Learned the term recently and really enjoy it, subscription fatigue is the feeling we all have had now where we are just over how everything is subscription based.
Which one was the last straw or most annoying/frustrating to you?
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Disney
When my paid Paramount+ subscription included unskippable ads.
What’s the point of paying for a subscription if you still get ads 🤷🏻
Marvelous strategy model.
Luckily I did the 6 month free trial and learned. 6 months is generous, ads are not.
I loathe the trend where I pay money and they still expect me to sit through ads. That’s why we all left cable to start with.
What’ll really aggravate you is that way back when cable was first rolling out, it was billed as paid TV service without ads (as opposed to the ad-supported OTA local networks). Obviously that promise didn’t last long.
It’s a tale as old as time. Its happened before, it’s happening now, and it’ll happen again.
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That’s why people switched to cable to start with. Broadcast TV had ads and cable didn’t.
People have depressingly short memories and a depressingly long patience for megacorporate thievery.
Ads on cable channels first happened in 1971. I doubt most people on here were born yet then.
by the time I had my own money I didn’t even think of getting pay tv because it was already running more ads than free to air.
Never had subscription fatigue because paid services have never been better than the free option in my experience.
I’m still refusing to pay for P+ in the UK. They nicked us about so much with Discovery, Picard and Lower Decks all being on Netflix and Amazon, then started pulling the rug from under us with Dis S3 and it appears maybe LD S4 this year. I’m not paying for a whole new service for one franchise no matter how much I love it. At least Disney got Marvel, Star Wars and all the Fox content before trying D+.
Imagine how we feel over here in NZ when we wanted to watch S2E1 of GH we actually got S1E3 of DOOL instead! Boy when the NPD were told about this I bet they ASAP’d their pants!
I hate acronyms.
Yeah it’s such a shameless cash grab, I know corporations mug us off every day but it’s disrespectful when they’re so desperate about it.
Even worse when it’s regarding Trek, a franchise that’s always been critical of capitalism.
I still haven’t forgiven Paramount+ for making me watch that train wreck of a Halo show.
Nobody made you watch that but you lol.
They tricked me! They said it was about Halo! I had no clue!
Man I’ve been having subscription fatigue since the first time I bought an RuneScape membership in 2004.
Pro-tip if you’re sick of paying for streaming: Stremio (app–I run on NVIDIA Shield) + Torrentio. Totally free and will have everything you ever need. For a few dollars, Real-Debrid adds more/faster stream options, but it’s purely optional/nice-to-have.
I would counter-argue for Jellyfin + Radarr-suite. I just like better Jellyfin’s interface.
I’ve seen it mentioned, but never tried it. I’ll have to read up on it, thanks!
Both options are valid, I use Plex instead, but selfhosting people need to understand that there is beauty on the streaming route, pirate streaming route.
Honestly, the streaming way is less bothersome and with almost immediate results, so there’s a lot of beauty in it.
I am a picky bastard so I want to make sure I’ll be able to watch everything in 4K, without waits nor interruptions. Plus I watch a lot of old stuff that takes a while to get: American Gothic took me 6 months to get, I tried getting the DVD set first but realized the latter episodes weren’t included.
Evernote. I’m not sure why I even stayed with them for so long; probably the pain of moving after so many years. Switched to Joplin before they doubled their fees for zero new (useful) features.
Yeah, I dropped EN years ago, when they doubled (at the time) the fees after acquiring Skitch. I floated around trying to make other things work, then found Joplin in the past year or so. Haven’t looked back.
Have you heard of our Lord and Savior, obsidian?
Tell me more!
Alarm clock apps that require a subscription. Basically any app that doesn’t require backend server infrastructure to function should not be subscription based.
There are alarm clock apps requiring a subscription now? Good heavens.
This might be a cop-out, but I’m absolutely sick of paying rent, and the open source alternatives aren’t great
Subscribing to a worthless landlord eats up 50% of my meager income every month.
can’t you pirate it? (make it your own and become independent from your providers?) Even if sacrificing a couple of features.
tent not rent!
Too real where I live.
i dont know whether to upvote in solidarity, or downvote because it’s wrong.
You wouldn’t download a car, would you?
Netflix, and when they said I’d have to pay for password sharing for my stepkids, because they use my account when they’re at their dad’s.
That was the last straw. I cracked the shits, bought a couple of ex-enterprise servers, and setup … something different. I then cancelled all streaming services (I got wind of the second Disney hike coming).
The cool thing is they now email me with cheap rejoin offers, telling me about all the cool shows I need to be aware of. ;)
How are your kids coping with, uh, something different? I imagine it’s a tad less convenient, even with your server. Also, I haven’t done something different since the rise of Netflix. Is the quality of something different generally higher with streaming services just putting their content on the internet themselves?
I self host my stuff with Plex and it’s really not any less convenient than Netflix or whatever else.
Yep, my son put together a machine to use as a PLEX server & I log in and watch things from across town. It works perfectly fine.
It doesn’t compress video more on mobile devices, that’s all I need to know. When I connect an iPad or iPhone to the home cinema setup, the compression is much worse then on an old laptop.
I admit, last time I tried something different years ago, it wasn’t that good, but thought I’d give it another go. I’d bought a lifetime pass way back, so had nothing to lose by trying.
The kids are coping fine - the apps for something different are all pretty rock-solid now - macOS, iOS, Android, Chromecast GTV. Plus I’m on a decent fibre internet connection, so even full high quality things work just fine when they’re not at home. Honestly, there’s not a lot of difference, except my catalogue of things is better than any single service.
Plus I take requests. :D Actually, I allow automated processing of requests, within certain limits.
How do you process the automated requests? That’s my dream for my little slice of things.
There’s an *arr app that oversees requests.
Arrr! I be hearin’ tales of the five hearties of the Dutchman, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, prowlarr, and the most feared scallywag of 'em all: overseer!
These look like my kind of pirates, thanks!
Why tf are you guys talking in code
Lol - why do you care? If you know, you know. Right?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Arrrrrrr.
🏴☠️
No one cares if you pirate…what are they gonna do, track your lemmy account?
Lemmy is banning sea faring communities.
Edit: lemmy.world to be specific
lemmy.world is, not others
You mean lemmy.world? Nowhere else bans it to my knowledge. Pretty sure Lemmy itself doesn’t and can’t ban anything.
Mine are handling oit perfectly fine - and we have the added difficulty of having German as mother tongue, and wanting to keep the English language content in the kids library low. Finding german language torrents is rather tricky.
I’m a native English speaker so take this with a grain of salt.
Usernet? If memory holds there are a few German language indexers.
I started again since a year or so. And decided to set up a home server (from an old pc) with the whole *arr suite this summer. Automation these days really is marvelous. You just tell it once which show you want to watch. It fetches you all the shows that are already out and also fetches you each new episode every week. And it’s all in good quality. And you can set automatic subtitles straight from the app’s interface.
If you have kids, the PBS Kids video app is pretty alright. And free (in the US of course)
I feel like I’ve avoided subscriptions for the most part, except for basics like rent, energy, telephony, a travel card. The software I use is mostly open-source (some of which I voluntary support on a monthly basis). I don’t need paid streaming because public TV streaming is good enough for shows/movies and YouTube with ad-block is good enough for music. I don’t game.
Energy and telephony are at least actual services that someone is actually performing.
I don’t subscribe to anything because they’re all scams.
Not subscription, but the first service I thought “wtf is this money-making model?” was Plants vs Zombies 2. The game wasn’t that good. And, oh, my most recent guilty pleasure is Monopoly Go; it’s entertainingly boring?
Apart from that, I’ve tried to keep subscriptions that I really like or use constantly:
UberPassUber One (mainly for when depression hits)- Deezer (just because I get 20% discount)
- Kagi (first month atm, but it has a minimum % of trash results)
never heard of uberpass, is it like free food delivery?
Correction: The service I referred to was renamed to Ober One.
Kinda. Basically you pay for occasional coupons and credits on UberEats, and a (5%) discount for every Uber ride.
For 70 MNX (~3.5 USD) a month there is no delivery fee on anything you order. It’s obvious their business model is to charge an obscene fee to then roll out a “better” option. But hey, it’s been convenient nonetheless.
I end up ordering from the same few places when I’m on my lowest, so their system usually gives me 100-200 MXN (~5-10 USD) discounts on those specific restaurants. The subtotal almost never exceeds 600 MXN (~30 USD).
Succinctly, it’s not free free. It’s a 5% discount on Uber rides, and a variable 15-30% discount for two orders a month.
For me, this beat saber knockoff game called “supernatural” which was advertised as free on the oculus app store. Not a one time purchase. Literal lunacy.
It started with the Netflix enshittification. I have had a Spotify and Netflix account essentially since these services were available, and that was great. Now only the Spotify sub is worth it, though I started to loathe that one as well because it at some point deleted all my local files or replaced them with what it thought matched them in their database.
Also every fucking app, no matter how mundane, wants to sell me a subscription. I have a web based game boy emulator on my phone, it works fine but everything beyond the absolute basic functions is paywalled behind a subscription. Not even a one time purchase.
Enshittification didn’t kill Netflix. What killed it was all the studios pulling their content licenses so they could start their own Netflix. Enshittification happened afterwards as Netflix desperately tried to make itself constantly profitable. They killed a lot of good shows and messed with the algorithm that showed people what they actually wanted to see.
I know what happened, I was there… Guess I should have used a different term for all the content being in one place for a good price shifting to being in a dozen places for exorbitant prices each than enshittification.
I’m torn between feeling bad for Netflix because they tried to do something cool and got the rug pulled out from under them as soon as it started to work, and mad at them for fucking up their algorithm and studio so badly
If it requires a subscription, it doesn’t exist.
That attitude has served me well. So far, at least.
I don’t do mail though, I know some do and are successful but mail is too important for me (and everyone subjected to my technical whims) to fuck it up.
I meant software and media. With mail, somebody’s running a server and policing spammers, which costs time and money.
Bro. RetroArch, gambatte or MGBA core. Thank me later.
This
if you truly need something web based, eclipse is completely free.
My mobile plan. The standard is signing for 24 months. I can’t really choose a plan that suits me, they stick virtually unlimited calls (which I barely use), and add mobile data that I can’t use up either. Settling for less barely reduces my bill if at all for whatever reason. On top of this, despite me signing for a set fixed amount to pay, they decide to “index” an extra 10-15% every year due to “unforseen circumstances” like inflation. And every time I sign a new contract I get an extra 10% on top of my bill for the same features I don’t use. Oh and they add a “happy call” where the call signal sounds like a piercing annoying very low quality melody, despite me denying the service. Switching to another telecom doesn’t really remedy the problem, the other two on the market here seem worse than mine in every respect.
Looking at the prepaid features, we’re looking at a 40-50% reduction in monthly fees, just paying for what I use, whenever I want to use it. It’s needlessly annoying switching from a subscription to a prepaid plan. You’d have to switch telecoms for a month and switch back to the one you like the most if you want to keep your number.
So yeah, as soon as my contract expires, I’m done with renewing. I’m sick of this.
Weather apps.
Official NOAA app is $1.99 a year. Worth every penny. Only subscription I’m happy to pay.
While many weather apps use published NOAA/NWS data, there’s no official app. Not sure who you’re paying lol
I use Weawow. Free, no ads, Aurora reports no trackers.
Wunderground FTW! It also lets me tap into my local home weather station, as well as those of my nearby neighbors and the weather forecasting is far superior to whatever the hell came with my phone.
Wunderground was awesome until IBM bought it
They’re one of my exceptions. The API/data needed for weather apps to function is not free (at least in the US), with the possible exception of NOAA, though I’m not sure if they offer an API for apps to use.
That’s why the developers have to pass the cost on. If you’ve got a free weather app, you’re probably paying for it with ad views. I’m personally not interested in doing that, so I chose an app I liked that lets me choose which source I want to use and customise the display.
Another thing I have a subscription for is a flight tracker. Operating ADS-B receivers is also not free, nor is additional data some apps get about delays and the like.
I also have a WoW subscription because servers are an ongoing cost (not factoring in continual development and new features even within a single expansion) but won’t keep paying for single player games. My purchase should cover development costs and the cost of fixing bugs.
Other stuff? Nope. I’ll spend a few dollars for useful utilities, but everything seems to be free with in-app purchases now, so most of the stuff I’ve got is grandfathered in from when you paid a reasonable fee that covered development costs and you weren’t hounded.
omg even weather apps now? 🤣😭
