I don’t have Peacock but I’m hanging out at my parents house and apparently when you pay for Peacock you have to watch ads at the beginning and end of shows PLUS every time you pause.
Every single time they paused it transitioned to an ad. What psychopaths run NBC?
Where do you stand on indie artists that are using Patreon to act like major studios, e.g. nothing is free and their work is limited release and deleted after the month?
I find it harder to be upset about what an artist does with their work because they’re the sole creator and didn’t exploit anyone to make it. The limited release stuff doesn’t sound great but none of the artists I follow do that, I certainly wouldn’t support them if they did. If they’re planning to never release the art ever again then I think there’s a fair argument to be made for piracy, although if you’re just waiting for the month to turn over to look at it guilt free, well, I think you’re just trying to justify it to yourself.
I’ve seen a few that delete their stuff after the month and never release it again. IIRC, at least one of them was making relatively huge cash per month and only ever released cropped previews publicly, so that one was definitely what I’d call predatory, but that is just the most extreme case I’ve seen. I hate that false scarcity works so well.
I’ve seen a few different methods. Scrubbed Patreon profiles, archives with passwords that change every month and aren’t redistributed, etc. I’ve run into several artists who do this.
I’m gonna go pay for that silly looking onyx the fortuitous film just so he gets my money for doing something different and helping other people make a dollar
I mean, I know capitalism pursues money to the death, even when it’s no longer needed or when it’s already perfectly fulfilling a market share. But the greed still staggers me every time.
It wouldn’t be so bad if Bezos and the top people took 99% but there’s literally no reason to make him a trillionare.
I mainly play on PC where thankfully I don’t have to worry about that.
But I also have a Nintendo switch, and get this shit… they don’t even let you back up your save games online. we’re talking about fucking kilobytes of data per game that they’re too stingy to provide.
You can’t even back up game saves to the microSD!
If your switch breaks, is stolen, or you just get a new one, you lose your game saves unless you pay for Nintendo online.
Only selected few games had that on PS2. Games were largely SP on top of that. It wasn’t default free, it was a fee except for few exceptions.
Never owned PS3 so no comment on that.
BUT, my original question is still applicable. The past you speak of wasn’t common and not something that’s agreed to be the “good old days” so to speak.
Not saying what you peddle wouldn’t be great, it would, but your statement simply isn’t accurate.
I just got charged $165 a couple days ago from two yearly subscriptions I totally forgot I had. We need a better solution. The banks should just implement the usage of Virtual Cards like Privacy.com does. It’d be so much more convent for people to cancel subscriptions, if they’re allowed to have multiple different virtual cards that they can easily toggle on or off.
They get a cut of every transaction, and the more debt you accrue, the more money the bank makes if you carry a balance. They are financially disincentivized from protecting you from your spending.
It seems people think otherwise according to down-votes. Not that I care about those but am finding it incredibly humorous there are people who think bank is your friend. Lol.
Most subscriptions can be canceled with a few clicks, usually right after buying it without loosing the paid for time. If you cant manage your subscriptions, that sounds like a problem you should address yourself instead.
Your suggested solution of simply turning off the credit card the subscription is linked to doesn’t cancel said subscription, it just results in a breach of contract from your side. That only works cause most companies can’t be asked to deal with you, otherwise the subscriptions would continue and the incurring cost would sooner or later be sent to a collecting agency, with additional charges for late payments.
You are right. The fact that cashless transactions are built on a pull model, where a shop/service is charging you instead of you being the one who sends the money, is absolutely fucking insane. I recently lost a few hundred bucks just because the shop used the wrong currency to charge me, leading to a double conversion at the absolutely shittiest rates, and by the time I got to someone in charge, the transaction was already cleared and set in stone. With a sane system this never would’ve happened.
In my home country they actually recently started to adopt such a model. Instead of you giving the card# to everyone, they instead show a QR code with all the necessary payment details: BIC, SWIFT, IBAN, the rest of scary numbers, order number and the invoice. You just open the bank app on your phone, point it at the code, review the sum and any possible fees, press confirm, and the moment the transaction is cleared the page just reloads automatically with order confirmed. I believe there’s also a special URL schema for when you don’t have a PC, but I haven’t tried it yet so can’t tell for sure. With this approach, subscriptions are much easier to manage, because it’s the bank’s job to send the money, so they can list all recurring payments on a special page where you could just cancel one. Also helps with scummy services that stop providing service the moment the subscription is canceled - they won’t even know you did until the the next day the payment is due.
EDIT: There is indeed a custom URL schema, and lots of cool stuff like offline payments without plastic. But some of it is still clunky, including subscriptions, which only a few banks support and most services are opting to use their own billing systems for now.
Everyone is saying Piracy but I say Public LIbraries, which often have CDs/DVDs/BDs/games now (depending on your locale). They’re taxpayer funded, so you might as well get your money’s worth, and they keep track of how often stuff gets borrowed which determines future financial support.
(And if you are tech-savvy enough to be on Lemmy, you probably know how to make a … permanent copy … for yourself to keep)
Libraries are great. Just think about it, if libraries as a concept hasn’t already exist, there is absolutely zero chance it will be invented in our time due to our overly restricting copyright law.
And also due to a rightward shift in the Overton window. A place where people just get to borrow books for free? That’s socialism. And it will completely kill the entire books industry
Which is exactly why big corporations are lobbying hard to get public library stripped of funds by any means necessary. I mean you can even 3D print spare parts in many libraries for free by now! The super rich cannot have that.
I mean shit, I don’t even have a DVD burner in any of my computers. Haven’t for a decade and a half. You expect me to grab my external drive to burn a copy? I can download anything on my gigabit connection in 5 minutes.
I use an iPod that I’ve modded 128gb into. It’s great. All the convenience of my own high quality music library, without having hundreds of CDs around.
My phone is 512gb and i use about 80 myself, largest part is porn(yeah i’m aware, it’s bad…very bad,i need some time).
I’ve decided to start pirating again as my device has plenty of space to keep my music.
The biggest thing is getting all lf the music, so nowadays i’ll just play what i have and sometimes go: “oh damn i forgot about billie eilish” for example and make a mental note until the next time i’m at my computer with some time to spare.
Slowly but steadily decreasing my porn stock and replacing it with music i would’ve bought as cd’s.
I basically canceled almost all my subscriptions and pirate stuff. Except music, since I build a CD collection and buy the rest online which is still cheaper than a streaming service and I can keep the music as long as I want without having to fear that songs will get removed from the service.
For music piracy if you’re needin’ try soulseek. I understand collecting physical items though, I do it with records, comics, and VHS tapes, just figured I’d spread the word just in case.
The last thing I paid for as a subscription service was Curiosity Stream a year ago. I’ve stopped watching movies and documentaries since and I don’t miss it.
It was ok. It didn’t offer as much content as I thought, it had a lot more in-house content that felt low budget, and I found it hard to find a topic that was truly enticing despite the variety. The service is fine and it was great as background noise while working, but it wasn’t enough for me. I would still recommend it.
That’s fair. There are not as many documentaries as I expected too. Many of the documentaries there are actually old and re-broadcasted from other TV channels around the world years ago. In a way, there is a sense of exoticness to them because otherwise they would have been forgotten by the passage of time and restricted by geographic distribution.
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