I opened Spotify this morning to be greeted by a modal popup with a “sponsored recommendation”.
Why am I seeing ads if I’m already paying for the premium plan!? 😑
Totally agree—paying for Spotify Premium should mean no ads, period. These “sponsored recommendations” feel like a sneaky way to double dip. It’s just corporate greed masked as personalization.
Spotify is injecting sponsored content into Premium , they’re double-dipping —subscription money and advertiser cash. That’s how big tech works and play with us.
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If you’re not paying you are the product. If you ARE paying you are STILL the product. This is how big tech works.
Basically every computer hardware manufacturer is collecting telemetry and sending it home. If you’re using MacOS or Windows, your OS is doing it aswell
Or Android, or iOS, or a Chromebook, or whatever other OS you’re using next year, if it isn’t some sort of Linux/UNIX system… and even some of those might not be great, but at least you can find out.
Tbh i have used linux on my home pc for years now and now they are very polished products , except most corporate apps are not there !
Which corporate apps?
Perhaps I’m lucky, but I rarely have an issue.
Adobe , microsoft office , catia etc etc etc
I mean… Android and ChromeOS are Linux underneath. MacOS is… related to Unix. Hang on, I need to look up that lineage…
Also Lineage.
Edit: MacOS used/uses the Mach kernel, and uses code “derived from BSD”, vague as Wikipedia is. That could mean it’s a whole copy-paste or that it just borrows ideas from BSD.
It has a history in the US anti trust (when the laws really worked)
MacOS has userland tools from some FreeBSD version (quite obsolete, IIRC). Also there’s a port of bhyve called xhyve for MacOS. Its kernel I wouldn’t expect to have much in common with BSDs.
Android isn’t in that list if you’re using something like LineageOS or GrapheneOS.
I suspect that’s a fraction of a percent of Android devices, though.
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I wouldn’t know about market share, but why would market share be a disqualifier to your statement? GrapheneOS and LineageOS are both massive projects with a lot of users. It should be mentioned for those that might be interested to know that they have an option for privacy. Not saying you were doing this, but I hate the defeatist attitude that everything tracks so why try? It’s wrong.
I use LineageOS and Linux and FOSS apps/software and selfhost services… if it’s something you care about, you can regain control and privacy over your data.
You become the product with name, address, and payment details attached to the account for improved demographic data for them to collect. Win win.
But you’re paying for the GOOD recommendations now, not the free bad ones… /s
That’s not how big tech works, it’s how DRM works. It is possible to sell music/games/movies in an ethical way, without DRM.
In the immortal words of James Stephanie Sterling “corporations don’t just want some money. They want all of the money”
Because why make money off you one way, when they can make money off you two ways?
It seems you can turn it off by touching “what’s this?” or “learn more” the next time you see one of these.
Really shitty that they don’t even put this as a setting though.
You are always the product when you do not own physical or digital non-DRMed copies of your media.
If you can’t reliably and repeatedly play your music in the middle of nowhere 50 miles away from any internet signal, you are the product. Download MP3s and take your music back.
And people on the lemmy.world instance wonder why we fight for the right to talk about piracy.
The lesson is that corporations will take, take, take no matter what. They will never honor any kind of social contract, and will always abuse anyone and everyone for profit to the maximum extent they are able.
So stop letting them take advantage of you.
And if they make a mistake, “my bad”. You make a mistake and it’s $100 in fees.
Unless, usually, they are a not for profit organization.
Or at least not a corporation that is expected to provide infinite growth for their shareholders.
And push for legislation that doesn’t allow em to do this in the first place.
Cause it doesn’t make it right, but on some level it’s hard to blame them for pushing the limits, if there’s no resistance or repercussion. That’s how we ended up in this mess.
Tech moves fast. Government moves slow. Most of these issues boil down to legislative failures.
I go hard when it comes to this. Firefox + uBlock Origin, use open source alternatives, don’t communicate outside of Signal, 2FA on everything, you name it. And it’s exhausting at times, not gonna lie. But my effort reinforces my sentiment that it shouldn’t fall to the consumer to put in all this effort just to have some a basic, healthy blend of convenience, privacy, and security.
Might I add, I hate the way every user-facing UI has devolved into the Youtube Shorts / TikTok “doomscrolling” swipe-UI now. There seems to be absolutely not a single braincell left in UI development to even consider the actual use case of the interface.
It’s all just:
- Monkey see UI to build.
- Moneky see TikTok big.
- Monkey do.
Not sure what this has to do with the post. You don’t need to swipe to dismiss that modal.
Hold on! This is a modal?! That’s even worse, I had these card-style things as scrollable cards before! 😧
what’s worse about it? You just need to touch “DISMISS”
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they made this tiktok change a few months ago but reverted back after backlash
That is literally what non-Open Source/capitalism is like:
- You don’t pay, you are the product
- You pay, you are the product and you pay for it
no, you pay spotify so they can give Joe Rogan money to make up bullshit every day.
Enshittification in action.
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, it’s everywhere. Once a platform has lock-in from users it turns its attention to vendors. Then once they’re locked in it rakes in the profits until nobody can tolerate it any more and something else takes its place.
What I really love about commercials is that if I click on them and order a life time subscription of whatever product they’re selling, I’m still gonna get the same commercials.
People defend intrusive advertising by appealing to some sort of social contract (ie you suffer through these things in order to get Spotify or whatever for free) but it’s not a social contract if the platform holds all the cards
Are we getting Spotify for free, if we’re buying premium?
The problem is you can’t “buy” products any more. Companies see that as interest, and then start to throw additional advertising to see how much they can get away with. Fuck that shit.
They’ve also run almost any way to do it outside of their ecosystems. If I want to listen to happy hardcore music, I have to hope spotify has it, but it’s rare to find that on most playlists, I’d have to go spend thousands of dollars for the same experience that Spotify offers, and that’s to own every track I’m even curious about.
Well we can always pirate !
Yo ho, yo ho!
