this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I think the problem is the idea of subscription services themselves which has caused companies to become adversaries to the customers rather than partners.
When you pay a one-time fee for an item or service, it's in that business's interest to make you feel valued as a customer, to bring you good so that you are likely to pay one-time fees again in the future.
With a recurring fee model, it's in the business's interest to make you use their service less while still paying, because if you use it too much they lose money, and if they price it according to how the power users use it then it won't be a competitive deal.
Example: when you get flights costing $200 per domestic trip, the airline wants to make you feel not terrible for choosing them. But if instead of that you paid $1000 a month to fly domestically "as often as you want", they will degrade the experience so that you wouldn't even want to fly more than 5 times per month, like duct tape you to your seat if they were allowed to, or put restrictions like "only to these cities" or "only on our 3am flights" or "only on trips less than x days or longer than y days".
No matter the industry, the whole premise of the RR model is to trick you into pretending you still have whatever original value of service, while screwing you in every possible way just short of the point that causes you to cancel. That makes them the most money.
I used to pirate because I was a broke kid. Now I have money (not as much as Rossman and no money for these subscriptions) but I too need to find value when I give this money I earned to someone who makes a thing. As Rossman said, if you're tinkering to get the thing you paid for, at that point you might as well tinker and not pay for it.
P.S.: Rossman is aware his whole shtick is "angry man yells at cloud while sometimes petting cat". I get many people don't like it. Don't watch it then. Odysee is just Rossman's spare platform in case YouTube doesn't like him anymore for whatever reason. Yes it's full of loonies (and you can call Rossman one too if you want) but just don't give them your attention.
I think you're spot on. It fits right in to the whole "enshittification" topic that Doctorow wrote about. Everyone started using streaming services like Netflix because it offered such a great user experience; now that they have the user base, unfortunately we are now at the point where Netflix has every motivation to make the platform as shitty as possible to milk as much money from their users as they can.