[CM30]

What disturbs me about this isn't just how these business models remove basic ownership rights in exchange for a locked down, walled garden ecosystem at the whim of a large company, but how so many people seem to either think it's a good thing or don't care about the issues at all.

You try to tell young people that putting all their work on social media sites and platforms like Reddit, Discord and YouTube isn't a good thing, and they don't get it. You tell people that digital distribution services could kill media preservation and render games, TV shows, films, etc lost to history. They don't get it.

Worse still, even the web development/software engineering community seems to be the same here. Every time I look for a solution for something on my site (commenting, likes, user logins, analytics, etc) I get answers saying to 'use X service that charges this amount per month and relies on their servers to run'. No, I don't want that. I don't want to 'rely' on any startup or third party company for website functionality. I want to host everything myself, and have full control over the source code as necessary.

It's why I always try to use open source stuff where necessary, and refuse to buy anything with a monthly fee.

And it doesn't stop there either. No, here on Hacker News we see comments advocating these setups for cars and transportation, as if the utopian ideal is that everyone s ride sharing or using public transport for their entire life. No, that's not a good thing. I don't want a world where getting places means paying a company every time, in an overly santised, samely environment. Where everything I do is under constant corporate surveillance.

That's a dystopian nightmare, just like every other aspect of this 'make every product a service or platform' philosophy is overall. And it's one a disturbing percentage of the population seem almost happier to switch to without a second thought.

[ryanwaggoner]

I think it just depends on what we’re talking about. It seems like you’re ignoring the total cost of ownership. Yes, you can drive your own car across town without paying a corporation....as long as you do your own maintenance with parts you make, refine your own gasoline, have your own insurance company, and can park without paying. And it still may take longer and be more hassle (depends obviously). It’s not like we all were born with infinite-lifespan cars that run on fairy dust. When done well, public transportation is vastly cheaper and more efficient. It’s fine if you want to drive, but don’t pretend like it’s not costing you as much or more (again, assuming you have good public transit as an option).

Let’s take music as an example. Yes, listening to my music on Spotify may theoretically somehow someday result in a loss of music diversity, or result in music being lost because no one owned it, or may result in me losing access to all “my” music if I stop paying, or the artist yanks their music from Spotify, or if Spotify shuts down. That all may happen.

But if I go for the pure ownership model of music, it will definitely cost me more in time and money and hassle. I’ll also have to worry about backing up these files, having enough storage for them, protecting them against file format changes over the coming decades. And it’ll cost me a lot more too!

Why? I just don’t care that much. 99% of what I listen to is personally ephemeral. Listening to it in 10 years would be an interesting afternoon of nostalgia, but that’s all. It’s the same for movies and tv shows.

Books are a little different for me, in that I’d probably be interested in re-reading 30% of the books I read. And I’ve started buying my favorite books in paper for this reason. But I always buy in digital first, because the pros for me vastly outweigh the cons.