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What's a product or service that you use but don't want to pay for and why?
I started this in ~life even though my own response is a tech service, to enable more diverse conversation.
For example, this could be something people normally pay for but you'd rather DIY, or a subscription service you use but don't see the point in paying for.
Youtube. Because Fuck Google, They're A Monopoly.
I'm not opposed to subscribing to Youtube, in principle. I'm just not willing to do so for them. I hate that I can't spite Youtube by going to a competitor.
The only thing I want is for ads to be non invasive. Midroll ads are disgusting and the default number they put in is only a net negative for the viewing experience.
Turns out, if you give me the choice between either a subscription that gives me no guarantees of a reasonable price or consistent features, OR a free plugin that just makes the ads go away... I'm taking the free plug in.
Newpipe for Android has been a game changer for lowering my annoyances with YouTube.
Newpipe for Android and using uBlock Origin on Firefox-based browsers (doesn't work on Blink anymore) means I haven't seen a single YT ad in years.
It's a beautiful thing, isn't it
Amen to that. I primarily watch youtube via the app on my TV, so I don't have adblock. Yes, I know there are apps that can get around that, but the thing is, I actually kind of like having the ads sometimes. I've found some good stuff purely because of the ads, like my now-favorite singer and the film Bullet Train, which ended up being the last film I saw in theaters with my dad. And, hilariously, the Brave browser, which I use to play music on my phone.
Also, I can get a laugh from seeing what the heck shows up. At one point I was getting trailers for horror movies and games, some local specialty boutique for young girls (which was very clearly a cheap local ad that was almost creepy due to the quality), and legitimate toy commercials. The kind of commercials I'd see on TV. No clue what age Youtube thought I was, I just know I cackled at that.
It's just the damn frequency that irritates me. Now I'm getting those minute-long midroll ad clusters that are "fewer ads for a longer video" on videos under 15 minutes. Really not happy about that...
If you have an Android TV, it is possible to install SmartTube to have YouTube without ads. I've been using it for some time with no complaints. The occasional error that is fixed quite quickly by the dev, but it's been a breeze otherwise.
I've had good luck of late using the Brave browser just for YouTube. I used to use the paid Vinegar extension but it no longer works; Brave has been 100% on blocking every single ad.
I want a lot more: basic respect for the user. The fact that I have to install a browser extension just so I can view video titles in their original language is insane. The fact that a multibillion-dollar company can roll out such an utterly stupid feature and make it mandatory destroys all hope that anything good can come out of this.
I do pay for YouTube since I don't let my kid use YT kids and don't want them to see ads. But I completely understand peoples principles on this. If YouTube just came out 15 years ago with common sense storage policy, they would not be here. Would anyone have minded if in 2009 they said that all videos with 0 views in one year would be deleted? If it ment getting less ads. Because it would have been fine to get less ads.
There could be some community initiative where videos that were profitable or culturally/artistically significant would be saved. But YouTube is free video storage for a lot of people. Do we really need the countless hundreds of months of twitch stream recordings with a collective 50 views of a handful of hours? The decades and decades of daily vlog updates that were likely not watched beyond a single week.
Yes, it's an immensely important cultural cache. And I will look up very cringy 14 year videos and still get a chuckle out of them. But when I do that, there will occasionally be a 14 view, video response, because YouTube used to have video responses back in the day. And that data is probably the reason you had the eighth not-porn game ad on the 2min video on how to reset your oven clock.
I doubt storage is the significant driver of expense for them. Content delivery is the really expensive part. A 0 view video can just be replicated in a couple of places in case someone needs it. A video that's getting millions of viewers per day needs to be replicated thousands and thousands of places as close as humanly possible to the user requesting it, otherwise no infrastructure in the world could handle the load. That requires caching servers with storage and compute at every possible internet point of presence, bandwidth to feed those caches, fail over systems for when they break and an orchestration system to make the whole thing work. That strikes me as much more expensive problem to solve than a dozen or so exabytes of storage.
YouTube is massively profitable and it’s not just because of ads. They are highly vertically integrated, with sponsor deals themselves, productions and content sales, premium, etc.
If they had a different content policy the internet would be extremely different. I like the way they do things now, to be honest. And I also think YouTube premium is one of those things that is well worth paying for. The immense value of the content that YouTube offers is unparalleled in the world — nebula is on its way but YouTube has magnitudes more content and a crazy good discovery system.
I get not wanting to give money to Google, one way or another. But IMO refusing to pay such small amounts for the value YouTube gives and then complaining it still gives you free access with some ads, that is a bit crazy. If YouTube was pay-to-access it would still be worth it at a few hundreds per month … the educational content alone.
...try watching it without a subscription, adblocker, nor VPN for a week: it got so bad that i quit following youtube links entirely, and my wife (who has a subscription and watches it regularly) was aghast when she saw what i sat through...
...i don't have a problem with tastefully advertising-supported services, but what youtube has become is honestly a pox on humanity...
...i think pornhub are leaving money on the table by not launching a competing all-ages video platform...
Oh wait they delete videos with no views? I have a super old kid video on there that I doubt get more than 1 or 2 views a year maybe. It was uploaded eons ago to share with family, back when they were still "don't be evil". I need to investigate if I have a proper backup.
I could be misinterpreting, but I think the statement was more that they should have always been implementing cost saving measures that could help reduce infinitely growing costs rather than using bad cost management as an excuse for increasingly aggressive monetization. One such potential policy that probably would've been fine if it had been around from the start being to purge videos that aren't realistically going to be useful any longer, like maybe ones that have had 0 views in the last year. I couldn't find any evidence of them doing that, though I did find multiple articles explicitly saying that they don't.
Zero views is just "storage" but small numbers of views are family and recitals and things. You should be ok, but a backup is always ideal
I donate to patreon's of channels that I frequent and have nebula. About the most you can do.
So much this. I used to be a YouTube subscriber in the past but I've since cancelled it and I refuse to sub to it ever again. Only two things that I've left to degoogle are YouTube and Google Mail.
It's so unfortunate that server costs are so high there can't exist a competitor to YouTube without massive funding. I'd be all over it if there was an alternative and given that they were ethical, I'd happily subscribe for even £20 a month.
Enjoying YouTube (or whatever is there to enjoy of it with all the censorships due to demonatization) on my phone (Orion on iOS & uBlock Origin) and pc (Firefox & uBlock Origin).
Enshittification is making life exhausting.
That's really not the issue. The costs with video streaming scale with your product - that is, there are not many fixed costs. Sure, youtube's server bills are massive, but so are the views. If you are a startup, and have a fraction of youtube's throughput, you will have a fraction of their server costs.
The issue is that youtube is not video storage or video hosting. No one needs that anymore; video hosting is table stakes. What youtube is, is social media. And it's hard to be a new social media because you need to attract users. Social media has strong network effects - youtube is the place to be, because it has the people on it.
You can host video trivially, but the question is how you can get an audience. Youtube answers the latter, not the former.
And so there are youtube competitors - TikTok is the most foremost of them, but so is reels. These are video-centric social media platforms.
For me it's the opposite haha, I just can't bring myself to cancel it. I've made a lot of changes with the whole anti-big-tech and buy-from-EU movement, even switched to Linux. But can't cancel Youtube Premium.
I'm paying 10 euros a month, and something like 40% of that goes to creators if I remember right. Plus, the bit of listening I do on YouTube Music also pays artists, and they actually earn more per listen than on Spotify.
When I tried to cancel I thought maybe I'd try some YouTube Music alternatives and just donate to a few favorite creators each month instead. I looked into Qobuz, but turns out they don't even accept all European countries (I'm from the Baltics), and I wasn't about to switch to Spotify after their whole Joe Rogan deal thing.
Then on top of that I realized I watch tons of different small creators, not just a handful. Most of them don't even have donation options set up.
There's also the thing that without premium, I'd need to run adblock on my iPad, Android phone. Probably doable, but honestly don't feel right about adblocking anymore. Every website I visit, if I find it valuable, I whitelist it on my adblocker so they get some revenue. So I'd feel weird adblocking YouTube creators too.
For 10 euros a month, the deal's pretty solid. I find so much great, valuable, informative content on YouTube anyway. I'm generally pretty picky with my subscriptions, but somehow can't step away from this one at least for now.
YouTube is the ONE thing I wish had a really good alternative. As it stands, like you, I will not support them with a subscription, and I don't like ads, so basically, I avoid YouTube. I don't feel like I'm missing much. Is there a ton of good content? Yes. Does my life move on happily without it, also yes.
People say Youtube enshittified, but I happily pay for it because I think it's only getting better and better. Youtube used to be full of crappy home videos. Now it's overflowing with great, well-produced content.
And Youtube is well-liked by creators for giving a 50/50 revenue share. And Youtube helps creators get discovered, and the UX and performance are great. Videos start nearly instantly. Streaming is buttery smooth. There are no mid-stream errors forcing me to refresh the page, which is common with other services.
Unless
you’re using Firefoxyour web browser reports that it’s Firefox. They’ve been caught a few times in recent years where videos would take a few seconds to load even on a totally fresh installation of Firefox, but simply changing the ‘user agent’ to Chrome immediately had the problem disappear.Absolutely. That’s why I use an ad adblocker and an Albanian VPN on my iPhone. This way I get no ads.
Ideology aside, serving video costs money and YT Premium is great value specially the Family tier. It is the largest video library in the world and enjoying it without ads in every device and network across multiple users and households is immense value. For me.
I understand you can remove ads without paying but I am talking about multiple devices on different places and networks. Including a household on another continent.
YouTube is by far the most essential subscription I have.
For me, it's dating apps - at least the current ones that have been gamified and enshittified to oblivion.
When I'm on the free tier, the app has incentive to seem worth a paid membership in my eyes. They can't gatekeep every truly compatible match just to make me pay to see them because I wouldn't even know what I'm missing out on. So not paying ensures I'll be fed interesting profiles every now and then, but not too many at any one time, which is exactly what I want. After all, if I start chatting with someone truly interesting, I'm going to take a while to get to know them, then go out with them for a longer while, and during this time any other potential matches would get frustrated that I'm making them wait in line. I'd rather have the app take the heat on my behalf.
If I started paying, several bad things would happen:
Essentially, I can only get to know 1-2 people seriously at any one time so trying to sell me access to more is a fool's errand. Especially when I know highly compatible people are rare, and there's nothing an app can do to change that.
I used dating apps for the first time in my life this year, in my 30's, and I agree with everything you said.
I told myself that trying to hijack and speed up the process was just not worth it. Who cares if I match twice as more? 1-2 matches every week was plenty enough for me.
It took two bad dates and around 12 bad matches to finally find my (now) girlfriend. I'm happy I took my time and didn't set unrealistic expectations for me.
It also helped that dating apps are like 15$ a week. Fuck that.
Holy smokes, I wasn't aware they're this expensive!
Fun fact they price extremely differently depending on your exact location. If you're in the middle of nowhere, it's reasonably priced. If you're in/near a city, good luck, it's like taking out a mortgage.
They also charge more the older you are and based on your gender - men pay more than women
Even worse: if you start paying for the subscription, they're now inventized to keep your subscription going meaning a truly great match that might result in a monogamous relationship or marriage is not their goal.
Movies and TV shows.
When I was younger and piracy was en vogue, I happily burned as many DVD's as I could while still maintaining a cable subscription. The cable, with its pricy tiers and relentless ads eventually fell to Netflix, and my piracy habit went with it.
15+ years later and tv is somehow worse than it was when Springer was in his prime. The endless superhero parade has successfully pushed me away from movies. Celebrities don't interest me. Price hikes and walled gardens soured me more and more to the big media houses. I find I just don't want to invest any more of myself into that slice of the world anymore. So, I don't really watch many shows or movies.
But that's not zero. For the one series and five movies I'll watch in a year, I'm back to piracy. The capitalists can eat me.
There's just SO much more TV now than there was 15 years ago. Some of it is quite good. The main issue with media for me this days is the loss of a monoculture.
20 years ago, my friends and I could talk about an episode of The Office or Battlestar Galactica, and even if they didn't see that particular episode or show, they'd at least be familiar with it.
Now, probably about 75% of the time someone tells me about a show they're watching, not only have I not seen it, I've never even heard of it.
None of my friends or family watch virtually any of the same shows.
I first noticed this when I was watching For All Mankind a few years ago. It's a critically acclaimed, successful show on Apple with a big budget and has run for four seasons, and I happen to think it's a pretty good show.
Not a single person I've ever mentioned it to in real life has ever heard of it. The only other people I know of that have ever seen a single episode of it are my parents, and only because I recommended it.
It's a lot harder to jump into stuff because of that for me. No one is really talking about the new show everyone is into at the water cooler. You just don't hear about stuff to the degree you used to, and there's so much choice, with so many shows being "slow burns" that unless you have a friend that you really trust the taste of, it's almost impossible to confidently jump into a new show.
The fragmentation of the streaming wars is, I think, the biggest factor in the death of this monoculture. Not only is there a lot of stuff spread around, there odds of anyone you're speaking to having the right set of services makes it feel pointless to even try to bring things up. There was a window of time that you could assume that just about everyone had Netflix, but now you can only assume that they probably have something and with a strong chance of it being a different something than what you have.
To use another Apple example from a few years back, I've still never spoken to anyone outside my household about Severance. Thoroughly enjoyed the show, but I just don't expect anyone in my life to have access to Apple's streaming library.
My suspicion is that if the license holders ever did agree to put everything on one service again that monoculture would return even with the vast library of content because the algorithm of that service would presumably do that on purpose. I do think people would pay a premium to have everything back in one place together, but I also don't foresee that happening. The industry went out of its way to deliberately create a service problem via fragmentation.
A service problem for which 'piracy' is not an unreasonable solution.
I'd happily pay a streaming service if it had access to all content.
At one point we were paying for 7 or 8 streaming services I think? I just bought a good NAS and setup Jellyfin instead. I've been slowly ripping my very large collection of movies and shows. For throwaway stuff I find it online, watch, and delete. I still have Netflix and Youtube. I refuse to pay for the ad free forced upgrade on Prime though, so I never use it anymore even though it's included in my Prime membership.
It's pretty messed up that the pirates apparently now have better user experiences than people paying for the services. They don't have to deal with multiple streaming apps of varying quality and libraries, don't have to deal with shows licensed in weird ways that may be missing parts (just yesterday it was mentioned on Tildes that the final 4 episodes of Wolf's Rain are missing on Crunchyroll), don't have to deal with their favorite shows disappearing to move to a different service (famously happened to The Office multiple times), don't have to deal with services degrading your content depending on your device (Netflix delivering lower quality 4k to PCs than smart TVs), and apparently stuff gets pirated so fast that they aren't even impacted by isolated release delays (like how the first episode of the final season of MHA was delayed 8 hours on Crunchyroll). It's possible people are overselling their pirating experiences, but even if they are overselling them it's still telling that they prefer it so much that they'll go online and post about how they prefer even super basic setups like Stremio+Torrentio+RD over the real services with the claim that it isn't just price.
I think you're absolutely right about the fragmenting—whereas before you could have basic cable, fancy cable, or no cable lol, now there's a whole spectrum. Which is why I put everything on Plex & just force people I care about to open the dang email with the account I made for them, seriously Mark it's that easy. I even had to start paying Mr. John Plex $7 a month or whatever, just to keep from having to get everybody to use jellyfin or something. So I want Plex to be the service I refuse to pay for, but they know better lol
Please do not mourn monoculture. For every common good it had, it had several major negatives. Monoculture is the thing that allowed every prejudice to fester and grow no matter how crazy and stupid it was; see how popular it was historically to be publicly racist, homophobic, sexist, etc.
Also consider the fact that we managed to suppress those things largely while the monoculture existed is a good indication that monoculture was always overestimated. At one time the United States had slavery, and the country was split into two and we had a civil war over it.
The thing you are missing is general social consensus. There are many reasons for that that are frankly too much to discuss in this format and would be best examined in an academic paper. But if I were to guess what was the largest common reason, I would say it was due to constant attacks by certain minority voices on large institutions (I.e. the recent defunding of public media in the US).
They miss the shared and sharable TV experience. A more limited selection, general availability to anyone with a TV and OTA or basic cable, and common scheduled viewing times that the vast majority of people consumed. "The Office" and "Battlestar Galactica" mentioned were very widely viewed and popular shows, but the one that I usually see highlighted is "LOST" (at least the early seasons). It felt like everyone was not only watching it, but then would want to talk about what happened and their developing theories over the next few days after every episode with everyone they could in school, at the office, even in small talk with strangers. The combination of common availability and common scheduled viewing, plus the week-long wait between episodes for people to really sit with each episode is what made that possible. It doesn't really work when everyone has different services with different catalogs where most new shows release complete seasons in one shot that can be watched or binged without pause at whenever time an individual wants.
Game of Thrones is really the last show I remember being like this. We had a group of people who’d get together every week to watch it, make food, etc.
I maintain very few subscription services and instead use alternatives for most. IE I buy blu-rays and DVDs rather than use streaming media, have a Synology NAS at home rather than pay for file storage, buy CDs and load them onto my iPod, and prefer playing or buying older physical games than overpriced new games or game subscription services. We also heavily rely on the library system.
Outside of the tech space, I'd probably say home contractors. I'll do anything I can to do it myself before paying someone, contractors are just too expensive (for example, replacing a window with a contractor is $2-3k US dollars, the same window is $400 at the store). I also manage our rental properties myself, as most management companies charge 10-15%.
I'm very envious of your ability to do home renovations. I have a paralyzing fear of what if I mess up my home and it becomes (magically) unlivable. I know it's possible to learn but it feels scary. Like how some people refuse to forage for food because it's scary
I'm in the same boat skills-wise, but possibly crazier in that I did a bathroom and bedroom reno with the advice and some help of friends in the trades.
To me, plumbing and major electrical are non negotiable professional hires because of implant a bad job can have. That said, planning demolition, drywall, light installs and appliances are all opportunities to learn a new skill, save money and peak your blood pressure!
Haha that's one way of looking at it! :D maybe when my life is too boring that's a good one to take on
I wouldn't advise doing it with a newborn either. I learned a thing or two but it damn near killed me.
Oh I'm fairly certain I'm still dead from that adventure, just walking ashes and dust, bound in service by the summoning ritual. Some say it's only until the kid becomes independent....
I thought that there was a light at the end of the tunnel - one that would let me sleep in, do whatever I want all morning on a Saturday...
And now that dream is gone. I'll have to ask you where best ashes and dust piles are, fellow parent wastelander.
I kid of course :) it gets far better with every year. Very soon you might still get woken up, but it will be occasional, and all you might need is to reassure or get a snack or maybe some Tylenol and they'll go back to bed. There are some who say big kid big problems, but big kid problems can wait till the next day when everyone's had sleep. It gets far better :D
Eager for hobbies and exercise again!
You will mess up! It's okay! I've broken and botched a million different things working on my place, you learn from the mistakes and you fix it. And even doing it twice it's still a lot cheaper than hiring it out. Just don't mess with the serious stuff (new electrical, load bearing walls, plumbing/gas etc) you'll be fine.
It sounds like you have similar tech habits to me! I cut ties with all streaming except YouTube last year. I did already have some physical media of my favorite movies, but I switched to buying way more blu ray and dvds (good lord second hand discs are basically free) and I also bought an iPod classic for music and it’s been a much better experience than Spotify. I already did have a massive music library on my NAS, I had just gotten lazy over the last few years and relied on Spotify too much. It’s good to be back to owning all of my media. I do still buy games digitally, though. I’m mostly a PC gamer so that’s just how it be.
I'm debating going this way with music. The only thing keeping me streaming is that I have 5 family members leeching my Apple plan, and Apple music offers lossless at no additional fee, which has been nice. But I do buy CDs of the albums I really love (and vinyl too sometimes), and rip them to a media player. I don't think I'd miss Apple Music and I'd feel relieved to have fewer ties to the large tech companies. I find a lot of great music via good old FM radio which, in my area, has 3 stations that have no ads and play a large variety of musical genres. I do also have a NAS, and I am under-utilizing it for sure. It would replace iCloud in this scenario.
Reddit Premium. I moved to Tildes because I hate the amount of ads on Reddit. The content quality has also gone down, but the ads are what really annoyed me. I don't want to pay premium for that. I'd rather donate to Tildes and save my time and energy by not browsing Reddit anymore.
Try “Sink It for Reddit”
Thank you! That looks promising. I’ll give it a shot.
Roads. Being in Harris County, I'm not super jazzed about paying taxes to fund the endless highway expansions and "asphaltization" of the area. I'd rather they use that money to build a half decent city with half decent public transit. I'm not just talking about Houston itself, but the entire county. In a civilized country, I'd be able to take a train from Mont Belvieu to Katy (and then promptly evacuate).
RSS reader. This is a service I could self-host, I just... haven't yet. Instead, I've paid for Inoreader and then BazQux for the past few years because "I'll get around to it one day".
I actually miss the semi-social popularity scoring of Inoreader. It would show, for each feed item, how many other people read that feed item. The read count would also be colored gray, yellow, or red, depending on how popular that feed item was relative to other items from the same feed. It was a useful way of identifying popular items in each feed, such as actually important news stories or great blog posts.
I've always thought it would be neat to build a minimally federated RSS reader that replicates that social feature of showing "how many people have read this, how popular is it compared to other items in this feed". Almost like the Pinboard of feed readers, but self-hosted and open-source.
https://webtoons.com
They're a website where authors can publish "long-strip" digital comics (i.e. webtoons). And relevant to me, it's one of the primary places you can read official translations of Korean comics (i.e. manhwa).
For the most part, I generally do enjoy using their site. They're one of the more "generous" webtoon platforms. Almost every series that's still in serialization is readable for free, barring 3-10 most recent chapters. You generally just have to pay to read series that have completed, or the most recent chapters of series that are still in serialization.
And you can even use the platform using some 3rd party comic readers (which is bizarre given how litigious their parent company is).
Now that I'm an "adult" and have been wanting to do a better job financially supporting the things I like, I thought about whether it made sense to pay for webtoons in some way. There are a couple completed series that I wouldn't mind reading. But ultimately, I decided against it because their pricing structure is insane.
On a lot of webtoons platforms, https://webtoons.com included, you pay-per-chapter using a virtual currency ("coins"). On webtoons, it's usually around 3 coins (30 cents) a chapter. So if I ever wanted to binge a decently sized manhwa (~200 chapters), it'd cost around $50 dollars. Which I find especially egregious, since I could probably blow through that many chapters in 2-4 hours. I think webtoons does (did?) offer ways to unlock chapters for free, but they were either gated by time (1 chapter/day) or by ads.
(It also doesn't help that there's tons of examples of fan translations with better translations and WAY better typesetting than the officially translationed manhwa on Webtoons)
Idk, that seems pretty fair considering how much the same amount of manga would cost. A lot of these authors are not exactly rolling in the dough either.
Totally fair. The calculus of price to enjoyment never really worked out for me, so I just stick to their free stuff and move on.
My dream would be if they offered something like VIZ or Shonen Jump manga subscriptions , which as far as I can tell are just a flat fee to read as much of their catalog as you want.
If by pay for you mean having the Facebook app milk my phone for data, then yes, I'll navigate Marketplace and messenger in FB's seriously crippled Desktop browser version for mobile.
Has anybody tried to use this? I swear that Facebook set booby traps in their mobile desktop version of the site. It's crippled beyond belief and sends mouse dragging commands through at the most annoying time.
I'll be honest, I didn't even know you could use the mobile web version of Facebook anymore.
It makes me irrationally angry when a mobile website is intentionally made horrible to get people to install an app, which is just a web browser, but worse, but with more invasive permissions. That battle has been lost though, and somehow these scumbags have managed to convince the average person that websites are slow and bad, and that "apps" (which are just websites) are somehow better.
I kind of assumed that every major social media platform basically prohibited you from using them without their app on mobile.
They basically do - it's a fucking nightmare. It's just my only option when I'm picking something up from FB mobile, thought most people are cool with just texting me once the sale is a go.
I got off Instagram, FB, and more several years ago. A couple months ago I decided to try Instagram again as a lot of close friends and family use it regularly and they live far. Thought it may be nice to see what they post. It's exactly what you describe for FB. The site is horrible. Bare minimum. On the computer is "ok"-ish, on Mobile it's a real nightmare. I have no doubt they do it on purpose, obviously, because the app will get way more permissions to gobble up your data, listen to you through your mic, etc. The site is more limited to the browser choice, VPN, etc. which will block it from getting your data.
Side note, after remembering what Instagram is all about, I ended up deleting the app, keeping the account, and only checking it occasionally on the computer. Turns out I basically miss out of 90% of things because everyone posts stories rather than regular (permanent) posts, so unless I check every day, I will not see what I was hoping to see. Might as well not bother at all.
Man, it all sounds so familiar.
If that's the world our families and friends choose to live in, so be it. Maybe they'll come around to our 'slow food' diet of email, text and Tildes one day.
I never actually deleted my instagram account that I made shortly after they were acquired by Facebook, but before they started messing with things. I remember when I opened the app, the feed would literally be “here are the posts from people you follow, in chronological order, since last time you opened the app” and only when you finished looking through them and kept scrolling did it start feeding you random other posts.
I still occasionally open it (maybe a few dozen times a year) but I can’t even remember the last time I’ve seen the actual posts by my actual friends/follows appearing in the top five posts that instagram wants to throw at me. It’s basically only there for when my friends or family want to share a direct link to some short form video they found.
Yes, true. Now, if you want to see just thing from the people you follow you have to hit this little arrow at the top and choose that option.
I use IbisPaintX a lot for taking notes while playing games, and AllTrails occasionally. Both have a subscription model -- Ibis is $28 and Alltrails is $36 per year. I just do not consider a subscription reasonable for apps that I use in a very limited way. Both I believe have some kind of social networking aspect, which I don't use at all. I'd rather be able to just buy the app and be done.
Ibis is great. Frankly, there are a lot of great drawing apps for Android. Who needs Procreate anyway
I have a lot of georeferenced PDF topographic maps which I'd like to use an Android app called Avenza maps for, but they want a subscription to view any good amount of your own maps and I simply don't want to pay a subscription for that. I'd even be ok with a one off purchase but the idea of paying ongoing amounts for what I use as an offline app with data I have saved locally irks me. I ended up going to the effort of tracking down a previous version of the app (back when it was called PDF maps) which lets me have all my maps, even if I did have to run it through app cloner to make it work due to it complaining about not being designed for modern Android.
In terms of things I tend to DIY instead of paying for one example is cutting my own hair - I don't need anything fancy so spending a bit of time with clippers, scissors, and a mirror every few weeks means I get to both save a noticeable amount of recurring spending and don't have to worry about organising time out of my day.
I also DIY the vast majority of my vehicle maintenance rather than spending money on mechanics, the only things I get other people to do are the mandatory roadworthy inspections each year (which must be done by a mechanic) and tyre fitting/wheel alignments (for my cars and road bikes, I normally do tyres myself for the adventure and dirt bikes).