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
Edit: syntax
What is ad guard him?
AdGuard Home, it’s a DNS level ad blocker similar to PiHole
Excuse me, but it’s “they/them”.
Cups of coffee money is what donations for FOSS devs is for.
Piracy is wrong and immoral! You should never use mullvad or proton with port forwarding off to pirate things!
I love the two sides of “It’s about the price of a cup of coffee” like they’re not referring to a 30oz premium milkshake with a shot of espresso, not a regular black coffee.
Then the
“Your generation can’t afford anything because of your coffee addiction!”
Like companies aren’t just monetizing every single last thing and telling us “you’ll own nothing and you’ll LIKE IT!”
Also the price of a coffee has gone up considerably in the last couple years
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.
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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Laughs in having my own Jellyfin media server and ad blockers for YouTube as well as using my server for file backups as well
laughs in 7 TB of media actively archived
just installed two 18TB drives, currently working on mirroring and swapping over to new drive sets. It’s a pain because i have limited sata, and need to do hotswaps unless i want to take EVERYTHING down.
It’s worth it though, wouldn’t catch me saying otherwise.
How… Uh… Would one get some of your media files…? Do we do like in the old days and do USB drop off sites mixed with geocaching?
Know me IRL. One of these days i do intend on properly preserving a lot of the content i host somewhere, that’s going to be an ordeal though. Most of it is YT content currently, considering it’s mostly what i consume that shouldn’t be a huge shocker.
Really though, if anything, just start your own archive and keep building it. Tailor it to your personal tastes and worry about it from there.
Spotify makes sense to have based on pure convenience. NSO is alright, but if you already emulate, there’s not much point in NSO due to Switch online multiplayer being ass. Paying for Adobe is amateur hour. Dropbox? Don’t make me laugh. Twitter blue is just sad.
It feels wrong paying for Spotify knowing the artists get jack shit. Why bother
if you want to support your favorite artist go to their concert, buy their album/merch.
I personally don’t care about any of that, personally I just want convenient music in one place, if there wasn’t spotify, there would just be some pirated service where artists would earn nothing. or Radio where there is no exposure for lesser artists.
so really I am not sure what kind of better solution you could come up with.
Join the dark side and buy music outright. Much better for the artists.
Or do both. Cost of Spotify is the cost of one album a month.
Exactly. One album a month and BAM you own 120 albums after a decade, and a huge collection when you’re old
I think Strato HiDrive offers a better price per gigabyte AAAND you can add support for SMB and FTP clients at low additional costs. Barely any cloud storage provider offers this one.
And they wonder why tides of the high seas is on the rise again.
pats SSD full of MP3s
FLAC! Long live songs you can actually own! Long live open source audio format!
That’s why bandcamp is one of the few places I’ll willingly spend money on digital media. DRM-free downloading in flac format? Yes please.
twitter is the most embarrassing one on here by a thousand miles
Especially considering most Twitter bluechecks today are bot accounts doing chatgpt responses
Netflix and Spotify actually makes sense to be subscription based. Amazon depends on how often you do shopping through them since it’s actually free (if you don’t include the fees) to function. I definitely wouldn’t pay for Dropbox but cloud storage and sync pretty much has to be a monthly subscription. If you are going to be against something at least be against to the parts that makes sense to be against of.
Life worked perfectly fine before Netflix and Spotify, everything was also fine before cloud everything.
They can suck on my left nut.
Yes, and life still works fine without them…nobody is forcing you to subscribe to Netflix. Keep paying your monthly cable subscription like the old days.
I ain’t got no cable, last time we had cable i watched for 2 weeks and after that everything was just repeating what i had already seen in those 2 weeks and loads of nonsense shows.
I prefer doing things, like learning new skills or doing something active.
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.
Yes, a cup of coffee every 5 minutes
The only thing I pay for is Crunchyroll. As for me it’s worth it as I get tons of stuff the watch for £5 a month and it’s also pretty easy to rip anything exclusive. And then I don’t feel like I’m giving nothing back to Japan when I pirate anything they don’t have I want.
I also pay for a VPS, but I’d say that’s renting more then it is a subscription.
