I am fucking scared of the mass surveilence nightmare direction that the internet and the world as a whole is going towards… C2PA, france hacking itself into citizen phones, the UK anti encryption law, EU’s chat control, etc. Im also sick of and hate the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality that corpos try to push. I dont wanna know how the world will look like in 5-10 years.
I also recently noticed that everything get’s more and more hostile towards the user. I observed so many apps and Websites that have hidden some big features behind a paywall recently - as if they don’t already make enough money with data collection and selling. First they make you comfortable with these QoL Stuff and then they steal it away, holding it in front of your face and want you to pay for it now, something that was free for years. It’s filthy…
I bought a lifetime license for the Spark email app. I even sent them some extra money when I learned their engineers are in the UK. Then they pushed out an update that removed the feature that caused me to buy their app in the first place, locked half of the other features behind a subscription, and said that since it’s an “update”, the previous lifetime subscriptions don’t count. Mother fuckers! Fuck the Spark team. I uninstalled it, gave them a 1 star review, and installed Fair Email. It’s a better app in most ways, is completely free, and is privacy focused. The only thing is that it’s missing the one feature I paid for, which was to be able to long press an email, tap “search for all emails by sender”, and then bulk action them. It was really useful for bulk deleting all Amazon confirmations and stuff like that.
I’ve had a couple pieces of software revoke my lifetime licenses when they switched to fully subscription (even though they swore lifetime license holders would be grandfathered). I get needing to make money to pay your software engineers to keep pushing out updates but man I hate this subscription hell we live in now
Software engineers have always needed to be paid, and companies got along just fine without subscription services. Bill Gates was the richest man in the world for the majority of my lifetime without a subscription service. The greed these days is immeasurable and needs to stop. It’s ruining everything! I just noticed today that they’re using the information band of the HD radio waves to push text ads to the car stereo while songs are playing now, instead of delivering song info like they said they’d do when they captured those public frequencies.
I get that not everything can be free. I’m more than willing to pay for sites and services that have value to me. But companies constantly selling your data, blasting you with advertisements and then having the gall to ask you to pay for the pleasure? It’s blatant rent-seeking.