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The internet.
And no I don't mean every single part of it. But somewhere along the line there became an expectation that the internet be free. That continued for sites that rapidly grew well beyond the point where it was reasonable for them to be maintained for free, but instead of a natural progression where we pay for things we use, we simply became the product of the internet at large in the form of data about every aspect of our lives.
We now live and exist in a world where very little of what we do is private in any way, our preferences and relationships and tendencies are digitized and correlated and used against us largely without our active, conscious knowledge. And it's all so Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube can be free. Or rather..."free".
It has always felt like the biggest scam ever to me, that everything I do and think online should be bought and sold without me really ever having much of a chance to have a say in that.
This contrasts interestingly with the current top comment, Subscriptions.
I think people's feelings about subscriptions are warped. There's been a very popular take here on Lemmy lately towards piracy and not paying people for their work, and it's annoying to say the least (especially contrasting it with how they deserve to be paid for what they do).
Things that don't actively have operating costs, e.g. a text editor, I think it makes sense to be traditional purchases. However, things that do require ongoing expenses, be it live service games, lemmy servers, news organizations, etc, these things need money to function, and funding them with our data is not making the world a better place.
Considering advertisers expect to make money off their ads, and seem to have the data to back that up, I'm going to assume (on average) free services sure aren't saving folks money either.
I too question the overall ire against subscriptions.
I understand the hesitance regarding the proliferation of streaming services. It's hard to keep track of them and the sort of transient nature of their content makes it frustrating.
But I don't think subscriptions are inherently bad insofar as the costs related to upkeeping things I want to have access to are ongoing expenses. It follows that my access would be an ongoing expense to support that. It's why people subscribe to the newspaper or magazines. A one time fee (or not paying at all) does not keep the presses running over time.
I pirated a lot of things when I was younger. But as I've grown older it has become clearer to me that without the financial support of those with the means to provide it, many things I enjoy could not exist. I'm happy to contribute so I can keep enjoying things I enjoy.
Yup, I increasingly pay for things to not be a part of that system anymore, Proton, Kagi, B2 Cloud storage, Standard Notes, Ars Technica, The Atlantic, NYTimes, The Akron Beacon Journal, Feedly, Last.fm, Todoist, Telegram, Privacy while donating to things like KDE, Dark Reader, Lemmy, the EFF, Sunshine, the RuneScape wiki (and that's just Internet related stuff).
I'm grateful that things were free as a kid, because I had no money to pay for them, and I think that is something these services should account for. However, now that I'm an adult, I think there's an obligation to make sure the things I use and want to exist receive funding (and don't need to turn to selling my data).