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Remember when the internet was prviate, anonymous, cool, and had more than three websites?
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.
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.
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.
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!
this post is 100% right, anyway stop buying phones, you don’t need them.
I wish to go even further.
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
Did TikTok just stop working in the browser completely? I won’t download the app, but my family sometimes send me links to it and the videos never load anymore. I thought it was my VPN.
You usually have to remove anything after the numbers and “?”, that should allow you to play it in the browser.
Seems to be so, it hasn’t worked for me in sometime.
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
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.
lesbian-moon-gf is a goddess of curmudgeonry and I am now her high priestess
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”
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
Self host on your desktop or laptop. Freedom is yours in FOSS.
I really don’t mind trading my money for value I receive. It doesn’t offend me.
As someone who has run businesses himself, I like being part of an economy where I can buy and sell things.
I don’t resent other people pirating stuff, and I don’t resent free services. I don’t mind donation-supported services. And I don’t mind paid services.
I guess it’s just who I am. I don’t really mind any kind of consensual economic arrangement people choose to form. Economic cooperation is economic cooperation.
I think it’s more of a “give a mouse a cookie” problem. Paying for software i use had never been an issue for me unless the fee is insane eg Photoshop or something of the sorts. Subscriptions are fine as well but we all know the price will go up and the feature load won’t or it might actually get worse. It’s not just as simple as i use it therefore i pay for it.
The problem is it becomes coercive the moment dishonest wording by marketing and the actual product is observed.
I don’t mind paying, but since I’ve set up jellyfin and the arr stack I’m getting a better service than anything you can actually buy.
I don’t want to flick between a dozen apps to see which sliver of content they’ve allowed me to view.
If subscribing and paying for services actually guaranteed ad-free, useful and complete experiences, then yes I would gladly pay. When iTunes made buying songs for a dollar easy, I paid hundreds of dollars for them, because it gave me exactly what I wanted at a fair price.
Now, when you sign up for a service, you’re still getting ads, you’re still getting paywalls around the movies and shows you really want to watch, you’re still getting your data mined and sold. You’re still paying more than you would have paid for premium, ad-free cable TV back in the old days.
It’s useless. I want to pay for good experiences and services, but they ain’t offering it.
