Comment by apsurd
18 hours ago
Heard it here on HN: problem is paying a subscription is purely additive. eventually, inevitably, they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads, etc.
it being against what your payment contract states just means they’ll reinvent and rename the tiers.
> they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads
Streaming services claiming prior art here.
I just remembered there’s a black mirror episode about this. The paid subscription evolution by a “health tech” startup let’s say.
I won’t give away the plot, but it’s so realistically absurd it’s sad, hilarious and terrifying all at once.
For those who might want to watch it, the episode is called "Common People", and it's a pretty brutal one.
I was just watching that episode literally now and had to nope out of it halfway through because it was making me sick to my stomach.
Sounds like my Amazon Prime subscription - now with more Ads.
Too young to remember cable TV?
cable TV would like to have a word with you :)
Pray they don’t change the terms a second time.
From what I can tell, that's already the case for these subscriptions. They give you some extra stuff but you're still getting ads, and they are still collecting your data
If you don't pay for a product, you are a less valuable product than if you'd pay for the product.
Eh, and Microsoft has shown that even if you pay they will still fuck with the product and . make it worse
Yeah this is the worst, never pay for something that has ads. It's teaching these companies it's ok.
It seems like there's no solution, then: companies will always chase the next dollar that allows them to exceed growth expectations on the earnings call. It seems like no matter what, anti-user behavior in pursuit of profit is inevitable.
Is there a solution to this?
The golden age of the internet was when it was an enthusiast's space. It is now almost entirely a corporate space, where the remaining enthusiasts' content is scraped 100K times a day and sold without attribution by the corporates.
The fediverse is a step in the right direction, and Meta charging may create another wave of converts there. It has a lot of growth pains to endure yet, but the ability to painlessly spin up your own instance could be very attractive to young people looking for their own non-corporate spaces on the internet.
We may also see some renewal via large companies (Meta in particular) imploding, from mismanagement and disenchanted users. My experience marketing a new product is that online advertising is completely ineffective now the web is filled with slop, no matter how well targeted it is. We've recently pivoted to optimise for word-of-mouth with orders of magnitude better results. I think any adtech company without a solid alternative profit stream is in for a rough ride (and no, AI is not a solid profit stream for anyone but Nvidia).
well Apple is stated as an easy counter example. They charge money for premium hardware and software. everything else is downstream. So while they could squeeze at every possible opportunity, they are less incentivized to abuse the relationship because their core proposition is: you pay money for our premium hardware and software.
it’s imperfect but contrasts this with the modern approach of grow at all costs, light money on fire and punt entirely on how to ever make money. it usually doesn’t end well for customers.
Which sadly appears to not even be holding for them now that they decided to start displaying ads on their App Store.
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This is just a copy of the YouTube model, to your point. It's not that you're going to get a premier experience. It's that you'll be spared from full enshittification. Only tech bros could possibly think making the default subscription level so bad that it would drive revenue. But here we are.