[mewpmewp2]

I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning and how the deals work. Having a subscription can actually be beneficial in terms of incentive to keep up supporting the product in my view.

If it's a huge problem psychologically for you, maybe you can just take the following 5 years or whatever time you estimate you will be using the product and calculate that into the base price to make your decision.

[thfuran]

>I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning

Adding advertising into the mix almost always makes the incentives align more poorly with the customer's interest. For example, the refrigerator manufacturer now has an incentive to increase food spoilage to increase ad conversions.

>Having a subscription can actually be beneficial in terms of incentive to keep up supporting the product in my view

So you want to pay them to show you ads in the hopes that that means they don't stop supporting your refrigerator? What does that even mean? They're not going to extend your warranty.

[mewpmewp2]

No I pay for subscription for them to not show ads and for them to have an incentive to keep the product working well as long as possible.

Because if the product stops working, I also stop paying subscription.

Right now there's an incentive to make short lasting products to have customer buy a new one, but with subscription the incentive changes.

[TeMPOraL]

> I don't get why it matters so much to people. It's all just incentives aligning and how the deals work.

Think of it like working conditions getting increasingly poor and abusive year over year, while your salary stays fixed.

It matters not because the deals are increasingly shit and abusive, but also because them being much better is within most of our's living memories, and there's no actual reason for things to go this shit, except a supplier-driven market fucking customers over because they can, and race-to-the-bottom mechanics preventing any single vendor from reversing course.

[mewpmewp2]

That would not be a problem of subscriptions though.

If they can just keep increasing prices unfairly, then it means something is wrong with free market, not with subscriptions.

[TeMPOraL]

I didn't say increasing prices. I said decreasing quality. Price can stay fixed or even go down.

And yes, there's plenty of wrong with the free market, starting with that it's a hypothetical construct that doesn't exist, and even if it did, it's gameable and would have been gamed by the vendors the same way the real market is.