Exciting news for who? Only the site owner is excited that a free resource now requires a subscription

“Yay! Now I have to pay another subscription! I’m so excited! Let’s celebrate with them!” - nobody

  • Quexotic@infosec.pubEnglish
    12·
    8 months ago

    I have no skin in this game but I think it sounds like they need to change their name from “open subtitles” to “closed captioning”

    Edit: stupid STT

  • ilega_dh@feddit.nlEnglish
    6·
    8 months ago

    Gather all the worlds subtitles under the guise of being “open” and then bait and switch when you’re the largest subtitles database out there.

    The free API had a limit of 20 subs/day, you’re not going to tell me those server costs were significant.

    • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      7·
      8 months ago

      The new API has the exact same free limit. They’re just dropping support for the old API soon and people who want to depend on the old version will need to pay for its continued support because they want to push everyone onto the new site/API

      • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
        3·
        8 months ago

        Yea OP should update the post. OS did a horrible job communicating but its not as dire as the title projects.

      • lazynooblet@lazysoci.alEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        I think it goes from 20 to 5. 10 if you’re not anonymous. To get more you need to have contributed to the site, monetarily or other wise.

  • Ludrol@szmer.infoEnglish
    4·
    8 months ago

    REST API docs

    Your consumer can query the API on its own, and download 5 subtitles per IP’s per 24 hours, but a user must be authenticated to download more. Users will then be able to download as many subtitles as their ranks allows, from 10 as simple signed up user, to 1000 for VIP user.

    I think it’s reasonable move. They have Legacy API that cost them a lot of manhours to maitain and they decided to cut on costs and replace it with a new thing. Sadly they decresed amount of api calls from 20 to 5 [needs citation]

    I think they don’t have good PR guy to better communicate the change

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      8 months ago

      Subtitles are like 5kb text files, why even limit their downloads in any way?

      • jayandp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        8 months ago

        The overhead isn’t the storage but the request. Processing a request takes CPU time, which can get expensive when people setup a media server and request subtitles for dozens of movies and shows. Every episode of a TV show is a separate request and that can add up fast when you scale it to thousands of users.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        8 months ago

        If they’re storing them in something like Amazon s3, there is a cost (extremely low, but not free) associated with retrieving data regardless of size.

        Even if they were an entirely free service, it’d make sense to put hard rate limits on unauthenticated users and more generous rate limits on authenticated ones.

        Leaving out rate limits is a good way to discover that you have users who will use your API real dumb.

        Their pricing model seems fucked, but that’s aside from the rate limits.

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        01·
        8 months ago

        Electricity aint exactly free. Even if the data they store is minuscule. Servers will pull >300w if you store 10gb or 2000gb.

  • Zoidberg@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    So what pisses me off in these cases is this: they didn’t contribute with the data. They’re a convenient aggregator, I give them that, but the data came from third parties. If you want to start charging for convenient access to the data you should at least make all data before you started charging available in a bulk download for free.

  • macniel@feddit.deEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    contribute to a greater cause

    For the greater good, that is their pockets.

  • voxel@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    well it has been deprecated for a few years, and they’re basically asking you to play for continued support.
    they have a new REST api, but you still need the old one, pay up because otherwise there’s no motivation to keep it around.

  • 6h0st_in_the_machin3@kbin.social
    0·
    8 months ago

    Let’s be clear in one thing:

    • There’s no free lunches.

    That’s it. Everything in the Universe, including you, has a “price” on energy. Now outside of all crony-capitalism craziness, we should all consider having a open, distributed, fair price Internet and it’s resources.

    I’m calling Louis.