Adobe runs what must be one of the largest deceptive rebills. The vast majority of users signing up for a monthly plan do not realize that it is actually an "annual plan, billed monthly" and thus that if they cancel after one month (for example) they'll be billed for the remaining 11 immediately. I honestly don't know how they haven't faced FTC action for this, as it's been their primary model for 5-10 years now.
> actually an "annual plan, billed monthly" and thus that if they cancel after one month (for example) they'll be billed for the remaining 11 immediately
I don't know if this is a recent policy change, but it is not the complete amount but only 50% of the remaining annual amount as per their website[1].
If it were something involving physical goods or services I can understand, but 50% penalty is still a crazy amount for a hosted software service.
I am not sure why this should face FTC or any similar mechanism to prevent "deception".
It's written right there:
US$22.99/mo
Annual, billed monthly
And if you slightly scroll down the very first question is how much it costs:
> There are several Creative Cloud plans that include Photoshop. You can purchase it as a standalone app for US$22.99/mo. for the annual billed monthly plan or opt for annual billing at US$263.88/yr.
Buying it with the annual billing would save you 1$ per month.
I have seen this model used elsewhere: if you opt in for the yearly subscription, you still pay per month but you save X% over the monthly subscription.
Not sure what could they do to make it more obvious, besides writing big: we only offer yearly subscriptions, although you can pay monthly..
Edit: if you click on buy it, it leads to another option too, the monthly one. Is this the scam one? Because it says you cancel any time...
Edit again: it seems that they did quite some nasty stuff in the past and then US sued them, so now they are more transparent about their subscriptions.
God bless such organizations that sue the hell out of such bad actors until they behave well.
"Annual, billed monthly" is the deception. That's not a common thing and most users just see it as normal month-to-month billing. Annual billing still having a discount just adds to the confusion.
IIRC it used to just say “annual” in some words, then the actual terms included the obligation to pay 12 months or pay a cancellation fee. I remember (a while ago when this made headlines) seeing a screenshot of the plans without it being clearly underscored as “annual, paid monthly”.
We successfully stopped paying for a collection of Adobe products that were for a student license last year. We randomly were charged again in January and February of this year and when I called they couldn't find any records of charges. They recommended contesting the charges on the card and we've not been charged since. Still, crazy that they couldn't even verify they charged my card.
I will never do subscriptions. As you mentioned, the fact that you you have to "successfully stop an automatic payment" is an experience that I'm not willing to go through.
I don’t get it, honestly. It’s very clear. You get a discount for an annual commitment and they let you pay monthly. It’s super clear which you’re signing up for when you do it. I’m in the UK, and there’s a 14 day cooling off period on the plans too, unless you buy the full blown annual one.
I’m no adobe supporter generally, and sure they could do more, but they take an awful lot of flak for people who won’t read two lines of text and then scream bloody murder.
Shown by the video embedded in [1] (which has a screenshot at 2:00), Adobe changed their sign-up process and added those clear options after being sued by the US for deceptive subscription fees.
For me the scummy part is that you can't cancel the recurring subscription in advance. If my renewal date is 2 months from now and I try to cancel they will charge me a fee immediately and end the subscription. The only way to cancel without charge is to come back right as the rebill is about to occur. There is no excuse for that other than they want to fuck over as many people as possible.
When I tried to cancel a regular monthly subscription, they tried to force me to pay a fee to be able to cancel the subscription, and they don't let you disconnect your payment methods. Luckily, I used paypal so I could unauthorise them on paypal. If this happened again to me I would be contacting the consumer rights organisation my country has.
I posted elsewhere in this thread that when I tried to cancel, and discovered that I was actually paying for an annual plan on a monthly basis, I told their support person I'd be speaking with the local consumer affairs regulator[1]. They instantly waived the cancellation fee. I'm tempted to think they've had some trouble with regulators on this issue before.
I just went back through the sign up process to check and it seems pretty obvious these days? I got three options at checkout annual billed monthly, monthly, annual.
I hate annual billed monthly but the wording isn't hidden.
> Adobe knowingly "trapped" customers into annual subscriptions, the FTC alleged.
> Adobe prioritized profits while spending years ignoring numerous complaints from users struggling to cancel costly subscriptions without incurring hefty hidden fees, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged in a lawsuit Monday.
> According to the FTC, Adobe knew that canceling subscriptions was hard but determined that it would hurt revenue to make canceling any easier, so Adobe never changed the "convoluted" process. Even when the FTC launched a probe in 2022 specifically indicating that Adobe's practices may be illegal, Adobe did nothing to address the alleged harm to consumers, the FTC complaint noted. Adobe also "provides no refunds or only partial refunds to some subscribers who incur charges after an attempted, unsuccessful cancellation."
I think it's still not great. The annual/monthly plan says:
>Annual, billed monthly
>US$22.99/mo
>Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days
There's a popup you can open with more information, but that just says:
>If you cancel after 14 days, your service will continue until the end of that month's billing period, and you will be charged an early termination fee.
It doesn't tell you anywhere what that fee is, and I can't find any link to a page with more information.
Should adobe only offer an annual subscription up front and a monthly rolling bill? Should they not offer a discount for people who want to make an annual commitment but don’t have the cash flow for the annual spend all in one go?
Almost every single one of Adbobe post on HN has a top comment about this evil subscription plan.
I fell for it once. But I’m in India so I just cancelled my debit card and that was that. Good luck to them to chase me through legal means in India. It was still bit of a hassle though.
> But I’m in India so I just cancelled my debit card and that was that.
i also use separate cards for everything, just through privacy.com, so i also can just cancel things. services have started falsely blocking it for abuse though which is really sad :/
I looked at their plans a few years back and it was very clear that they had 3 payment options: Monthly, Annual, and Annual billed Monthly. Of course if you get the third option, getting out of the contract is going to cost you. Otherwise what would ever be the point of choosing the Monthly plan when both Annual options have a discount for going with a longer subscription period?
It seems like this would/should be covered under Australia's unfair contracts law, which requires the term to have a legitimate interest as well as being transparent (which I dont think would be met if they are charging 50% of the remainder, when they would have been happy for you to get a monthly subscription and cancel after a month, only having spent a fifth of what they would charge for termination)
But you know what? Karma’s a bitch. I think I am likely not alone in having used a cracked version of photoshop for far, far more time than I ever did an actual paid up copy.
I’m not unaware that piracy was part of their strategy for market penetration, and I guess it’s now a case of “we have the market cornered, let’s monetise”.
Yeah this is terrible, I remember for creative suite there used to be some weird workaround where you could switch your plan to the cheapest one (I think it was Photoshop+Lightroom) and then cancel, and then it would not charge you for the remaining time. I wonder if that still works.
I would love to know how this goes in the Netherlands where we have strict rules on this. If it's not really clear rules dictate the customer is right, so that yearly subscription is simply a monthly subscription.
I have one of those "annual plan, billed monthly". How the hell do I figure out when I initially signed for it? Along the way, I got two free months for getting a Logitech mouse, does that change my annual month?
When you're logged in at https://account.adobe.com/plans, click the first link in the left sidebar with your current plan, it should mention the day you signed up.
I still don't see why this is a point against Adobe. When you select a plan, they very clearly give you 3 options. Monthly, Annual billed monthly, and Annual prepaid. The Annual billed monthly is just flat-out better for end users over prepaid. Why do people want to get rid of it? Because some people FAFO when trying to get an annual price while still being able to cancel any time?
I do not like Adobe in the slightest, but it's not because of their billing practices.
Interestingly, just fyi, they do a reasonable-person test when trying these cases. That means they literally pull 100 people off the street and ask each one to go through the funnel and then give them a quiz with questions like "How much am I going to be billed?"
So if people are confused, it's basically on you, regardless of whether you think you were being clear about the terms.
Signing a contract where, even if you stop using the company's service or having anything to do with the company, you still have to keep paying them nevertheless... sounds like one of those types of deals† that we invented the concept of "inalienable rights" to prevent companies from offering.
† I.e. the type of deal where the individual is being asked to trade away something they cannot reasonably evaluate the net present value of (their own future optionality in a future they can't predict) — which will inevitably be presented by the company offering the deal, in a way that minimizes/obscures this loss of optionality. In other words, it's a deal that, in being able to make it, has the same inherent flaws as indentured servitude does — just with money instead of labor.
Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care. The AI features in Photoshop are the best around in my experience and come in handy constantly for all sorts of touchup work.
Anyway I don't really think they deserve a lot of the hate they get, but I do hope this encourages development of viable alternatives to their products. Photoshop is still pretty much peerless. Illustrator has a ton of competitors catching up. After Effects and Premiere for video editing are getting overtaken by Davinci Resolve -- though for motion graphics it is still hard to beat After Effects. Though I do love that Adobe simply uses JavaScript for its expression and scripting language.
> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care.
It's because nobody actually wants that.
Artists don't like AI image generators because they have to compete with them, not because of how they were trained. How they were trained is just the the most plausible claim they can make against them if they want to sue OpenAI et al over it, or to make a moral argument that some kind of misappropriation is occurring.
From the perspective of an artist, a corporation training an AI image generator in a way that isn't susceptible to moral or legal assault is worse, because then it exists and they have to compete with it and there is no visible path for them to make it go away.
Most artists would prefer not to compete with an AI image generator that has been trained on their own artwork without their permission, for obvious reasons.
I went through a phase of using the A.I. tools to touch up photos and thought they were helpful. If I needed to add another row of bricks to a wall or remove something they get it done. I haven’t used it in a few months because I’m taking different photos than I was back then.
> or to make a moral argument that some kind of misappropriation is occurring.
They can also make a legal argument that the training set will fully reproduce copyrighted work. Which is just an actual crime as well as being completely amoral.
> because then it exists and they have to compete with it
The entire point of copyright law is: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Individual artists should not have to "compete" against a billion dollar corporation which freely engages in copyright violations that these same artists have to abide by.
>Artists don't like AI image generators because they have to compete with them
I always wonder why people make statements like this. Anyone that knows more than one artist knows that artists uses these tools for a variety of reasons and aren't nearly as scared as random internet concern trolls make them out to be.
> From the perspective of an artist, a corporation training an AI image generator in a way that isn't susceptible to moral or legal assault is worse
That's ignoring the fact that an AI image generator trained without infringing on existing works would have way worse quality, because of the reduced amount and quality of the training set.
I'd say that is a bit of an ungenerous characterization. Is it possible that it could be both? That while artists maybe do feel under attack in terms of competition, that there is a genuine ethical dilemma at hand?
If I were an artist, and I made a painting and published it to a site which was then used to train an LLM, I would feel as though the AI company treated me disingenuously, regardless of competition or not. Intellectual property laws aside, I think there is a social contract being broken when a publicly shared work is then used without the artist's direct, explicit permission.
Adobe isn't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be more legally compliant, because they see that as a market opportunity. Otoh, artists complain about legal compliance of AIs not because that is what they care about, but because they see that as their only possible redress against a phenomenon they find distasteful. A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.
Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something. There are all kinds of things people and companies do which I dislike but for which there's no just basis for regulating. If Adobe properly licenses all their training data artists don't have a right to say "well i think this is bad for creativity and puts my job at risk, ban it!!!" Or more precisely, they have a right to say that, but no moral justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it.
I hate Adobe's subscription model as much as the next guy and that's a good reason to get annoyed at them. Adobe building AI features is not.
> A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.
Quite an assertion. Why exactly would this be true?
The ship has sailed, but I can understand artists feeling that no matter how any AI is trained prospectively, it was only made possible because the methods to do so were learned through unethical means - we now know the exact model architectures, efficient training methods and types of training data needed so that companies like Adobe can recreate it with a fraction of the cost.
We obviously can never unscramble that egg, which is sad because it probably means there will never be a way to make such people feel OK about AI.
I'm curious why you think it would be worse for everybody? This argument seems to depend on the assumption that if something makes AI less viable then the situation for human beings is worse overall. I don't think many actual people would accept that premise.
“A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.”
Care to elaborate?
Also, saying artists only concern themselves with the legality of art used in AI because of distaste when there are legal cases where their art has been appropriated seems like a bold position to take.
It’s a practice founded on scooping everything up without care for origin or attribution and it’s not like it’s a transparent process. There are people that literally go out of their way to let artists know they’re training on their art and taunt them about it online. Is it unusual they would assume bad faith from those purporting to train their AI legally when participation up till now has either been involuntary or opt out? Rolling out AI features when your customers are artists is tone deaf at best and trolling at worst.
They don't have to be motivated by ethics. I'm fine with them grudgingly doing ethical things because their customer base is all artists, many of whom would look for an alternative product.
While I agree about Adobe behaving more ethically, I suspect they simply talked to their customers, and decided they didn't have much choice. CELSYS, who makes Clip Studio, suffered a backlash and pulled their initial AI features: https://www.clipstudio.net/en/news/202212/02_01/
Probably didn't help that Clip Studio is predominantly used by Japanese artists, and virtually all models capable of producing anime-style images were trained on a dataset of their own, stolen pixiv art.
I would describe my business relationship with Adobe as:
"hostage"
They annually harass me with licensing checks and questionnaires because they really hate you if you run Photoshop inside a VM (my daily driver is Linux), although it is explicitly allowed. Luckily, I don't need the Adobe software that often. But they hold a lot of important old company documents hostage in their proprietary file formats. So I can't cancel the subscription, no matter how much I'd like to.
Even if they’re “trying”, it’s moot if the result isn’t clearly more ethical, and with the proliferation of stolen imagery on their stock image service (which they use to train their models), the ethics of their models are very much not clear.
If I saw news of a huge purge of stolen content on their stock image service with continued periodic purges afterwards (and subsequent retraining of their models to exclude said content), I might take the claim more seriously.
Now that would have been a really interesting thing for them to start a conversation about on Bluesky. They would have got some genuine engagement if they wanted it.
Much better than the transparently vapid marketing-speak
I think, part of the fiasco is about that engagement posters are not really welcomed on Bluesky. And, "What’s fueling your creativity right now?” is a pure engagement post, contributing nothing on its side of the conversation. Hence, it's more like another attempt to harvest Adobe's subscribers. — For X/Twitter-bound marketing it's probably fine, at least, much what we had become used to, but it totally fails the Bluesky community. (Lesson leaned: not all social media are the same.)
> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical
Adobe is cannibalizing their paid C-Suite artists by pumping out image generators to their enterprise customers. How is that ethical? They are double dipping and screwing over their longtime paying artists
This is I think a narrow viewpoint that assumes the AI will ever get truly as good as a human artist. Will it get good enough for most people? Probably, but if not Adobe then four others will do the same thing, and as another commenter pointed out Adobe is the only one even attempting to make AI tools ethically. I think the hate is extremely misdirected.
AI tech and tools aren’t just going to go away, and people aren’t going to just not make a tool you don’t like, so sticking your head in the sand and pretending like it will stop if you scream loud enough is not going to help, you should instead be encouraging efforts like Adobe’s to make these tools ethically.
I've never heard anyone (at least not anyone who wasn't already using GIMP) complain about the concept of paying for it, it's always been the way Adobe tries to squeeze extra money out of you. First it was bundles where you'd have to buy software you didn't need to get what you do. Then it was a subscription. Also, each CS version seemed to add very little for the price.
The best? I tried the Photoshop AI features to clean up a old photo for the first time this week and it crashed every time. After a bunch of searching I found a post identifying problem - it always crashes if there are two or more faces in the photo. Guess someone forgot to test on the more than one person edge case.
Step 1. Make a stock photos library for everyone to upload.
Step 2. Use that stock photo library to train your AI without letting users opt out. You couldn't remove photos without accepting the licence.
Step 3. Allow users to use AI generated art on said stock library, even further ignoring artists by regurgitating art from other models.
Step 4. Force new licences to users that use any file as potential training data.
Step 5. Act shocked when everyone is mad.
> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data
I was actually contacted by someone at Adobe for a chat about disability representation and sensitivity in Japan because they were doing research to gauge the atmosphere here and ensure that people with disabilities were represented, and how those representations would be appropriate for Japanese culture. It really blew my mind.
People hate bad AI images, because they hate bad images, period. They don't hate good AI images, and when they see great AI images, they don't even realize they are made by AI.
It's true, there's a deluge of bad art now, and it's almost entirely AI art. But it's not because AI models exist or how they're trained - it's because marketers[0] don't give a fuck about how people feel. AI art is cheap and takes little effort to get - it's so cheap and low-effort, that on the lower end of quality scale, there is no human competition. It makes no economic sense to commission human labor to make art this bad. But with AI, you can get it for free - and marketing loves this, because, again, they don't care about people or the commons[1], they just see an ability to get ahead by trading away quality for greater volume at lower costs.
In short: don't blame bad AI art on AI, blame it on people who spam us with it.
--
[0] - I don't mean here just marketing agencies and people with marketing-related job titles, but also generally people engaging in excessive promotion of their services, content, or themselves.
[1] - Such as population-level aesthetic sensibilities, or sanity.
I don't know for sure about the common usage, but personally my use of AI in Photoshop are things like replacing a telephone pole with a tree, or extending a photo outside of frame, which is much different than just generating entire images. It is unfortunate that this usage of generative AI is lumped in with everything else.
I still use it, and might upgrade to their latest version.
It's fine as a way of making shitposts, but I don't know if it's a professional-grade graphics editor - but I'm not a professional myself, so what do I know.
There are a lot of good photoshop alternatives. Most are better at individual use cases than photoshop. For example, nearly all the alternatives are better at designing website comps because they are object-based instead of layer-based.
There are "some" Photoshop wannabes. I still haven't found any program on Linux that can give me anywhere close to the same ease of use and powerful tools that Photoshop has. The example you provided sounds like you want to use Illustrator for your use case anyway.
I'm not pointing fingers in any specific direction, but there is a lot of importance in AI leadership, and with that you're going to see a lot of bot activity and astroturfing to hinder the advancement of competitors. We also see companies such as OpenAI publicly calling out Elon Musk for what appears to be competition-motivated harassment.
So while I think we're all pretty aware of both sides of the image gen discussion and may have differing opinions about that - I think we can all agree that the genie can't be put back in the bottle. This will naturally lead for those that do take advantage of the technology to outpace those which do not.
Also I applaud Adobe's approach to building their models "ethically", yes they are inferior to many competitors, but they work well enough to save significant time and money. They have been very good at honing in what AI is genuinely useful for instead of bolting on a chatbot onto every app like clock radios in the 1980s.
Uh, not sure where you’ve been but Adobe is slavering over using the content its locked-in users create to train its products. It only (seemingly) backed off this approach last year when the cost in terms of subscription revenue got too high. But you’re naive if you think they aren’t desperately planning how to get back to that original plan of owning an ever-growing slice of every bit of human creativity that touches their software.
> Anyway I don't really think they deserve a lot of the hate they get
The dark lesson here is that you avoid hate and bad PR by cutting artists out of the loop entirely and just shipping whatever slop the AI puts out. Maybe you lose 20% of the quality but you don't have to deal with the screaming and dogpiles.
Ethical? You realize most of their training data was obtained by users forced agreement to a EULA with the intention of their art being sold on Adobe’s marketplace without it ever being made explicit their art was going to be used for AI training until much later, right?
There’s no evidence that their generative tools are more ethical.
Even if you believe everything they say, they are lying by omission. For example, for their text to image technology, they never specify what their text language model is trained on - it’s almost certainly CLIP or T5, which is trained on plenty of not-expressly-licensed data. If they trained such a model from scratch - they don’t have enough image bureau data to make their own CLIP, even at 400m images, CLIP only performs well at the 4-7b image-caption pair scale - where’s the paper? It’s smoke and mirrors dude.
There’s a certain personality type that is getting co-opted on social media like Hacker News to “mook” for Adobe. Something on the intersection of a certain obsessive personality and Dunning Kruger.
You are assuming that there is an ethical way to use AI. There are several ethical concerns around using AI, and Adobe is perhaps concerned with one of these (charitably, respecting artists, or a little more cynically, respecting copyright).
Many would argue, myself included, that the most ethical approach towards AI is to not use it. Procreate is a popular digital art program that is loudly taking that position: https://procreate.com/ai
It's a corporation which knows that more of its users are artsy types who care about this than Adobe, which trends a little more professional. I have no idea what position the leadership personally holds but this is very much like DEI in that corporations embrace and discard it opportunistically.
Procreate is also owned by Apple, who is definitely not taking that position. Not saying both can't be true, but if a strong anti-AI stance is what you seek--I would be worried.
> Hey, we're Adobe! We're here to connect with the artists, designers, and storytellers who bring ideas to life. What's fueling your creativity right now?
> Drop a reply, tag a creator, or share your latest work—we'd love to see what inspires you!
That's such a bland, corporate message. It feels totally inauthentic. Do Adobe (a corporation) really "love to see what inspires you" or do they just want engagement for their new account?
I'm not surprised in the slightest that it triggered a pile-on.
I'm not surprised but disheartened that people have so little going on in their life they thing trying to boycott a bsky corporate account is a good use of their time.
I think it's rather the opposite - there's way too much going on in their life, specifically stuff that they have no control over, so they vent all that stress wherever they can.
I’m pretty sure the amount of time and energy it took you to write this post is more or less equal to the amount of time and energy energy it took somebody else to write a post making fun of the Adobe account
Yes, but it's not what social media users want. How about posting tips, small micro courses, behind the scene stories about what motivated some choices in the app, anything useful or endearing? Not just harvesting likes and account names?
This type of vapid nonsense simply isn’t very welcome on Bluesky. Or really, increasingly, _anywhere_ (except LinkedIn, the most absurd of all the social networks); I think its day has largely passed.
The general mood on Bluesky is very opposed to AI, especially AI art. Since Adobe now has AI integrated into their products, people on Bluesky hate them.
From what I've seen Bluesky is kind of the Twitter for artists who dislike AI and don't want their art scraped by Twitter. That one of the most hated companies in the art space decided to appear there too was obviously not going to be received well.
It's likely both. In most large organizations I've worked with, there is a split between true believers and cynics. And often the true believers are so bought in they have trouble recognizing the cynics. There are likely earnest folks behind every bland social media post. Doesn't mean their product is worth anything either way.
The left has spent the last decade proudly bullying everyone for wrongthink, including going after employment and family members. It should come as no surprise then that corporations wouldn’t participate above the bare minimum on a predominantly leftist forum.
I feel like you are misrepresenting things (intentionally or not).
I've heard this narrative from really dishonest people, but I don't know you so can't judge. Maybe it's just a coincidence and you really think that.
Yeah, I'm surprised by how many here are responding with weird Adobe rants. They posted fairly innocuous stuff, were attacked, and ultimately chose to abandon the platform as a result.
This sounds like a bigger indictment of the platform than anything to do with Adobe.
Since when did a damn website have to be a "platform"? Did anyone ask to chat with Time Warner on the public AOL chatrooms of the 90s? Were Digg users interested in hearing from Blockbuster in the 2000s?
Adobe could try to offer virtual "office hours" with employees helping people learn to use the software, give something back to their users. Instead they immediately treated it like another marketing channel with a formulaic and lazy engagement bait question that I'm sure they thought would work the same way it does on Twitter and Instagram.
I'm pretty left leaning and I don't like Bluesky. For me, it's too hostile and too much of an angry echo chamber. X is scattered wildly but I with muting I have been able to shape to get a more reasonable feed.
I don't understand why people struggle with either site. Follow only people you want to see. Both sites allow you to only see posts from those accounts. Problem solved.
Same here. I'd agree with many of the political positions on Bluesky but it looks like the left equivalent of what Truth Social is on the right - Bluesky recently started publishing home addresses of DOGE employees, with the intent seeming to be to target them with violence.
As is the case with most ideological echo chambers, they devolve into struggle sessions. You find the same thing happening in the niche right-wing movement sections of twitter, it's just "this person is secretly indian/jewish" instead of "this person is secretly a racist/xyzphobe".
Twitter has the advantage of a broader range so you can escape that while bluesky is almost exclusively used based on strong ideological motivation. It's raison d'etre at this point is basically and highly political so this was bound to happen.
Likewise here, the amount of just pure made up crap/misinformation on X has definitely increased (perhaps because accounts get paid for views/engagement now) or the algorithm seems to push it more, but it's not an echo chamber.
I have at least 100 words on my X muted word list and it's just about usable.
This is a weird argument because Bluesky doesn't have a "feed"... by default you see only the people you follow unless you subscribe to specific other feeds.
So you followed a bunch of people you didn't like? That says more about you than the platform...
So far, Bluesky hasn't been inserting alt-right nutjobs into my feed like Twitter has.
Bluesky seems to focus on curating your own feed, to the point where mass blocklists will block hundreds or thousands of accounts, and not every blocklist is reliable. The "block first, ask questions later" approach is very freeing and I've been practicing it on social media long before it gained traction on Bluesky.
I expect the platform will be very painful for people who believe everyone should be subjected to their opinion (the people who will cry censorship because Reddit shadow-banned them). Good riddance, I'd say; they can be happy on Twitter with the rest of their kind.
On average, my experience has been a lot better. I'm guessing that's mostly because I had to fight and subdue Twitter to exclusively show me content from the people I follow, combined with social media's general attraction to alt-right nutjobs (and of course, Twitter's owner being an alt-right nutjob doesn't help either).
I find that the extremes of hostility are worse on bluesky, but the average skeet is much less hostile. And there's just straight up fewer skeets to be angry about.
Being familiar only with the street slang for "skeet" and not Bluesky's relatively recent adoption of "skeet" to mean "Bluesky post", my parser really had to do some work to try to understand this sentence.
I don’t use either lately because I’ve found that to be better for mental health overall, but to me it seemed that Bluesky was generally better about staying “on track” when it comes to showing relevant things, once trained. Xitter really, really likes to veer off course and so much as stopping scrolling for a second while an undesired post is on screen is enough for it to start showing more of the same type.
Bsky doesn’t have blue check replies which is a major point in its favor too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worthwhile blue check reply, it’s like if one purposefully dredged up the worst YouTube video comments they could find and pinned them at the top.
Bluesky currently has the kuro5hin "A Group Is It's Own Worst Enemy" effect going on. People who think they claimed land first believe that they get to define the future of the service for everyone else.
It's obnoxious, and if the service truly offers a real alternative to Twitter it needs to squash these brigading groups. I get that people don't want to see the posts of brands...so don't follow them. It's incredibly simple. I don't want furry content but I don't run around the platform complaining that some do.
Maybe it shouldn't have been surprising after Democrats removed abolishing the death penalty from their party platform, but all the Mangione stuff on bluesky was pretty sad to see.
It figures. One's knee-deep in censorship and the other one is more or less free-for-all, so you get high levels of hostility and an extreme range of ideas respectively from the get go.
If a new a Twitter/Bluesky replacement is to promote civil discourse, it will need to _restrict_ reach as a core feature. Which... seems antithetical to a social media platform. But as long as "enragement = engagement" holds true, each new social media platform will eventually devolve into the same kind of cesspool as its predecessors.
People will just go back to Twitter/X, again, because despite all the falling-sky predictions it remains the single most important social media platform of our day. Governments around the world announce actual world-changing news on it - kind of all you need to know.
The Bluesky community is left-leaning and mainly consists of early adopters - basically, a group of active idealists. It's unsurprising that they are highly hostile toward a company with a history of exploitative behavior. Additionally, the current political situation significantly affects their emotional stability, negatively.
I mean, yeah, the place is a kind of minefield these days, but I don't blame people. It just happens.
Bluesky is the worst of old Twitter concentrated into one place. It's some weird mixture of the hall monitors of Mastodon crossed with wannabe members of the weather underground. Like a leftwing Gab full of only Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz types. This sort of of faux outrage at adobe is par for the course - its awful over there.
I have a much different experience on Twitter. It has a much higher tolerance for racism, misogyny, gay/transphobia, and wild conspiracies. It got much worse after the election and I finally bailed on it after the inauguration. I have not missed it.
Bluesky has all that but just in the anti direction. I was hoping for a more absolute of not disparaging anyone based on their race, gender, or sexual preference.
In my experience, that is completely untrue. I think it is more of "you are the company you keep" situation. Bluesky is obviously more socially liberal and therefore, IMO objectively smarter, nicer users and community. On Bluesky you have more control over your experience which makes me wonder how genuine your post is.
The last time I logged into my twitter account (which I use maybe once or twice a year to post about tech or complain to a customer service account) the first thing I saw was a paid ad espousing white nationalism and The Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
I have a very hard time believing that Bluesky is more hostile than Twitter.
The phenomenon at work here is: if product being produced by a profit-seeking enterprise can be rented instead of being sold, said enterprise will eventually find a way to do it, then over time, rather than a single bill, it will attempt to rent out individual aspects of the now product-turned-service, followed by cost cutting that degrades the default service level while introducing additional service levels for which the consumer will have to pay additional fees, and finally making switching away to competitors progressively difficult for the consumer. This is a natural outcome of profit-maximization.
This is the primary reason why creatives despise Adobe despite some people here arguing that it's for the AI art generation. They hate that too but the biggest pain point by far is the toxic business relation you have to maintain to continue to use industry standard tooling.
>Do you want updates? You want new versions? New features? Support?
No. This was a solved problem decades ago. Purchase includes minor version updates, then you keep it for life without updates. Upgrading to the next version is a choice.
Why did we collectively agree that customer choice does not matter?
All the digital artists I know don't use and want new features in Photophop. And more generally, most non-tech businesses values more stability than having new features.
It depends, what are you charging for the new features in the update/version? Twenty years ago, you'd put out a new version and I could go find what new features it had and decide for myself whether those were worth the price you ask to get them. If the answer is yes, I pay and I get the new features. If the answer is no, I don't pay and I keep using the program I already bought.
Why do you think the company is automatically entitlted to rent seeking and the removal of user choice just because they tweaked the ui?
Does a JetBrains style license not address this exactly? You buy the current version and one year of updates. If you want updates after that you have to renew.
All big companies do that for few years now - either with used language or graphics (namely Corporate Memphis and its various uncanny variants) or with both.
It's enough to look at patch notes for mobile apps: these are exactly cutesy, fake friendly. 99% of the time you won't learn what was changed or fixed but instead you get these unrelated comments trying to show how cool company xyz is. It's unironic "hello fellow kids" meme approach.
As a photographer, I have a love/hate relationship with Adobe. I’m not a fan of many aspects of their business, but Lightroom is a (sometimes) excellent product.
On the one hand, I don’t have much sympathy for Adobe. On the other hand, this whole situation is why I am not on social media these days with the exception of HN and niche subreddits.
Even if much of the criticism they receive is warranted, the social media climate is just so incredibly toxic that I want no part of it.
Feels like there has to be a better way to be social on the Internet, but as time goes on I’m increasingly not sure if humans can handle it once a certain scale is reached.
I switched to capture 1 due to how poorly adobe handles fujifilm raw file even today. Workflow wise it is basically the same functions just in different places. Doesn’t take long to get up and running.
Maybe, just maybe, the platforms that we use to engage socially with other human beings don't also have to be organized around engaging commercially with brands.
Thank you. I would not accept a corporate brand sending me text messages. I don't want to "engage" with brands. The less of this garbage on the Internet, the better.
Wish we could separate all that corporate entities on the internet in their own walled social network world. Where they could have all these weird marketing convos like, mcdonald being angry because pepsi "unhahaed" nestle post /s
Then don't follow or engage with their content? You understand that's your option, right?
I actually enjoy Bsky as a replacement for Twitter mostly to keep on top of news (tech and otherwise, the tech often coming from the source), along with a small selection of high profile figures. So I follow those sources and venues.
It is absolutely pathetic that a small mob attacked Adobe -- primarily a super aggressive anti-AI contingent that runs around like a sad torch mob on bsky -- and I hope Adobe return to the platform. It would be nice for people like me, who chose to follow these brands, to see the news from Adobe, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc, and my choice shouldn't be limited by those people.
No, the moral is different: if you’re a company notoriously hostile to creatives, don’t ask in a post “What’s fueling your creativity right now?” - and if you do then don’t be surprised when you get honest answers.
Bluesky audience is certain kind, more left leaning, finding corporations evil. Adobe's experiment shows that it is unlikely any big corp could go there any time until the audience is more diverse, less cancel culture.
Adobe is special. They have a pretty narrow specific audience who are kinda stuck with them, and who they’ve spent the last decade industriously pissing off.
Bluesky _is_ less tolerant than Twitter of “hello, we’re a brand, aren’t we wonderful/funny”, but I think this particular reaction is more about it being Adobe than anything else.
The reaction seems specific to Adobe which has (probably) not been a good steward of its role as a tool for creatives. I don’t think other big corps would get that reaction.
My guess is that most Bluesky users are doing their own thing and never noticed this until after it was over and appeared in the news. But it does seem like there is a large crowd of nasty people in Bluesky, and that seems like a bad sign.
I don't know if I would refer to Adobe as being evil, but they're definitely one of the shittiest software companies in existence. And I'm 100% convinced that they would receive the same type of welcome if they made a xshitter account today.
Not particularly. What they do seem to have is a more artist-heavy community, and that community has been fucked over by Adobe over the last decade or so.
Crocodile tears for the poor company that got drunk on enshittifying its own brand and now has to sleep in it. Adobe's takeover is like it freebased Private Equity and now complains that it has no friends. The TOS change to have AI train on all your art is really what broke people.
Readit News
I don't know if this is a recent policy change, but it is not the complete amount but only 50% of the remaining annual amount as per their website[1].
If it were something involving physical goods or services I can understand, but 50% penalty is still a crazy amount for a hosted software service.
1. https://www.adobe.com/legal/subscription-terms.html
https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/plans.html
I am not sure why this should face FTC or any similar mechanism to prevent "deception".
It's written right there:
US$22.99/mo Annual, billed monthly
And if you slightly scroll down the very first question is how much it costs:
> There are several Creative Cloud plans that include Photoshop. You can purchase it as a standalone app for US$22.99/mo. for the annual billed monthly plan or opt for annual billing at US$263.88/yr.
Buying it with the annual billing would save you 1$ per month.
I have seen this model used elsewhere: if you opt in for the yearly subscription, you still pay per month but you save X% over the monthly subscription.
Not sure what could they do to make it more obvious, besides writing big: we only offer yearly subscriptions, although you can pay monthly..
Edit: if you click on buy it, it leads to another option too, the monthly one. Is this the scam one? Because it says you cancel any time...
Edit again: it seems that they did quite some nasty stuff in the past and then US sued them, so now they are more transparent about their subscriptions.
God bless such organizations that sue the hell out of such bad actors until they behave well.
I’m no adobe supporter generally, and sure they could do more, but they take an awful lot of flak for people who won’t read two lines of text and then scream bloody murder.
https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/adobe-sued-over-subscription-f...
1: https://www.fairtrading.nsw.gov.au/
I hate annual billed monthly but the wording isn't hidden.
> Adobe knowingly "trapped" customers into annual subscriptions, the FTC alleged.
> Adobe prioritized profits while spending years ignoring numerous complaints from users struggling to cancel costly subscriptions without incurring hefty hidden fees, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged in a lawsuit Monday.
> According to the FTC, Adobe knew that canceling subscriptions was hard but determined that it would hurt revenue to make canceling any easier, so Adobe never changed the "convoluted" process. Even when the FTC launched a probe in 2022 specifically indicating that Adobe's practices may be illegal, Adobe did nothing to address the alleged harm to consumers, the FTC complaint noted. Adobe also "provides no refunds or only partial refunds to some subscribers who incur charges after an attempted, unsuccessful cancellation."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/ftc-sues-adobe-o...
>Annual, billed monthly
>US$22.99/mo
>Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days
There's a popup you can open with more information, but that just says:
>If you cancel after 14 days, your service will continue until the end of that month's billing period, and you will be charged an early termination fee.
It doesn't tell you anywhere what that fee is, and I can't find any link to a page with more information.
Deleted Comment
I fell for it once. But I’m in India so I just cancelled my debit card and that was that. Good luck to them to chase me through legal means in India. It was still bit of a hassle though.
Now it’s much easier to deal with the subscription problems due to the new RBI norms.
i also use separate cards for everything, just through privacy.com, so i also can just cancel things. services have started falsely blocking it for abuse though which is really sad :/
Edit: I just clicked on buy, and it leads to what you said. Apparently the monthly one is not mentioned in the front page. Weird.
But you know what? Karma’s a bitch. I think I am likely not alone in having used a cracked version of photoshop for far, far more time than I ever did an actual paid up copy.
I’m not unaware that piracy was part of their strategy for market penetration, and I guess it’s now a case of “we have the market cornered, let’s monetise”.
FTC Takes Action Against Adobe and Executives for Hiding Fees, Preventing Consumers from Easily Cancelling Software Subscriptions
June 17, 2024
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/06/...
I do not like Adobe in the slightest, but it's not because of their billing practices.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/06/...
Interestingly, just fyi, they do a reasonable-person test when trying these cases. That means they literally pull 100 people off the street and ask each one to go through the funnel and then give them a quiz with questions like "How much am I going to be billed?"
So if people are confused, it's basically on you, regardless of whether you think you were being clear about the terms.
† I.e. the type of deal where the individual is being asked to trade away something they cannot reasonably evaluate the net present value of (their own future optionality in a future they can't predict) — which will inevitably be presented by the company offering the deal, in a way that minimizes/obscures this loss of optionality. In other words, it's a deal that, in being able to make it, has the same inherent flaws as indentured servitude does — just with money instead of labor.
Anyway I don't really think they deserve a lot of the hate they get, but I do hope this encourages development of viable alternatives to their products. Photoshop is still pretty much peerless. Illustrator has a ton of competitors catching up. After Effects and Premiere for video editing are getting overtaken by Davinci Resolve -- though for motion graphics it is still hard to beat After Effects. Though I do love that Adobe simply uses JavaScript for its expression and scripting language.
It's because nobody actually wants that.
Artists don't like AI image generators because they have to compete with them, not because of how they were trained. How they were trained is just the the most plausible claim they can make against them if they want to sue OpenAI et al over it, or to make a moral argument that some kind of misappropriation is occurring.
From the perspective of an artist, a corporation training an AI image generator in a way that isn't susceptible to moral or legal assault is worse, because then it exists and they have to compete with it and there is no visible path for them to make it go away.
They can also make a legal argument that the training set will fully reproduce copyrighted work. Which is just an actual crime as well as being completely amoral.
> because then it exists and they have to compete with it
The entire point of copyright law is: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Individual artists should not have to "compete" against a billion dollar corporation which freely engages in copyright violations that these same artists have to abide by.
I always wonder why people make statements like this. Anyone that knows more than one artist knows that artists uses these tools for a variety of reasons and aren't nearly as scared as random internet concern trolls make them out to be.
That's ignoring the fact that an AI image generator trained without infringing on existing works would have way worse quality, because of the reduced amount and quality of the training set.
If I were an artist, and I made a painting and published it to a site which was then used to train an LLM, I would feel as though the AI company treated me disingenuously, regardless of competition or not. Intellectual property laws aside, I think there is a social contract being broken when a publicly shared work is then used without the artist's direct, explicit permission.
I hate Adobe's subscription model as much as the next guy and that's a good reason to get annoyed at them. Adobe building AI features is not.
Quite an assertion. Why exactly would this be true?
Is the implication of this statement that using AI for image editing and creation is inherently unethical?
Is that really how people feel?
We obviously can never unscramble that egg, which is sad because it probably means there will never be a way to make such people feel OK about AI.
Ethics (as opposed to morals) is about codified rules.
The law is a set of codified rules.
So are these really that different (beyond how the law is a hodge-podge and usually a minimum requirement rather than an ideal to reach for)?
Care to elaborate?
Also, saying artists only concern themselves with the legality of art used in AI because of distaste when there are legal cases where their art has been appropriated seems like a bold position to take.
It’s a practice founded on scooping everything up without care for origin or attribution and it’s not like it’s a transparent process. There are people that literally go out of their way to let artists know they’re training on their art and taunt them about it online. Is it unusual they would assume bad faith from those purporting to train their AI legally when participation up till now has either been involuntary or opt out? Rolling out AI features when your customers are artists is tone deaf at best and trolling at worst.
It's sad that it's funny that you think Adobe is motivated by ethical consideration.
Deleted Comment
Let's normalize it.
"hostage"
They annually harass me with licensing checks and questionnaires because they really hate you if you run Photoshop inside a VM (my daily driver is Linux), although it is explicitly allowed. Luckily, I don't need the Adobe software that often. But they hold a lot of important old company documents hostage in their proprietary file formats. So I can't cancel the subscription, no matter how much I'd like to.
If I saw news of a huge purge of stolen content on their stock image service with continued periodic purges afterwards (and subsequent retraining of their models to exclude said content), I might take the claim more seriously.
Much better than the transparently vapid marketing-speak
Adobe is cannibalizing their paid C-Suite artists by pumping out image generators to their enterprise customers. How is that ethical? They are double dipping and screwing over their longtime paying artists
AI tech and tools aren’t just going to go away, and people aren’t going to just not make a tool you don’t like, so sticking your head in the sand and pretending like it will stop if you scream loud enough is not going to help, you should instead be encouraging efforts like Adobe’s to make these tools ethically.
Their sales went crazy because everyone was relentlessly pirating their software.
https://www.adobe.com/fireflyapproach/
(I work for Adobe)
They have burned so much of goodwill that the community is not willing to engage even with positive things now.
This broadly is happening to tech as well.
I was actually contacted by someone at Adobe for a chat about disability representation and sensitivity in Japan because they were doing research to gauge the atmosphere here and ensure that people with disabilities were represented, and how those representations would be appropriate for Japanese culture. It really blew my mind.
https://adobe.design/stories/leading-design/reducing-biased-...
(I work for Adobe)
Law is agreeable hate, in a way. Things that gets enough hate will get regulated out, sooner or later.
People hate bad AI images, because they hate bad images, period. They don't hate good AI images, and when they see great AI images, they don't even realize they are made by AI.
It's true, there's a deluge of bad art now, and it's almost entirely AI art. But it's not because AI models exist or how they're trained - it's because marketers[0] don't give a fuck about how people feel. AI art is cheap and takes little effort to get - it's so cheap and low-effort, that on the lower end of quality scale, there is no human competition. It makes no economic sense to commission human labor to make art this bad. But with AI, you can get it for free - and marketing loves this, because, again, they don't care about people or the commons[1], they just see an ability to get ahead by trading away quality for greater volume at lower costs.
In short: don't blame bad AI art on AI, blame it on people who spam us with it.
--
[0] - I don't mean here just marketing agencies and people with marketing-related job titles, but also generally people engaging in excessive promotion of their services, content, or themselves.
[1] - Such as population-level aesthetic sensibilities, or sanity.
I don't know for sure about the common usage, but personally my use of AI in Photoshop are things like replacing a telephone pole with a tree, or extending a photo outside of frame, which is much different than just generating entire images. It is unfortunate that this usage of generative AI is lumped in with everything else.
It's fine as a way of making shitposts, but I don't know if it's a professional-grade graphics editor - but I'm not a professional myself, so what do I know.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
"Get artists to use it" is the free square :)
So while I think we're all pretty aware of both sides of the image gen discussion and may have differing opinions about that - I think we can all agree that the genie can't be put back in the bottle. This will naturally lead for those that do take advantage of the technology to outpace those which do not.
Also I applaud Adobe's approach to building their models "ethically", yes they are inferior to many competitors, but they work well enough to save significant time and money. They have been very good at honing in what AI is genuinely useful for instead of bolting on a chatbot onto every app like clock radios in the 1980s.
To people who are on board with the "AI" hype train, there is no ethical problem to be solved wrt. "AI".
Neither side cares.
At least Meta gives their models to the public.
The dark lesson here is that you avoid hate and bad PR by cutting artists out of the loop entirely and just shipping whatever slop the AI puts out. Maybe you lose 20% of the quality but you don't have to deal with the screaming and dogpiles.
Even if you believe everything they say, they are lying by omission. For example, for their text to image technology, they never specify what their text language model is trained on - it’s almost certainly CLIP or T5, which is trained on plenty of not-expressly-licensed data. If they trained such a model from scratch - they don’t have enough image bureau data to make their own CLIP, even at 400m images, CLIP only performs well at the 4-7b image-caption pair scale - where’s the paper? It’s smoke and mirrors dude.
There’s a certain personality type that is getting co-opted on social media like Hacker News to “mook” for Adobe. Something on the intersection of a certain obsessive personality and Dunning Kruger.
Many would argue, myself included, that the most ethical approach towards AI is to not use it. Procreate is a popular digital art program that is loudly taking that position: https://procreate.com/ai
> Hey, we're Adobe! We're here to connect with the artists, designers, and storytellers who bring ideas to life. What's fueling your creativity right now?
> Drop a reply, tag a creator, or share your latest work—we'd love to see what inspires you!
That's such a bland, corporate message. It feels totally inauthentic. Do Adobe (a corporation) really "love to see what inspires you" or do they just want engagement for their new account?
I'm not surprised in the slightest that it triggered a pile-on.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
A profile of an up and coming artist doing cool stuff with Adobe software.
A video interview with an interesting team lead at Adobe.
Or just stick to product announcements like various other brand accounts to.
Pretty much anything that doesn't come across as fake engagement bait would probably have been fine.
I am so over pile-ons by people who see themselves as being SO important.
Also: it feels really weird to defend Adobe.
This sounds like a bigger indictment of the platform than anything to do with Adobe.
Adobe could try to offer virtual "office hours" with employees helping people learn to use the software, give something back to their users. Instead they immediately treated it like another marketing channel with a formulaic and lazy engagement bait question that I'm sure they thought would work the same way it does on Twitter and Instagram.
Social media was a catastrophic mistake.
Twitter has the advantage of a broader range so you can escape that while bluesky is almost exclusively used based on strong ideological motivation. It's raison d'etre at this point is basically and highly political so this was bound to happen.
I have at least 100 words on my X muted word list and it's just about usable.
So you followed a bunch of people you didn't like? That says more about you than the platform...
Dead Comment
Bluesky seems to focus on curating your own feed, to the point where mass blocklists will block hundreds or thousands of accounts, and not every blocklist is reliable. The "block first, ask questions later" approach is very freeing and I've been practicing it on social media long before it gained traction on Bluesky.
I expect the platform will be very painful for people who believe everyone should be subjected to their opinion (the people who will cry censorship because Reddit shadow-banned them). Good riddance, I'd say; they can be happy on Twitter with the rest of their kind.
On average, my experience has been a lot better. I'm guessing that's mostly because I had to fight and subdue Twitter to exclusively show me content from the people I follow, combined with social media's general attraction to alt-right nutjobs (and of course, Twitter's owner being an alt-right nutjob doesn't help either).
The experience of a person following fantasy football stuff, and another person following politics, will be totally different, regardless of website.
Bsky doesn’t have blue check replies which is a major point in its favor too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worthwhile blue check reply, it’s like if one purposefully dredged up the worst YouTube video comments they could find and pinned them at the top.
It's obnoxious, and if the service truly offers a real alternative to Twitter it needs to squash these brigading groups. I get that people don't want to see the posts of brands...so don't follow them. It's incredibly simple. I don't want furry content but I don't run around the platform complaining that some do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
It’s a community of unhealthy social media addicts
Deleted Comment
I mean, yeah, the place is a kind of minefield these days, but I don't blame people. It just happens.
X is much more of an ideological mix.
I have a very hard time believing that Bluesky is more hostile than Twitter.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Do you want updates? You want new versions? New features? Support?
Single bill it's like buying an IPhone once and then you expect to get a new one for free each year.
No. This was a solved problem decades ago. Purchase includes minor version updates, then you keep it for life without updates. Upgrading to the next version is a choice.
Why did we collectively agree that customer choice does not matter?
Single bill makes a lot of sense for many users.
Why do you think the company is automatically entitlted to rent seeking and the removal of user choice just because they tweaked the ui?
On the one hand, I don’t have much sympathy for Adobe. On the other hand, this whole situation is why I am not on social media these days with the exception of HN and niche subreddits.
Even if much of the criticism they receive is warranted, the social media climate is just so incredibly toxic that I want no part of it.
Feels like there has to be a better way to be social on the Internet, but as time goes on I’m increasingly not sure if humans can handle it once a certain scale is reached.
But I just can't go back to their predatory pricing practices, and the absolute malware of a programme that creative cloud is.
These people drive away normal folks creating an ever more distilled community of unpleasant folks.
How many normal people are going to hang around places like reddit and bluesky that are seemingly now filled with hate and conspiracy theories.
Dead Comment
Its a fools errand to go on a "free" platform and complain about corporate presence. If you are not paying, then those corporate bodies are.
Deleted Comment
I actually enjoy Bsky as a replacement for Twitter mostly to keep on top of news (tech and otherwise, the tech often coming from the source), along with a small selection of high profile figures. So I follow those sources and venues.
It is absolutely pathetic that a small mob attacked Adobe -- primarily a super aggressive anti-AI contingent that runs around like a sad torch mob on bsky -- and I hope Adobe return to the platform. It would be nice for people like me, who chose to follow these brands, to see the news from Adobe, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc, and my choice shouldn't be limited by those people.
Pretty sure they trashed their own brand with their subscription model. They're finding that out now.
I jumped to Affinity apps years ago when Adobe required a subscription — never looked back.
Bluesky _is_ less tolerant than Twitter of “hello, we’re a brand, aren’t we wonderful/funny”, but I think this particular reaction is more about it being Adobe than anything else.
I love when people use this to mean "more white and conservative."
Bluesky users lean toward hating corporate greed. Adobe is greedy as fuck. Simple as. They and companies like them can stay off.
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
you make that sound like a bad thing
Crocodile tears for the poor company that got drunk on enshittifying its own brand and now has to sleep in it. Adobe's takeover is like it freebased Private Equity and now complains that it has no friends. The TOS change to have AI train on all your art is really what broke people.
Dead Comment
It may never be a Twitter alternative in the sense of making anyone a billionaire, but I'm okay with that.