HackThePlanet

It's too much crap now, the prices are going up, but the services are increasingly crap.

Last year, I cancelled my subscription and switched to self-hosting with Navidrome. It does what it's supposed to do, it does it well, no bullshit algorithms, and there are enough integrations to even provide a basic "discover this new song," "create a playlist the way I want," etc.

Strange, I thought that paying more and more to get, in most cases, less and less was a good business move.

For those who may have forgotten, the little prince of Meta more or less started with Facemash, a site that displayed two photos side by side and asked users to vote for which person was "more attractive," using a mechanism similar to "Hot or Not."

All "funny" if it weren't for:

• Privacy: using photographs of people without consent would often violate regulations and, in many countries, personal data protection laws.
• Consent: the people depicted had not chosen to participate.
• Objectification: asking people to rank solely based on their physical appearance can be seen as a form of objectification and can contribute to a disrespectful environment.
• Possible psychological effects: this type of public comparison can affect self-esteem and exclude or humiliate some people.

Not to mention what happened with Cambridge Analytica.

What do people expect from a mind like that?

It's truly touching how that man says, "It must have cost a fortune" for what his employees did for him. People who dedicate even a small portion of their working time to helping people, even a small gesture, and not just for money, deserve better in this world.

Steam seems to be one of the very few services (perhaps even the only one I know of) that hasn't transformed its product by following the trend of enshittification. I have many games on Steam, purchased years and years ago, many of which are no longer available, but I can still download and play, having purchased them back then.

I really appreciate Steam, but from what I read every day, I don't think "forever" exists, especially online. If we think of it in terms of "everything's in the cloud," well, the cloud costs money, so unless they somehow dispose of data, I don't know if a company can actually keep every single piece of data "forever" while maintaining a good price and not losing out or burdening consumers.

The same goes for physical copies: I could lose them, break them, my house burn down, and I'd lose everything, whereas if they were in the cloud, I wouldn't have any problems. The point is that consumers should be allowed, where possible, to export what they've purchased. Honestly, I think that anyone who bought movies or other content on some platform and then years later discovered that the company had removed them and they could no longer use them (or worse, the same content was on another paid platform) would honestly bother me.

I don't doubt that digital is more accessible and readily available than other formats. The biggest problem is that few services allow me to download locally what I've purchased.

So, for me, you're not buying anything, you're just renting for the long term.

Honestly, I'm tired of buying digital only to suddenly find out I can no longer use what I purchased. For these services, I prefer self-hosting or any method that allows me to have a working copy locally. At least I can decide what to do with the digital content.