Remember what "subscription" used to mean?

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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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."
- haha.... no, not really. not in most cases anyway. In a lot of cases you are forced to update to the newer app that has "an improved user experience" which usually means it got nerfed

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).
- Just think customer vs. consumer.
- 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.

Another thing about subscriptions now is the part about "saving money." It used to be that you got a real discount on magazines if you subscribed to them. The idea was to pay more up front now but pay less money per issue. Online subscriptions try to convince the consumer that it's cheaper to subscribe to a streaming, gaming, or e-book service because you have the entire catalog at your disposal. The problem is that you're not really saving any money. You won't be interested in using the entire catalog, only a few items from the catalog. I'm not going to read all the terrible books on KindleUnlimited, for example. This is also a flat-out lie. Items get removed from the catalog all the time. Netflix, KindleUnlimited, Xbox, et. al. don't keep things there indefinitely. It's also important to consider how things you might want to use are not in the catalog, so you'd have to pay the subscription fee plus buy an item that isn't in the catalog. In the end, it's all more money for the company and less money for the consumer to save.

💀

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.”
- 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.
  
  Correct. Home page is a complete disaster, while the subscription page works the way it should.
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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".
  
  LPT: Get a trash account and watch all the viral stuff there. Use your main account for watching all the stuff you really care about.
- One of the reasons I don't even bother with a Youtube account and instead track my subscriptions with Invidious.
- My wife watches a lot of YouTube and has several favorites. She's subscribed to none of them. Apparently lots of people do this and completely ignore the subscription feature.
  
  To some extent, I do as well.
  If I want to see about 30% of the content of a particular channel, I’m absolutely not going to subscribe. Let’s say there’s a channel that made a few cool Minecraft videos, but they also do lots of other random stuff I don’t care about. If I subscribe, YT will send me some of that that 70% as well.
  However, if I want to see at least 95% of the videos, subscription is in order. With this method, I’ve been able to curate my home view to be more meaningful and relevant to me.

The idea of products "as a Service" has really taken off in the business world, and that really should be all you need to know about it. If the "short-term-profit-damn-the-long-term" crowd likes it, I'm gonna start off assuming it's bad.

It won't be gone, not in 30 years anyway. Data storage is relatively cheap and 30 year old, even 50 year old content gets consumed all the time even right now.
There is a point to be made that online content is ephemeral, since we have no control over it's availability. But not in 30 years.
- There are issues now that hasn't existed before:
  DRM, enough said
  Streaming content
  Or other means to make content unavailable
  Think P.T. It still exists only on a handful of PS4 consoles. Konami simply has no interest in releasing it.
  Or all the MMOs and online games. Can't even run your own server without some herculean effort.
  Or games only on Apple TV (subscription to boot).
  Magazines tend to be distributed in some weird formats that only one app can open.
  Even when it comes to stuff like TV shows that were pulled from streaming services recently, some are completely gone because nobody thought to archive and distribute them. And who does, faces legal risks.
  Some of these problems aren't new, lost old media is a known issue, but wasn't modern tech supposed to make things better?
  (Not to mention reliance on technology in general. A good enough solar flare can wipe all the data on half the planet. That's another topic tho.)
  
  Is it a relatively new expectation of society that content should be indefinitely preserved? Prior to the widespread adoption of VHS I wouldn't have thought it would be in the public consciousness.
  I'd class myself on the 'keep all the things' side of any preservation argument as building on our cultural history can only be a good thing (artistically speaking - I don't care much for the capitalist tears regarding copyright infringement). Yet I find it interesting, amusing even, that we expect, by default, that content should be preserved and readily available. In 100 years we'll still be able to view any episode or 'Mrs Brown's Boys' yet have no way to see Shakespeare's premiere of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.
  For clarity, in 100 years I still will not have watched even 1 episode of 'Mrs Brown's Boys'.
- A reasonable amount of it will be gone. If there is not adequate warning and people willing to spend time and server space on preservation then a lot will disappear when the companies who own the IP or host the content go under/move to other focuses.
  It's not like there will necessarily be wholesale losses like when the BBC were taping over all the old Dr Who episodes, or even more modern examples like the time Myspace lost all music hosted on their site, but I would expect a reasonable proportion to be at least widely inaccessible.

Thankfully Humble Choice exists and is the older idea of a subscription, which is why I keep it active even in the crummier months.
- Yea I was thinking of mentioning HB as an old-school way of doing things. But also almost all the games are just on Steam, so that defeats the purpose.
  
  And the prices have gone up massively. I never even look at HB any more.

This is why Homer's dad was yelling at the cloud
- Yes that's me
  
  You should post this in the memes community, it's great!

GOG and piracy for video games
Linux and open source software for computers
piracy for everything else until/unless things change
- I agree, but once game streamimg and rental games on consoles become the norm, and other streaming situations, even piracy won't save us.
  
  I hope that if/when that happens, I will have the strength to live with the boredom and just not be subscribed to those services or have those products :c
  On the other hand, it's always possible that pirates will find a way. For example, there's an open source project that lets you download encrypted Wii U files (games) directly from official Nintendo servers. Of course, it may not be a permanent solution if those servers go down or those files are removed from the servers. Also for example, the Internet Archive has archives of at least some games that were only available for purchase and download as far as I know from Xbox Live Arcade. I, uh, know someone who downloaded Fable Heroes (Xbox 360) from the Internet Archive and now plays it through the Xenia emulator.
  I recently heard of a movie called Crater that Disney made as an exclusive for Disney+. It was well received by critics and many viewers reviewed it well too, however apparently it didn't perform well enough by Disney's standards and they completely removed it from their platform after only 48 days. It is no longer possible to watch Crater legally as far as I know. Maybe the best we can do is hope that archival and piracy projects continue to find ways to work, and contribute to those efforts when and where we can. Because as long as people continue to pay for these services and these companies are still making profit even while (imo) disrespecting their customers and their right to own things they buy, it will continue to get worse and not better.
  -- I moved across the US last year, coast to coast, and I couldn't take my collections of movies, games, and books with me. I couldn't afford the space on the plane. I miss having physical copies of things!

Reading this reminded me of the pc magazine I used to buy when I was in middle school, it always had interesting articles and it came with a CD full of free games and software! Oh, the nostalgia.
Now, granted. You’d only get one magazine a month. Not a whole library of movies or games or comic books.
I feel like it didn't matter as much back then, games used to last longer, we'd replay them a lot and it was common to share them around with your friends. Nowadays a lot of people just rush to finish a game (without really enjoying it) so they can go to the next one. It's a pseudo-job.
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.
Even if no one wants them, there's always the option of giving them to the Internet Archive.
- I remember Xbox magazines that came with demo disc's. Those were the days. NY 20s were awesome.
- I think most people just hoard games on Steam without playing them.

To be clear: Your public library almost certainly doesn’t want your 1992 National Geographics. Please be nice to your librarians.
- Where I live, they do. (And they distribute donated stuff to libraries that are missing stuff.)
  
  My bad. I stand corrected. Librarians here get so sick of donations we can’t use that there are endless memes on librarian social media groups complaining about people ignoring signs and policy and dumping media they no longer want in or near the library because they can’t be bothered to dispose of it properly. (And they do.) If that’d not a problem in your area, kudos for helping the library. I apologize.

So true

upload the collection to the internet archive!

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