DEF CON 31 - An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification - Cory Doctorow
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344
The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn't have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four" (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don't have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
Noooo no more subscriptions please. Can we please go back to one time payments for apps/services?
I understand hating subscriptions but in this case a one time payment would require Kagi to continually gain an increasing number of members for eternity or run out of operating money and shut down. You could hope for something donation-based like most Lemmy instances, but just expecting other users to cover your costs is selfish. There's a difference between asking your users to at least pay what they're costing you and rent-seeking with things that don't or shouldn't cost you a dime to provide. Subscription services have existed for a very, very long time (see: any government that collects taxes), it's only recently and due to greedy trends that they've been becoming a nuisance.
If you want to empower your own sense of privacy and security, you'll need to accept that you've been paying for services with your data or supposed ad views for decades, and some of those services cost money to run.
They could offer both 10$a month or a larger (ex 240$) lifetime buy and give people a choice
I believe Sirius did this and it was a huge boon to their cash flow
I agree that subscriptions for apps becoming the norm is pretty terrible. You should just be able to pay once and use the version you paid for forever, and optionally upgrade to a newer version for a price.
But Kagi is a service. You using their search actively costs them money, so they wouldn't only not gain any money from you after your one-time purchase, but actually lose money.
That's not my problem, change the business model away from subscriptions. I will never support the subscription model for literally everything now.
So don't subscribe. It's that simple. Did you pay a one-time fee for electricity as well?
Do I pay for Google? Do I pay for Wikipedia? Do I pay for Signal messaging? Do I pay for email? No, I pay for none of that. I pay for internet already, stop making me pay for every little website or app I use as well.