Subscription models are the thin end of the wedge of enshittification.
This you know: the years travel fast, and time after time I done the tell. But this ain't onebody's tell. It's the tell of us all, and you've got to listen it and to 'member, 'cause what you hears today you got to tell the newborn tomorrow. I's looking behind us now into history back.
Imagine a world of television. No streaming, mind. Broadcast television. You had to orient your day around what you wanted to watch, if it was even possible. Or you had to buy expensive equipment to use terrible UIs to try and make an inferior copy of what you wanted to watch at a given time.
We weren't animals of course. We had this spiffy thing called "cable". With a cable package you could get a dozen channels clearly instead of maybe two clear ones and a half-dozen more fuzzy ones via the antennae. Life was great! But ... it was about to get better. Because the cable companies had cooked up...
PREMIUM CABLE!
And the centrepiece of premium cable was specialty channels, the most popular of which were the movie ones! Just think! You could get movies in their entirety, not hacked and slashed for television audiences. Not torn apart limb from limb by commercial inserts. You'd watch a movie from beginning to end, non-stop, and could do this 24 hours a day, if you liked, all for the price of seeing two movies in theatres per month. (And back then theatres were dirt cheap by comparison to today!)
O frabjous joy!
No commercials. You paid a subscription for these channels, so no commercials.
And then the commercials started.
It started off sanely enough. A scattering of "hand-selected" commercials between movies/episodes/whatever. (And, weirdly, despite the cable companies having opened a new stream of revenue, prices edged up a bit for the premium channels.) Then it was 10-15 minutes of solid commercials between movies/episodes/whatever and they didn't seem too discriminating in what they advertised. Almost as if it was "anybody who paid" instead of "hand-selected".
Then, in the more traditionally TV-oriented fare, with episodes, rather than full movies. the specialty channels started putting commercials during the episodes.
Salami tactics. Slice by slice. Prices edged up. Services got worse. And ads infested everything. Until today you can't even check out what's showing without being flooded with ads.
Subscription models are not a bulwark against ads.
I just tried asking perplexity.ai about that and … SURPRISE! … it said it wouldn't help me do something "unethical" (because apparently destroying an unethical system is unethical).