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Maybe this is a hot take, but this post is very entitled. Custom server emojis and using a video platform for audio only while your phone is sleeping as basic features? You can be annoyed that these are the features they chose to be premium or you can be annoyed by how much premium costs, but you are hardly missing out on the standard experience without them. Frankly, there are better choices to complain about being premium, but compared to the past the amount of stuff we can get from the internet for free at great convenience is incredible.
Also, piracy is easy. If you use the platform a lot and don't want to pay you can often get a premium or better experience with a bit of time invested for some setup. I use xManager for Spotify and ReVanced for Youtube. Both give me an ad-free experience for free and are more customizable than the legit application. ReVanced especially allows me to get rid of a lot of the UI I don't use, change input actions, skip sponsor/intro/afk segments, and a lot more. There might be something for Tiktok too now but I haven't looked.
The internet is worse than it used to be. Free internet services aren’t free because corporations want to help people out. They’re free because they’re trying to out-compete people who want to just help people and make the world a better place.
The early internet was a glimpse of how our world could be if we all just worked together, shared resources, followed our passions and collaborated to make cool things. There are still plenty of examples of products and services provided entirely free by people who do so just because they want to.
We get to see, in real time, what it looks like for private corporations to enclose common land, but digitally. And now people are forgetting - or maybe they didn’t even know to begin with - that all the shit that’s now covered with ads and has horrible design patterns - all used to be free.
This whole sequence does not make any sense. They are entitled for complaining about the standard experience, yet piracy is easy? What does that suppose to mean? If you think the standard experience is adequate then why resort to piracy? What is the entitlement referring to? According to you they can complain about the pricing and a lot of other features being paywalled, but the entitlement comes from the particular two examples they gave? Because you don't think they are important, as if the important features to you are universal? I don't get what the point of this is
The entitlement comes from the idea that these are basic features that should be available to them for free, in addition to everything else included in the free service. They are the sort of things casual users may not even be aware of. If they don't think the extra stuff is worth the price, they can just not buy them. But thinking they are overvalued is not the same thing as thinking they should be free.
If you think the standard experience is adequate then why resort to piracy?
Because I use these a lot and want something better than the standard service when it's an option. If you wanted to sell a car for $5000 and someone offered you $10,000, would you say no because $5000 was adequate?
Because you don't think they are important, as if the important features to you are universal?
I guess "importance" is relative, so I'll clarify; they do little to contribute to the main function of the apps. Youtube is a video platform, so it should allow you to watch hosted videos. Discord is a voice and text messaging app, so you should be able to send messages and join calls. They are robust enough that you can do many other things with them too, but these secondary offerings are sometimes more limited if you don't pay. The people that do choose to pay supplement the cost of offering the basic services to those that don't.
Yeah you are just the average piracy bad person got it. You just happen to use pirated content that's what confused me and I unfortunately engaged. And yet you somehow still didn't answer what exactly xmanager offers that Spotify premium doesn't. Make it make sense, there are no extra features, only pirated premium features that are not the main function :)
It's great seeing people defend the profits of oligarchs and monopolies and their ability to define what the standard experience is and what zero marginal cost feature can or cannot be paywalled. Which is definitely not entirely subjective, you are right to be so confident on that, you can get to tell us what the necessary functions of any app is.