This was originally a Twitter thread I made, but seeing as how Elon Musk* might STILL be buying Twitter, I might delete old tweets again.
* WOAH, I can post about Elon Musk on my tiny blog without fear of someone name searching themselves and probably finding my tiny blog and then being annoyed by fans of that walnut.
I am literally just buying mp3s or music CDs and ripping them, and keeping a library on my computer like it's 2005 again. I also have some albums on my phone to listen to on the go.
I am trying to move away from subscription services and just purchasing what I want.
Everything is moving to subscription models and I think that is terrible. We shouldn't have to rent our tools (i.e. adobe products), access to car features (heated seats), and the fragmentation of video streaming means MULTIPLE subscriptions just to get a decent selection. No thx
How much are we REALLY spending with the sum total of all our subscriptions? Stuff we might have even forgotten about?? Maybe with what we save in canceling it all, we could dish out the $5 - $20 for an album or movie when we want it.
The only subscriptions I'm ok with are paying for web hosting, paying for FFXIV, and I guess you could call paying utilities a subscription? Except the cost fluctuates for my energy bill. ☃️
Don't you miss having a gigantic library of mp3s on your computer and listening to them with Winamp?
My husband's car has Bluetooth connection so I can play my music off my phone with VLC. For my own car, I just have a CD players, so I've unearthed my old CD binder and added some more CDs to it and that's what I listen to.
And with subscription video services removing shows whenever they want, wouldn't it be better to just buy a series you're enjoying on DVD/BluRay? Or at least as a digital video purchase?
I own The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra on DVD and on YT so I can play it wherever I go 💀
I'm not just being an old person when I say that the internet was better (in many ways, not all) ten years, fifteen years ago. Things were more anonymous, there were more choices on "social media" - different message boards, blog services, etc. People went to actual websites
Not just Birdsite, Facesite, and Clock App or whatever.
You could be a part of a message board for a certain interest, not just stuck tweeting about your interests to literally everybody.
Your post data was local to that one site, not a company with a big aggregation of it.
Flash existed, and Flash launched so many kids/teens' first experiences with game programming and animation. It also provided tons of free entertainment by people for people.
Now instead of free little online games, we have "free" little mobile games that want to exploit you.
The web used to be customizable. Message boards let you put HTML into your signature (Sig art was A THING!), sites with profile pages let you customize it with CSS, like Myspace. Even YouTube let you customize your channel's appearance.
The internet isn't FOR US anymore. It's for corporations. They build "platforms" so they can make money off us. Stealing our data. Games with microtransactions for every little thing. Everything is a subscription or a middle-man, taking huge cuts of profits. Everything is a gig.
They make so much money off us creating content and selling ads, and they give us a few beans as compensation, and we try to hustle to maximize our beans, but the companies have complete control on how much to give. How their ALGORITHMS work for discoverability. We lose.
A site like YouTube or Patreon can mutilate someone's income from random decisions that we have no say in, aside from angry responses to announcements. They can outright lie about things, like Facebook and the performance of its video platform, which only hurts US.
We need to move away from these systems. AND as users we need to be willing to do things like... Surf to websites again, instead of watching everything on YouTube.
And yeah, that's hard when we have locked down smart TVs with select apps. Smart TV doesn't have homestarrunne
Watching video on our phone browser is less nice than on a dedicated app.
BUT HOLY CRAP we can watch video on our phone.
We used to sit at our computers watching Flash animations and even video content like (for better or worse) Channel Awe5ome.
I'm literally going to go adopt my dad's old computer to hook up to my tv at home so I can play my entire library of games from all previous generations in one place.
Tired of paying multiple times for the same game and for old games that are re-released.
I already bought that shit. ALL of it should be playable.