#subscription-based services

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[inumo]

Avoiding putting rage comics on my blog and instead posting this as text

This post is in direct response to a rage comic about hating subscription-based services, but I hate rage comics & their cultural associations so. To put it simply: yes, the rise of subscription-based services sucks. No, this does not mean you should hide in a hole and never pay for services.

Consider Twitter. We've all been hearing about how tons and tons of people have been getting laid off, resigning, or otherwise leaving Twitter's employ after Musk took over. Before that, though, Twitter was 7,500 employees all working to keep that platform alive & improving. Assuming all employees were necessary (which, having now seen how much is crumbling without them, is not an unreasonable assumption) and had even a basic software engineer's salary of $200,000, that's still $1,500,000,000 per year just going towards employee wages. How do you make 1.5 billion dollars in a year? "Advertisers" is the common choice, but now you're not making your platform for users – you're making it for advertisers. They're the income, so they get first priority, and that's how you get engagement algorithms (to keep users looking so they'll see more ads), identification algorithms (to target ads more so advertisers will pay better), etc.

So, you want to make a better platform, one that doesn't have advertisers at the heart of the machine. In fact, let's make a service that has no ads at all! But even if we (charitably) estimate that half of Twitter's employees were dedicated to improving product delivery for advertisers, you still have $750,000,000 per year being spent on salaries. How are you making 750 million dollars in a year, WITHOUT going to advertisers? If you refuse to turn users into a product, then the users must be consumers – and consumers have to pay for goods and services.

So, what's my point here? I'm not here to say every change in software from ownership to licensing is good – it sucks for a lot of reasons, namely that you cannot count on an unchanging product to be always available between DRM and server dependencies. I'm not here to say you should pay for every goddamn service ever, because let's be real not every service is worth your money. Hell, I'm not even saying you should pay for corporate services (which includes Tumblr; the blue checkmarks are a funny bit, but spending $100 to support a "small" company that was valued at $7,500,000,000 in 2021 is losing the plot). I'm saying that with so much in development costs, you should be expecting to pay for products, and you should expect to pay for them regularly if you want to use them. This is the new normal, produced by a mix of unequal rising development costs compared to consumer willingness to pay, the capitalist drive for infinite shareholder profit demanding more out of an ever-plateauing capacity to make money, and the simple fact that a large number of the digital products people use today require some form of active maintenance (even if that's just keeping a server online somewhere so the product can function while your computer is off).

TL;DR subscription-based services have become a necessary part of the tech ecosystem to support the ever-increasing demands of late-stage capitalism & profit. They are a feature of the online "lifestyle" we have today where people don't have to know how to run their own web servers, make their own software, or moderate their own digital spaces. If you object to the beneficiaries of these subscriptions & disagree with their profit motive, consider joining Cohost or a Mastodon instance where the requests to get paid are directly tied to the continued support of the platform. If you object to the lifestyle, well, it's not too late to learn how to make & run your own website; I hear webrings are coming back in style...