The easiest and most efficient way for a company to know that you're not providing value to them is by cancelling your subscription. I agree that companies making this difficult is bad, but many services don't make this difficult. Instead, you're asking them to read the mind of their customers which is not easy. Netflix does treat extreme periods of inactivity (IIRC more than a year I think?) as a reasonable signal that you've forgotten about it.

> You get to exercise so much more Personal Responsibility when you aren't free-riding off other people, even.

I don't think you're really understanding the point. People who don't exercise any personal responsibility over their finances are the ones who are free-riding off people who do. That's because when you don't manage your finances and you refuse to shoulder the cost for that, the time & effort and complexity it costs to accommodate that has to be paid by someone who isn't you.

Edit: I'm not sure there's anything I can say to sway your mind about this since you've really honed in on the emotional angle to this but I think it's worth pointing out that this isn't really a moralizing thing to me, I have been and know many people who fall short, I don't treat it morally. It's largely about resource allocation and behavioral incentives. Asking central organizations like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of consumers is very difficult and costly, it's overall much more efficient to ask consumers to signal their desires themselves, it's why markets tend to be more efficient. Making consumers pay the cost of mismanaging their finances also discourages them from doing it, increasing efficiency.

People who fail to cancel their subscriptions are not free-riding off anyone, they're paying $X per billing period.

> Asking central organizations like a corporation to infer the correct thing for lots of consumers is very difficult and costly

Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.

They're not free-riding currently, but what the parent is suggesting is that streaming subscriptions don't charge for months without activity.

> Usage based billing isn't that hard. It's just less profitable.

Creating alternative usage-based billing models when most customers are happy with a monthly model is hard and has real costs. There are already storefronts with a more usage-based model: stuff like iTunes and Google Play Store let you pay per movie & episode, that's typically what consumers use when they don't like a monthly billing model.

But, by that same logic, they should just be charging you by how much you watch. So it's no longer "don't charge them for the month they didn't view" but, instead, "charge them $X/minute watched". If you're going to go with usage based billing, go with usage based billing.

The point is that this is a choice by content businesses. Pausing and resuming payments could easily be frictionless, but it isn’t.

I generally disagree with dark patterns that make it onerously difficult to cancel, but many streaming services (like Netflix) don't make it that difficult and pausing and resuming payments is already easy enough. I just have to actually do it, not ask them to read my mind.

Auto-cancellation or whatever is never ever going to happen. Unless forced by regulation I suppose, which I don’t see a reason for. We’re not talking about fraud or deception, just the general day-to-day scumminess of capitalism.

All that said, I don’t think your argument carries the weight you think it does. “I’m happy my underutilization of a service subsidizes other users” isn’t a compelling story to me and doesn’t seem like a net benefit. To each their own.

(Anyway, a binger whose usage is equivalent to a non-binge watcher, except concentrated rather than diffuse, is not actually underutilizing the service and isn’t really who we’re talking about here. I think.)

I am actually talking about this here. It sounds like you understood my point but also think this is not what I'm talking about? I'm not saying I underutilize my service, I am actually talking about equivalent usage except concentrated rather than diffuse. When you ask companies to automatically omit fees for months of inactivity, you are punishing users who diffuse their use while rewarding users who concentrate their use.

> I mean, for starters this whole conversation is fantasy because streamers, or really, businesses in general, will never on their own initiative stop taking taking money from customers.

Literally false. Netflix did this because they're not trying to build a business on tricking people who don't want their product. But it's a fairly long period of inactivity because anything less and it's not clear if they actually forgot or not https://about.netflix.com/en/news/helping-members-who-havent...

No I get that, my point is that the usage pattern you’re describing isn’t really relevant here.

> Literally false. Netflix did this…

Great!

But here's the rub. While it is true that any given person in practice might benefit from such a pricing scheme, it isn't true that everyone could in principle benefit from such a pricing scheme. The model depends intrinsically on uneven and non-maximal usage of the service, which is what the aforementioned subsidizing is doing. For it to work, it requires that a large share of people overpay for the service, where overpaying means paying more than the value of what you receive (by definition, if you don't use a service, then you are overpaying). If everyone were using the service maximally, there would be no difference between paying for how much you use and paying a flat rate, because you can be sure that the service provider would raise prices to cover costs and reap profits.

So no one is doing you any favors here. Poor utilization is not just an "oops" on the part of the subscriber, but an essential feature of the business model. If everyone was being "personally responsible", the business model simply wouldn't work. And because this isn't a charity, the idea of being happy about subsidizing others users is kind of weird.

So two natural questions to ask are:

1. What could a pay-as-you-go model look like in such cases? Could it cover the expenses of the service? Arguably, no. Those who don't use much would probably continue not to use much. Those who do might reduce consumption, because now you must pay for what you use.

2. Is there a morally sound justification for paying at least a base rate for an unused or underutilized utility to keep it afloat (perhaps charging additionally according to usage)? Putting aside all utilitarian arguments, which I take to be unacceptable, we can find a number of cases that seem to operate similarly that we do not appear to object to. Take the salary, for example. One is not payed strictly according to the value one provides, though you could argue that salary is, ideally, a method of paying for the value provided in a diffuse way (value provided previous year reflected in the following year, esp. bonuses, or upfront payment with expectation of value). So salary doesn't seem quite the same. What about the fact that you can use the service on demand? This is like having a driver who gets payed for being on-call. It seems like this may be a good analogue to begin with to try to grasp the ethical and economic reality of the subscription model in question.

Firstly, I wasn't talking about under-utilization, I was comparing equivalent usage but one person watches most of their media consistently week by week while others binge a lot of content in a month and then take a break. They are not subsidizing each other in a normal monthly subscription model, they are just using the service in different patterns. But if the binger only paid for the month he binges, he's paying less but still consuming the same bandwidth.

Secondly, personal responsibility means different things to different people. It's absurd to suggest that if everyone was "personally responsible" they'd all be spending as much time as possible streaming TV shows to maximally utilize their media subscription. That's like saying the personally responsible thing to do with health insurance is be as sick as possible so you get the most amount of medical care for your buck. That's like saying the personally responsible thing to do in a buffet is to eat as much as humanly possible.

Most people are not hellbent on squeezing the last drop of value out every service, they accept the simplicity of a consistent monthly price so they don't have to spend the mental overhead of financially evaluating every single thing they consume. If you want to financially evaluate everything, you can go to a digital or retail store and buy one movie or TV season at a time, that way no one is subsidizing anyone else, but a lot of people think that kind of sucks.

The benefit you get in return is variety. In a buffet, it's easy to try small bites that you would otherwise be hesitant to pay full price for and you don't have to financially regret every bad bite of food.

Yeah, some people get less bang for their buck than others but not everyone is obsessed with coming out ahead.

This was Clay Shirky's argument at least a couple decades back about why microtransactions don't generally work. At least for optional small purchases making continuous "Is this 5 cent purchase worth it?" decisions is exhausting.

Music probably provides a better test case for this than video in general because you don't really many exclusives. Given the starting point of a lot of ripped/downloaded music, I could probably dispense with music streaming and just buy an album or two now and then but it's close enough to breakeven I don't bother.

So you -did- use your insurance this (and every) month. You didn't-claim- from insurance, but that's incidental.

Insurance exists to give you peace of mind (or more technically act as a hedge against your risk). You got that benefit/peace/hedge so you used your insurance.

Now, if we take this thought, you could argue that Netflix isn't there to provide "show x" which you may, or may not, watch. Rather its there yo provide you with the -option- to watch show x. Whether you watch it or not is up to you.

I feel this comparison is not equivalent though because risk is very real, while selling a "Netflix option" seems very contrived.