This question just came to me while I was buying a subway pass. It’s priced very well, provides a very good service, doesn’t suffer from enshittification, and its price increases very rarely.
What are some other services which people don’t mind subscribing to?
Most software with a subscription has some kind of backend resource that is being consumed, even if that’s not obvious to the user. The software companies are getting rich too of course, so yeah it should cost less.
Some services, like social media, require backend resources and there’s no way around it.
Others, dare I say most, are backend by the company’s choice and usually to the detriment of the user.
Some require backend resources purely for DRM and so that they can pull the plug on it whenever they please and screw over everyone who paid for it. Like most single player games these days. Or as a means of holding your in game items hostage to get more money out of you (Pokemon Home comes to mind).
Updates alone have no way to happen solely on the local machine. There are many reasons why using someone else’s computer would be required, which have nothing to do with social media. Just off the top of my head:
And a lot more I can’t think of right now. Most of this shit makes me want to vomit in my mouth. I’d much rather spend my time and money sourcing, building, and configuring my own hardware and running everything locally. But that’s just because I’m an idealistic nerd with an uncompromising bent towards digital liberty - most users and softwares are not built for that.
No, but it wouldn’t need to cost the original vendor that much backend resources either if they’re willing to relinquish control of it. There’s a reason most Linux distros would rather you use the torrent than their hosted images, and package managers allow you to add any mirror you want and for anyone to spin up a mirror. Something like IPFS (or BitTorrent) would be a great fit for software updates, because it doesn’t matter where the file comes from, as long as it’s the same file.
Updates are expensive for the vendor because they insist on their servers being the only place you can get them from.
I’d be more accepting of this if it wasn’t for the fact that they increasingly don’t even let you try to run it on your own hardware. Taking an hour or even overnight to process a video might not be ideal, but there are still countless use cases where that’s acceptable and worth the security of not sending your data to the cloud.
Antivirus is an antipattern and the need for it is usually a symptom of the OS architecture/permission control model being hopelessly vulnrable. An ideal system would be zero trust and some random piece of code wouldn’t be able to do anything truly harmful to begin with. You can still social engineer the user into giving a malicious program trust, but you can social engineer them into whitelisting it in their antivirus too.
Certificates don’t need that much backend resources and can be decentralized in the same way as updates, taking load off the original vendor.
Licensing is a circular argument. I’m paying for you to maintain the system that determines if I paid or not?
Yeah that’s not a “feature” most people appreciate. At best they accept it as inevetable because they can’t turn it off.
Also, if a company tries using that as justification for their subscription model, they can go fuck themselves.
If it has to do with the legal system or government, then it should be covered by the ultimate subscription model: taxes. I shouldn’t have to cover a company’s costs of filing things with the government when I already pay the government.