In simple cases maybe but in general how the format is actually interpreted matters more than what some spec says. Markdown is a great example because in practice almost every markdown renderer does things a bit differently.

>A lot of people used to happily pay for desktop software.

More or less no one used to "happily" pay. Absent pirating software, they did pay often hundreds of dollars for all sort of software sight unseen (though shareware did provide try before you bought) which often came with minimal updates/upgrades unless they paid for such.

But expectations have largely changed.

Given the anemic sales of macOS apps vs online subscriptions, I would disagree. I’m sure it’s the same story on windows. Offline only makes sense when your public infrastructure is garbage. Otherwise most people will choose convenience over control.

Making people dependent on a cloud subscription isn't exactly in the spirit of spreading offline programs...

iCloud kind of does this and is the suggested way to store app data files.

It’s not immune to file conflicts across your devices though.

But before it wasn't as easy to create them every few days.

If I had to guess, I would say the GP wants to express that the mass of consumers acts in uninformed silly ways, and with such people local-first has a very low adoption rate, because they usually don't spend a thought about their digital foot/fingerprint or who really owns their data or how they do their personal computing and whether they are independent of anyone else in their personal computing. That there is this huge part of our society, that again and again creates incentives for enshittification.

> The really crazy thing is that everyone just forgot a couple of years ago "Dubai chocolate" meant something a lot more gross.

It's called damage control and yes it's crazy that we blindly allow this kind of society-wide manipulation.

> paying more than a fair price by deceptive business practices

I see product X is $10/month. I subscribe. I'm not sure where the deception is there? The alternative is likely either the cost of the product is exorbitantly high like $500 for lifetime. Or the developer makes it more affordable but sales peter out and they end up having to go out of business and can't afford to maintain the product after a couple of years. Likely both. And hackernews will complain either way.

The only sustainable model I've seen is lifetime licenses but updates for a single year.

I think this thread is an example of a fascinating class of miscommunication I've observed on HN, but I want to say it out loud to see if I'm understanding it.

Two people meet in an HN thread, and they both dislike the status quo in a particular way (e.g. that copyright is awful, DRMed games suck, whatever). They both want to fight back against the thing that they dislike, but they do it in different ways.

One person finds alternatives to the mainstream and then advertises them and tell people: Look, here's the other way you can do it so you can avoid this terrible mess! That messaging can sometimes come across as downplaying the severity of the problem.

The second person instead wants to raise awareness of how awful the mess is, and so has to emphasize that this is a real problem.

The end result is two people that I think agree, but who appear to disagree because one wants to emphasize the severity of the problem and the other wants to emphasize potential solutions that the individual can take to address it.

Concretely, I think that's what happened here. I think everybody in this thread is pissed that single-player games would have activation and online DRM. Some people like to get around that by buying on marketplaces like GOG or playing open source games, and others want to change the policy that makes this trend possible, which means insisting that it really is a problem.

Sorry for all the meta commentary. If I got it wrong, I'd be interested to understand better!