good as music? The wind in the trees.
Not saying I’m some ascetic who doesn’t enjoy media, but when I hit a paywall or an adwall I just try to say “ok, see ya later” and move on letting that content desire slip from my mind.
This is great advice. There’s so much content to enjoy from the past 20+ years that I don’t feel the desire to immediately buy the new thing. You can usually get it for far cheaper down the line.
There are communities such as PatientGamers for videogames that preach exactly this.
Usually, but not always. Some 5-10 year old games are still north of $50. The price for some movies and TV series has gone up rather than down over the years.
Luckily, as you said there’s so much out there that as long as I don’t get too picky there’s more than enough available without paying gouged prices.
I actually got some somewhat more recent AAA games from GoG (a store which I favour because of their No-DRM rule, though there’s a handful of games were it’s “kinda”) and I literally can’t get around to them because I’m just enjoying 15 year old games or Indie title as I tend to favour open-ended games.
Why should I buy, say, “must register and log-in to Rockstar services” Red Dead Redemption from Steam if my entertainment needs are fully fulfilled already and there’s even a backlog of “bought them but haven’t got around to try them” games (including stuff like Prey) plus a bunch of Indie infinite-replayability games (like Terraria and Rimworld) which I haven’t played for long enough now that they’re fun to play again?
This is not just to illustrate the point: I’m genuinely not getting around to play something like Prey, much less buying the original God Of War (available from GoG hence DRM-free, unlike Ragnarok) because I keep just having fun from a mix of really old games and far less “graphically impressive” open-ended Indie games.
Downvotes from stimulation hounds lol.
What if someone other than me knows what baby Yoda is up to?
To repeat, I’m not saying I perfectly succeed at this.
Not being able to use every server emoji on Discord is actually a good safeguard for NSFW spamming, because when trolls have to pay to be obnoxious, they usually stop doing it.
I agree on the premise as a whole, though. Our entire lives are getting enshittified with subscription models, designed to prey on those who forget to cancel or otherwise don’t have the means or knowledge to get rid of it
lesbian-moon-gf is a goddess of curmudgeonry and I am now her high priestess
I’m so glad that after signing up, Lemmy quickly showcased to me posts about opensource/ public alternatives for the apps/websites we normally use. It brings me such a reignited passion. In time I’m gonna change my email, cloud services, OS… Everything!
Nice. I felt the same way a few years ago and changed everything over 2 years. Best decision ever (besides having a child, that was a great decision as well.)
That’s so motivating to hear because doesn’t matter how long it takes as long as it gets done :') awesome!
I’m okay with paying for Internet services if the price is right… I’m not okay with also getting milked (data mined) for profit in addition to paying.
Remember when the internet was prviate, anonymous, cool, and had more than three websites?
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Self host on your desktop or laptop. Freedom is yours in FOSS.
What’s this?
Wish I could get my dad to get this. I tell him I use an adblocker, he says why? He’s never been bothered by it. His generation grew up in a technologically inconvenient time that he now glorifies today’s streaming services, not seeing how they are enshittified. It’s sad and I wish I could get him to understand.
In fairness, this streaming world is a marvel - if you can afford it. You can, for £100 a month, have access to damn near any piece of media that’s been published over the past 100 years. If you watch ten movies in a month you’ve spent the equivalent of buying ten DVDs ten years ago. Everything beyond that is pure profit.
But if you don’t have a spare £100 a month, you can get fucked. You can spend your time feeling like you’re missing out because you can’t afford Disney+ this month, and you’re trying desperately to avoid spoilers of the tentpole show they’ve just dropped.
Our parents (generally) can afford it, and can compare it to how it used to be. Hell, I’m 44 and I still see it as an incredible feat. But it’s one I’m tired of. So I pirate the few things that have piqued my interest, and browse my friend’s well stocked Plex library for other distractions. My sole subscription is Apple Music. I could pirate music and only ever use my iPod, but there are times when I prefer the convenience of my phone.
As for the ads: I’m British, so can only speak for times I visited the US as a kid; but TV advertising has long been WAY out of control over there. Ads, opening credits, ads, part one, ads, part two, ads, closing credits, ads. It’s fucking insane. Here in the UK, if you’re not watching BBC, it’s ads, part one, ads, part two, ads. Done. So from our perspective, advertising on the internet is mad. But to older Gen X/Boomer Americans, it’s just a way of life.
If you have android you can also use Firefox to play YouTube in the background or when the screen is locked.
also with https://revanced.app
For every person with the discipline to ignore subscription based services there are hundreds who go “but I don’t get ads if I do”
We need more texts like these. Different people respond to different kinds of content/appeals. I personally very much agree with this but I think some people would reject the entire idea because they might draw their line at piracy; which can be shifted, and I think that’s why we need way more of these messages
Here’s the problem: the alternative is ads, and I don’t think the ad model is sustainable.
Of course it’s not, but the alternative is not earning as much money, and the corporations can’t tolerate that. So they’ll keep juicing us for every last penny, all the while making ‘efficiency savings’ where they can.
Fuck knows what they’ll do next to make even more money, but the CEOs will have retired by then, so it’s Someone Else’s Problem.
This is the real issue. Companies/shareholders won’t accept stable profits, so they will do anything possible to increase profits. AD-free subscriptions will be a thing of the past in the next 10 years and we will be right back to cable. Bundled subscriptions with cancellation terms and ads.
I also need to also underscore that the vast majority of profits are NOT going to the people who actually create the content, so these increases are just lining the pockets of shareholders and executives.
I am prepared to let them all burn down. I will never pay for YouTube or disable ublock origin. I’d rather have it die
the alternative: reasonable offerings and decent service
“no it couldn’t be this, it must be ads”
I have no idea what I’m even missing out on by not paying for Discord but others are happy to pay for it, so I think that’s a pretty reasonable offering. I can’t speak for the YouTube and Tiktok example though since I don’t use those.
not much, more emojis, more stickers, more file upload, more text characters in your messages, funny reactions, nothing exciting really.
Nitro sucks with how aggressive it’s advertising is, but aside from that, it’s mostly benign.
Companies make way more money shoveling ads down our throats than they ever will from subscriptions. That’s why subscriptions services end up having ads anyway… or doing things like Netflix whos offering a cheaper subscription that serves ads.
We’ll never get companies to get away from ad revenue. It too easy of a way to make money.
Its not sustainable if you want infinite growth sure.
