The Inevitable Coming Of Monetization

Say what you will about Bluesky thus far, but I quite like it and it brings back those Old Twitter memories that faded with time as Twitter became more and more enshittified over time, finally peaking with Elon's takeover of the platform.

 

Unfortunately, I think most of us know that no good thing lasts forever, and the ad-free Bluesky feed at some point will start to feature ads of some sort. The best we could hope for would be something akin to the way Daring Fireball did ads: Visible, but out of the way, not intrusive at all. But this is the 2020s. We know it won't be that simple.

 

I know Bluesky have said they have monetization ideas on the table, but here's what I'd like to see/some lines I want to define whenever the time does come:

 

Subscriptions should be fairly priced and not be compromised: No "you'll see less ads". If I'm paying you money, there needs to be NO ads. The "monthly cost plus ads" is a scam perpetuated by the streaming services and sadly rather than getting punished for them they saw massive profits, so everyone wants to jump on that bandwagon. You're better than that, Bluesky.

 

As for fairly priced, the cost should be at most--for normal users who just want ad free--no more than $10. Preferably less. 

 

Maybe a little congratulatory badge on their profile or something but critical functionality should not and never be locked behind this subscription like Twitter did.

 

Monetization does not come at the cost of the moderation tools Bluesky has. Blocklists/labeling services/so on and so forth. These are some of the most powerful tools Bluesky has going for it, don't cripple them in the name of making money.

 

Monetization does not come in the form of a forced algorithm. Bluesky has algorithmic feeds, but you have to specifically seek them out and use them, your timeline defaults to chronological and stays there unless you specify otherwise. For the love of all that is holy, do not pull a Meta and make it so algorithmic feeds are the only apparent option and you have to crawl on broken glass to get to the chronological feeds.

Advertiser blocking must be allowed. One of my main issues with TikTok for example is that I constantly get ads for religious garbage and I'm about as far from religious as you can be. Yet no matter how many times I say that no, this advertising does NOT apply to me, it keeps coming up. Let me block them from ever appearing in my feed again. I don't care if the advertiser really, really, mega wants to get in front of my eyeballs in particular.

Ads must be clearly defined, and also not obnoxious: No autoplaying video with sound, ads must be clearly labeled (unlike Twitter where they try to look like real posts as much as they can), and cannot be engineered in such a way that would fool a user into tapping on them.

This list kinda also serves as a nice line in the sand that if crossed will likely mean the return to Mastodon for myself. Really, I really define the line as "pre-Elon Twitter". I know advertising is probably going to show up. I know the chuds and fash are going to show up (and already have). So long as Bluesky continues to give me the tools to make sure I never know of these people existing, I'm okay with it. But the minute they begin crippling our ability to lock those people out is when I begin looking to go back to Mastodon.

The only thing that could be added to help things in this regard is private accounts. That'd be nice.

Apple Music Radicalized Me

EDIT, 5/20/25: Decided to just remove the section trashing on Spotify because when I came in here to change something it just felt out of place with the rest of this piece. Spotify sucks for different reasons, it'll get its time in the limelight. But not now.

I will tell anyone with ears that I vehemently, intensely carry a deep seated hatred for Apple Music. Same goes for Spotify, don't worry. But Apple Music, that one specifically pissed me off on such a deep level that maybe it'd be good to put it in one place why I hate it oh so very much.

Apple's music pedigree is no joke; while they weren't the first to market with an MP3 player, the iPod and iTunes Music Store brought this then-new concept to the masses and convinced the dinosaurs at the record labels to hop on board with the idea of digital music sales. While some might consider the iPod a relic in this day of paying a subscription for a limitless collection of music, it did become such an iconic staple of the 00s that it is revered much like the Walkman is.

Apple has even done well to preserve the legacy they created to this day: Modern macOS releases (and Apple Devices/Music for Windows) still support iPods all the way back to the first gen (provided you have the proper adapters for FireWire). Compare and contrast to the Zune, which Microsoft wasted no time in trying to wash its hands of once Windows Phone 8 released (and no longer depended on the Zune syncing protocol that WP7 used).

Apple's music chops is what makes the handling of Apple Music even more puzzling and infuriating to me. Given how much Spotify was taking off and Apple's legacy in digital music, in hindsight it would have been surprising to not see them hop on the streaming bandwagon at some point.

The implementation is where I have an issue with it. Rather than making Apple Music its own app, Apple did that thing it does and just decided to helpfully integrate it with the original Music app (formerly just named "iPod" in old versions of iOS) that handled your local library and iTunes Match, if you bothered to use that. (And unlike Apple Music, if you never interacted with iTunes Match or iCloud Music Library, it for the most part stayed completely out of your way and never showed its face.)

This was fine and not at all unprecedented: Google Play Music (RIP) did this to great effect: Google rolled out a streaming service called Google Play Music All Access (that's a mouthful) and it too integrated with Play Music, but it never came at a cost to those who opted to use Play Music to play local files. It never got in the way, it never obscured anything (as far as I know, I am 100% recalling this from memory), it just stayed helpfully in the corner, ready to spring to life if you went out of your way to invoke it.

Apple Music did not do this. Apple really, really wanted you to know that they launched a new streaming service, and that they were offering a three month free trial to really sell you on it. So on June 30th, 2015, after we finished installing iOS 8.4 on our devices, we went to Music and got barred off from accessing our library because we had to clear an ad for Apple Music before we could actually use the app as we did prior.

Worse yet, even if you didn't accept the free trial, Apple Music left all sorts of detritus all over the UI, begging you to interact with it, which would proc another ad for that free trial. Some would say this is whatever, just dance around the new junk littered throughout and keep on keepin' on, but this angered me deeply, because Apple took a previously decent app (and in fact, the only app you could use for local files synced from iTunes, at the time) and crapped it up to push their streaming service I had no interest in.

Let's pause this tirade for a second. Let's assume you were, in fact, curious, and decided to try this whole thing out. The crappy implementation of Apple Music doesn't even stop at the ads it used to throw at you! No, Apple Music also included iCloud Music Library, and to properly use Apple Music (as in, to be able to cache songs for offline, and to be able to save music rather than going on a search for it every time you wanted to play it) you had to have iCloud Music Library on.

iCloud Music Library in my experience was (and maybe still is, I'm not trusting it again) an unmitigated disaster. On the surface, it seems great! It'll mirror your library to Apple's servers and keep it in sync with all your devices and computers automatically. Great! The problem is--to save on server-side storage--it'll match music to files Apple already has on hand, as to not have a million discrete copies of God Bless Tiny Tim for everyone that has that album in their library. Quelle surprise, this function would very frequently misstep.

In my case, it would either flag files I actually own as "unplayable in your region", it would replace them with the wrong versions (or if I had the original masters of some albums and the artist later revised that album with changes, the original album would be lost, replaced with the new version), or explicit songs would be replaced with clean versions. If I didn't have a full backup of my local library, this would have been catastrophic.

Worse, the only way to solve a mismatch or an unplayable file? Delete and re-add it from the main computer's library. Which doesn't do me a whole lot of good if I'm on the road and my computer's at home.

This wouldn't be an issue if iCloud Music Library wasn't essentially a condition of using Apple Music. But it is. Paying monthly for music isn't bad enough as it is, now you have to cede control of the files you already own to use the service.

Major point for Spotify and literally every other service here that doesn't do that.

Back to trashing on Apple Music's invasion of the Music app: It wasn't enough for Apple that there was streaming cruft littered throughout the Music app and and you had to dismiss an ad to get back into your library after 8.4 was installed. No, that ad would reappear at random and had to be dismissed every few launches of Music. This was immensely infuriating as I lived in an area with subpar cellular service at the time, and the ad would have to be fetched from Apple's servers every time it popped up.  If I wasn't on Wi-Fi, the ad wouldn't finish loading sometimes, and I'd be effectively locked out of the Music app until the ad could finish loading. Great.

Thankfully, at the time a lot of us were still doing local files and our voices were loud enough that Apple heard us and gave us a toggle in settings to kill Apple Music once and for all. Unfortunately, this didn't clean up all the streaming cruft from the Music app. There were still things like trending searches and whatnot. But boy howdy, it was a big improvement. Even though Apple would slyly toggle Apple Music back on at random after an iOS update.

But has it gotten better?

Fast forward a few years. Do you think Apple got any better about being total dicks about Apple Music? Ha. Haha. No.

The Music app in modern iOS versions still has a huge lot of Apple Music cruft in the search tab, where it will show you a tile of genres and seasonal crap. Even if Apple Music is turned off. As you might guess, all of this requires a subscription and WILL proc an ad if tapped.

It feels dark patterned (if that's the right term for this) to hell, a bunch of elements screaming "touch me!" to give Apple the opportunity to cram another ad down your gullet.

(And in iOS 18, Apple has gotten worse about this, though I am unsure if it's a bug or intentional: If you tap the text box in the Music app's search tab, on iOS 17 the two tabs--if Apple Music is turned off--will be Radio (which doesn't require a subscription, necessarily, so it gets a pass) and Your Library, and Music will remember whichever one you previously had selected. On iOS 18, Radio is replaced with Apple Music regardless of if it is turned on or off, and the search will always default to searching Apple Music. It does not remember your last selection.)

Not even traditional computer operating systems are immune! On macOS Monterey, Apple had completely nuked the Apple Music toggle until it was added back in 12.3. On Windows, since Apple Music's dedicated app has replaced iTunes, now, there is no longer a toggle. You get the streaming detritus all up in your grill (along with the aforementioned search behavior seen in iOS 18, above) with no way to turn it off. Wonderful. I'll stay on iTunes until it dies, thanks.

I've always carried this hatred, this disappointment, because it felt like I bought into the Apple ecosystem specifically to avoid hubris like this. Apple was (and still is, in some respects) the company that seemingly was the best about respecting you when you said no, and obeying your boundaries. (This is the same company that--in the sea of all the AI bullshit--has their implementation of it be completely opt-in whilst everyone else is forcing it on you no matter what your preference. The duality of Apple, I guess. Well that didn't last too long, did it? Apple really must hate nice things in their endless pursuit of pleasing their shareholders. Sigh.)

Apple Music wasn't that. Apple Music wouldn't take no for an answer, it would operate under the assumption that every no is a thinly-veiled yes, and that it'll get you at some point. To me, it marked when Apple started down the road of effectively becoming no better than the rest of the tech industry after years of feeling like a bastion of hope against the worst parts of it.

Even more infuriating were the people who would punch down on people like me and claim we're overreacting, and to just "deal with it". This only made my irritation with everything worse, and arguably is the reason this bullshit keeps fucking happening. Because no one is willing to put their foot down and say no, the buck stops right here, right now.

Thankfully there are people out there doing exactly that, like Ed Zitron (whose piece inspired me to write this because a lot of what he talks about in the first half of Never Forgive Them really does a good job of summing up my feelings about, well, Apple being a little shit). After so many years of people telling you that you're overreacting and to just roll over and deal, it's nice to see someone on the same page telling you that no, nothing is actually wrong with you. The tech industry has failed you. This is not your fault.

As such, I'm hoping that in writing this, someone else in my shoes gets some validation and feels that no, they're not alone, and their feelings are valid.

On Windows 7 and Vintage Computing

I know some would stop me at the title and tell me: "Hey, no, Windows 7 is not and never will be retro or vintage! It's too modern!" Especially if you stick to a strict 20-year rule for retro/vintage stuff. (Though I'd check the clock, as Vista is fast approaching that magical milestone, and Windows 7 to me just feels like a service pack on steroids.)

At least in my opinion, I think--extreme examples notwithstanding--that you really shouldn't put retro/vintage to a timeline. Especially if you look at other categories like cell phones, where it feels like every device ages in cat years and devices released ten years ago might as well be 20 if you measured them in computing years. (Case in point, 2025 is the 10 year anniversary of the iPhone 6s, the last iPhone that would ship with a headphone jack.)

Anywhooooo we're kinda losing the scope of this piece. We've got a stage to set.

Much of this piece could be applied to both Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard. 2009, at least looking back, was an absolutely--as the kids say--goated year for OS releases. It also laid down a very defined demarcation that we wouldn't pick up on for another couple of years: This was the last bastion before The Decline.

The Decline being when both OSes began their downward trajectory into what they are today. Today, macOS feels more known for being a bug-ridden mess than anything, and Windows is known for trying to cram unwanted garbage down your gullet and doing crap to your PC that you didn't approve of it doing.

This began first with OS X: Lion would release in 2011, and this marked the start of something I really wish Apple would stop: A yearly release cadence for Mac OS, much like iOS. While this seemed to be okay at the time, it would later catch up to Apple and result in bugs piling up and this vicious cycle of only being able to really enjoy a bug-free (or rather, a "merely stable but still kinda buggy") OS release for a couple months before Apple was beating down your door begging you to install the new version.

(This is even worse on iOS, where Apple enforces firmware signing so if you take a bad update you usually can't roll back. Further, iOS developers are a lot more expedient about dropping older versions so there's more pressure to upgrade.)

Lion also brought with it the start of the iOS-ification of Mac OS, as it began adopting UI elements from iOS. (It honestly didn't get too bad until many years later, if you think about it. One of the worst changes to macOS, IMO, was the system settings UI change in Ventura. I still struggle with it to this day.)

Windows, on the other hand, would take a wildly different move. Microsoft saw the iPad taking off and seemingly was looking for the next big thing in computing after Netbooks crashed and burned so hard, so they went all in on tablet computing. 2012 saw the launch of Windows 8, and along with it, the revamped Surface line of products.

Microsoft went all in so much that they even forced the tablet UI (lovingly called Metro) regardless of what kind of device you were using. Desktop? Laptop? You got the tablet UI. People, quelle surprise, absolutely hated this. Despite Windows 8's core being much improved over 7, the improvements were overshadowed by the UI being absolutely awful for everyone not on a tablet PC.

Microsoft to their credit did try to run this back, allowing desktop users to revert to a more desktop-friendly UI with Windows 8.1, but at that point the damage had been done and Windows 7 just further entrenched itself as "the good OS". It was Windows XP all over again.

A more complete 180 came with Windows 10, though this began the second chapter of The Decline, for Windows at least: Microsoft moved Windows to become more in line with a Software as a Service model. Updates were forced, there was now Microsoft-supplied bloatware (so you didn't even have to just worry about prebuilt manufacturers loading your OS with that crap anymore!) and the general sentiment of the way 10 operated was "you don't own your computer anymore. We do."

This sentiment was only intensified by people on Windows 7/8/8.1 thinking they were being good eggs and having their automatic updates on, only to be greeted with a stealth upgrade to Windows 10 that happened without their approval, plus the constant nags to upgrade.

(Linux nerds: I can hear your keyboards chattering in the background as you prepare your expected response to that sentiment. Please sit down. It didn't work then, it's not going to work now.)

Much to the chagrin of IT guys everywhere, a lot of us continued riding out Windows 7 for a few more years, some of us even going so far as to upgrade to Windows 8.1 and just installing a Start Menu replacement (like Classic Shell or Start8). Launch Windows 10 was rough. It did what it wanted and it did not care about what the end user wanted. In the middle of a huge project and haven't saved? Microsoft does not give a single fuck, we're updating RIGHT NOW.

It was only a few years in that 10 was tamed and some agency was finally returned to the end user. It still didn't feel right though, as Windows would just mysteriously do things on its own and with no input from the user. Did you want a weather readout on your taskbar? We don't care, you're getting one there now, with links to Bing News! Random apps just showing up in Start, too. Things would just happen, without any action from the user. It--again--felt like we no longer owned our computers. Microsoft did.

But now, here in 2024, we've gotten used to 10's hubris, and arguably 10's going to look pretty damn good by the end of this because Microsoft further walked this path with Windows 11, an OS that does more of what 10 did before it was tamed properly, and arbitrarily dropped a whole host of hardware that could very much run it. For bonus points, Microsoft had the balls to announce all this right in the middle of a silicon shortage. So people who wanted to upgrade their PCs and even had the money to do so...couldn't. There was nothing to buy!

As if that wasn't enough, we also now have both companies doing AI garbage, though much like Windows 8's tablet UI, Microsoft is going all in on it and forcing it down everyone's gullet and even into innocent apps that haven't seen attention in decades, like Notepad. Yes, the AI bros are even coming for fuckin' NOTEPAD. What a world we live in.

This is why (and I'm sorry it took an eternity to arrive here) I think there's a lot of nostalgia and celebration around Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, and also why I think they deserve a seat at the table with the other retrocomputing thingamabobs: They're products from a bygone era. They were the last mainstream OSes from an age where it felt like technology was being made for the betterment of humankind, not just to exploit us for endless wads of cash.

They were from a time when we felt like we owned technology, not the other way around.

The dividing line between Windows 7/Snow Leopard and future releases feels--in hindsight--as significant as when Apple brought Steve Jobs back and there was a very clear line between the beige days of the mid 90s and the colorful translucence of the late 90s and early 00s. There was a massive vibe shift and I think as time goes on more and more of us are longing for the days before The Decline began.

I know I certainly am.