The real cost of enshittification is that they make it impossible for others to run honest business.
Who will pay a subscription for privacy respecting services when there are a dozen free alternatives. True cost of running online business has been completely hidden from users and for so long that they will never accept those that want to cover the costs upfront.
e.g. how many of you remain on Lemmy if instance owners asked for a monthly fee to cover their server costs?
I’d do it.
That’s the neoliberal secret – you have to play the game, no matter how immoral the rules.
Well, not entirely. We can move out to the wilderness and live off the land with very minimal interaction with civilization. We don’t because iPhones and medicine are too good to give up.
No, we can’t.
There’s eight billion of us which is way higher then the earth’s natural carrying capacity.
In maybe a hundred years we’ll have a frontier again.
If they are 100% transparent in regard to where the money goes, I’m in. The problem with something like youtube premium is not that it’s unaffordable to the majority of users. It’s that at this point you have to assume that they don’t need the subscription fee to cover their costs, but to shove that money up some CEOs or shareholders asses. Yeah that’s not gonna happen unless they force me to and even then I’d think twice about if I really need that service.
Kind of surprised (and a bit disappointed) you didn’t get more replies saying “I already pay”. Which does admittedly support your point!
p.s. I already pay.
I used to donate to BBSes, and my BBS ran on donations, so that’s how I’d approach the issue.
We should hear about these costs more often, see emcouragement posts towards donating and stuff. I’ve seen some admins did these.
Depends honestly but there’s a fee I’d be willing to pay to support if there was ongoing development and efforts for things user privacy and responsible moderation.
The last two words of my username will official disappear by that point. And it’s not like someone other than me is already referring to themself as “Resol” without a suffix anyway.
A few but nowhere near enough. I do pay a few “optional” subscriptions to support good services but not many
I’d pay if the price was reasonable.
Would you pay $10/m for a search engine?
$10 per month? Probably not.
$5 maybe as long as the search results are good and accurate.
I run my own Lemmy instance, I already pay $23.00 a month just to be here.
