[rkomorn]

I thought the main complaint was "I'm paying for channels I don't watch!" while not realizing the channels they were watching were actually what they were paying for, and the rest of the stuff was just lumped in for nearly free to make the lineups look bigger and more appealing.

[sunrunner]

For some reason I always saw it in reverse, that I had to pay to subsidise a set of channels I'm _not_ interested in for the one I am.

[rkomorn]

Chances are that's not what was happening unless you were watching the channels nobody else watches.

I haven't looked into cable pricing for a while but i remember a few of the contract disputes that caused some big channels to drop off big cable providers in the 2010s. The price-per-customer those channels were asking the cable companies were significant chunks of what a package would cost the customer (eg upwards for $1).

Meanwhile some of the less common ones were a few cents per customer.

That means that unless you weren't watching any of the $1+ ones, you were mostly actually "paying for what you're watching".

[nickthegreek]

I assure you that there are many people who do not need nor want ESPN and knew damn well they were directly paying it.

[rkomorn]

And those people were having part of their package subsidized by the people who were watching ESPN but not the other channels.