The article about the “subscription” HP ink made me realise something.
Subscriptions aren’t a new idea at all. You could subscribe to paper magazines. And you got to keep them.
I’m just clearing up my old house and it’s filled with tons of old tech magazines. Lots of useful knowledge here. Wanna know how Windows and Mac compared in 1993? It’s in here. All the forgotten technologies? Old games, old phones, whatever? You’ll find it.
Now, granted. You’d only get one magazine a month. Not a whole library of movies or games or comic books.
But still, the very definition of subscription has shifted. Now, the common meaning is “you only get to use these things as long as you’re paying”. Nobody even thinks it could mean anything else.
Besides, it doesn’t only apply to services that offer entire libraries. Online magazines still exist in a similar form as the paper ones. But you only get to access them while your “subscription” is active. Even the stuff you had while you were paying.
BTW I’m not throwing my old magazines away. I won’t have the space, but a friend is taking it all. If they wouldn’t, I’d give them to a library or let someone take them. The online and streaming stuff of today and tomorrow? In 30 years it’ll be gone, forgotten and inaccessible.
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Kind of similar to how people gradually stopped using the phrase “social network” (implying the main point of these sites was to connect with other human beings) and shifted to calling it “social media” (implying the main point is to passively consume content).
Social media is just a broader catch-all. If you look at literature actually studying these things, distinctions are made between SNSs - Social Networking Sites - and other forms of social media.
SNSs are a subset of social media sites that usually involve mutual follows. Think Facebook or LinkedIn. Those are the sorts of sites that are based around social networking. But the majority of the social web is not made up of SNSs, and networks are much looser or even poorly defined on the rest of the social web, so it’s difficult to call it “social networking”.
Exactly, and that’s a very, very, very bad thing. We all signed up for social networks on the promise they’d help us make new friends and stay in touch with our old ones. Now, ten years later, we’re walled off into lonely bubbles being fed ads and propaganda in between posts from strangers we didn’t even chose to follow, but some algorithm decided we should see posts from anyways.
If social media had looked the way it does now when it’d first been invented, no one would have ever signed up for it. Instead, we were frogs in a boiling pot.
Granted, I think there is an important distinction between the two. I’d call stuff like Discord and Snapchat “social media”, in they’re mediums with “Web 2.0” socialisation elements, but not Facebook/Twitter/Friends Reunited sorts of things like “social networks” tend to be.
And on YouTube subscribing means: “We’ll probably show you some videos from this channel every now and then. If you don’t click on those videos, we’ll think you don’t like that channel anymore, but forgot to unsubscribe, so we’ll just stop showing those videos. Actually, we might just stop any time if we don’t like that channel. It’s pretty random TBH.”
What you’re describing is the home page, not the subscription page. If you want to see content from your subscriptions, go to your subscription page. I prefer my home page to be a mix of things I know and things I don’t know. Found tons of interesting content that way.
Yeah, the subscription page totally works. No problems there… Although some people claim that YT has removed some subcriptions without consent. Never happened to me though, so I don’t know if it’s actually true or not.
Hmm… I don’t think this has been my experience. My subscriptions page on YouTube has always shown all the new videos from all of my subscriptions. It’s recently changed to also include “shorts” which I hate, but they’re all there whether I’ve watched any of their content or not.
Home page is a different story, but I don’t really scroll there. I always go straight to subs.
I don’t know for sure, I’m not an avid watcher, but I’ve seen several pretty big channels talk about this in their videos and ask people to check their subscription because it does apparently happen.
Correct. Home page is a complete disaster, while the subscription page works the way it should.
One of the reasons I don’t even bother with a Youtube account and instead track my subscriptions with Invidious.
Meanwhile, it will insist on showing you awful recommendations from channels you have never watched no matter how long you ignore them or how many times you click “not interested”.
There is an advantage to the “new” model - when you subscribe, you retroactively get access to all past content as well.
Obviously for a newspaper or similar time-sensitive content this is not a very useful feature, but for other media/services it can be worth the trade-off of losing access after your subscription ends.
That’s not really true anymore either. Now e.g. the streaming video services keep removing stuff all the time, and shift focus to producing new stuff. Their intent is to keep you subbed for the new content.
But even so, the limitations before was natural. You can’t ship a truck of magazines to everyone every month. You could still access old issues in a library tho. Cable TV couldn’t have everything all the time, but reruns and niche channels kept trying to fill the blanks.
Now the limitations are purely artificial. “You can only access what we say you can. Shut up and consume.”
Thankfully Humble Choice exists and is the older idea of a subscription, which is why I keep it active even in the crummier months.
GOG and piracy for video games
Linux and open source software for computers
piracy for everything else until/unless things change
This is why Homer’s dad was yelling at the cloud
upload the collection to the internet archive!
So true
