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I've used most available services, but discontinued one after another along with promises that a better user experience will be provided with reduced content and removed functionality with the slight price hike. YouTube was my first and last video service I paid for, only Spotify remains on the borderline.
I do not understand the position where companies first provide a good service and and than later reduces the experience and functionality. YouTube especially, when they are providing a platform but not the content.
Their AI would easily see that I more or less gave them free money since I wasn't a high consumer putting any load on their data centers. I paid to remove the worst ads around to just see a few trailers and videos for the kids.
Twitter has taught us that the vast majority, once committed to a platform, will tolerate endless abuse and never leave. So companies treat you real nice to get you in the door so they can piss all over you later.
Do a search for "embrace extend extinguish" to learn more.
EEE is not really about that, this is more enshittification.
EEE and enshittification are very related concepts. The extinguish phase of EEE usually goes hand in hand with enshittification as once you've extinguished the competition you're free to cut costs and enjoy a monopoly. Cutting costs leads to enshittification.
Related in the sense that they're both common techniques in capitalism. You can use one without the other just fine. EEE can only be applied by market leaders, enshittification hits all (public) companies on the capitalist market.
Huh?
EEE is about a big company acting like they're helping a smaller company/organization, but they have the goal of taking full monopolistic control over the market. Enshittification is companies using loss leader products to create lock-in, and then slowly making the product worse to squeeze money out of all parties until the company's product crashes and fades into irrelevancy.
I don't have numbers to offer but the initial pricing may have been losing them money. Some big companies will offer a service at a loss to get more customers to bite, then when the price hikes hit many of the customers will be used to the service and just sign up for the hike.
This is the norm for the "X as a service" market. Since it's a recurring revenue stream you can offer your "product" below cost to entice people since they're going to have to keep paying up to continue using it. Then once you've hooked enough people you can dial up the pricing and dial down the costs/features. Fuck everything about this. I want to pay once and own for life.
"Cloud" based services I genuinely understand the need for a recurring service model. They are paying for hosting of infrastructure on a recurring basis and a one time fee wouldn't cover that.
Generally, though. I agree. If I'm running the software locally, I want to own my license fully.
The problem is that they keep making stuff that was formerly a purchase (download, physical copy, run locally, etc) into unnecessary cloud services just to justify the transition to "X as a service". I want to download it and keep it on my home server, not pay a recurring fee to access the same file over and over from a server.
Yeah. That's a different problem. 😁
I was more referring to the idea that subscriptions themselves are the problem.
I'm also ok with subscription prices increasing over time as costs increase. But I completely agree with removing services being a bad thing.