I hear you. I only pay for Proton Mail and Proton Pass, and one of my biggest frustrations is that Proton doesn’t allow bundled subscriptions, so I have 2 Proton accounts. It’s impractical to have multiple Proton accounts, just because I don’t want nor need Proton Unlimited.
Unfortunately, I feel like Proton can rely on the fact that they remain the overall best option for private email to prevent lots of people from leaving. And soon they will probably be the best option for password managers, if they aren’t already.
This is very unfortunate, I personally think flexible pricing would attract more business.
That being said, I personally don’t need all services that offered by Proton Unlimited, but I grouped up several persons and joined Proton Family Plan instead.
I hear you on flexible pricing, but I want to clarify something. I’m all for Proton bundling multiple products at a discount. For e.g., offering Proton Mail Plus and Proton Pass Plus together at a lower price than if you got them both individually. That being said, I do don’t want to be forced to pay for a service I don’t want or need.
For e.g., if Proton offers a bundled subscription for Proton Mail Plus, Proton Pass Plus, and Proton VPN plus, but the option to only get Proton Pass Plus and Proton Mail Plus is not possible, that is a no go for me.
That’s why I didn’t use the term “bundled subscription” in my original comment, because it can mean anything. And to me, it’s important that I am able to have à la carte experience, and pay only for the products I want. I do not want to be forced into paying for something I don’t want.
I don’t need all the services offered by Proton Unlimited either. And even if I did, I cannot afford it. Moreover, it’s not just about not being able to afford it. Many people in the privacy community don’t want to put all their eggs in the Proton basket. They’d rather use a different VPN provider, for example. That makes sense to me too.
Thats exactly what I meant “flexible pricing”, they should allow people to customize the own “service package" , or like pay as ypu go pricing or eaxh ervice, instead of forcing people into just few offerings.
The reason i brought up Family Plan is that it is cheaper.
I hear you. Is getting the family plan that paying for 2 Proton Products individually for you? Don’t you find what Proton is doing to be a crappy business practice?
It is clear that there are no technical preventing Proton from allowing multiple subscriptions under the same account. The reason they don’t allow it is to coerce users into their most expensive individual plan.
Well, I think it’s more Proton just doing things as they want to. Simply not doing your way or another way doesn’t mean it’s what you think or feel it is. And yes, I remember those discussions well and you’ve always made your point clear. But should Proton do better and provide more options in different ways? Absolutely.
That’s why I explain it as one subscription but only with the services you want (custom plans). When you say multiple “subscriptions” for one account, that may confuse folks. It’s a semantics issue mostly.
We can disagree, but I think there is a case to be made that me labelling this practice as enshittificaiton and/or a dark pattern is justified and accurate. Part of my reasoning is because Proton is getting my money either way, but they are deliberately creating a subpar UX for those who want to give less of it. Some people say that’s the nature of business, and that may be true, but I don’t think it negates my argument.
I certainly don’t want people to be confused, but there is a difference between the two, which is why I say “multiple subscriptions”. I’m all for a single bundled subscription comprising any and every combination of products. But it needs to be specified, otherwise it leaves room for Proton to force users to subscribe to services they don’t want. And I don’t want to give them a chance to misinterpret what users like me are asking for.
I don’t think anyone has said you’re objectively wrong. Atleast I don’t think so. All of it has as I see it only been a discussion for how and why people feel otherwise.
I dare say no, there is not. You clearly did not understand Cory Doctorow’s concept or are using it with ill intent. Enshittification does not mean “I think a business doing xyz is shitty”.
Rather it refers to platform decay:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Proton is neither a platform, nor does it have a two-sided market. It has a direct relationship with its customers and does not hold them hostage. Also, they are not a publicy traded company maximizing shareholder value. In fact, they are governed by a non-profit foundation. The concept just does not apply here.
Criticism of Proton subscription tiers is absolutely legit, but please don’t confuse it with platform decay - this just takes away from the very real issues of enshittification on platforms such as Uber, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
There is still a skeptical part of me that is wary of Proton.
Lies in the marketing of Lumo. Andy Yen causing up with a Trump candidate. Weird integrations and aggressive development like proton wallet (Bitcoin) and Zoom.
It’s ok to criticize where criticism is due.
Hopefully, you are right and by design it can’t be enshittified, but it’s ok to still be
Respectfully, I don’t think I am. I have been following Doctorow’s work for over a decade. I am currently reading his book, and I don’t think I misinterpreted or misappropriated the term.
Have you watched Cory Doctorow’s recent podcast interview with Adam Conover? In it, he defines enshittification as platform decay as you say, but he allows it to be applied to any business that deliberately gets worse to force customers into a certain behavior. Hence, me applying the term to Proton and other companies like Evernote and Microsoft for what they are doing with Windows.
At 9:35 Cory explains how he first used the term to describe his horrible experience with Trip Advisor’s website. Then at 11:11 Adam goes into how the term became popular to express anger that everybody feels, and at 11:39 Cory says the following:
Here’s your permission officially to use this word in a loose, non-technical term. There are a bunch of weird scolds who follow people around online and say “No you’re using enshittificaiton wrong! You have to use it in this strict technical sense.” […] Use it to mean things getting rotten. That’s fine. I don’t want to confine its use to a group of irrelevant insiders who use it in a precise technical sense. Use it loosely! That’s fine.
I hope this clarifies the matter.
I noticed you didn’t contest my use of the term dark pattern to describe what Proton is doing.
I think this is coming down to how egregious we individually find the changes and dark patterns and whatnot to then decide ourselves if each of us can qualify what we think and feel about the product/company/tool in question enshittification. It’s subjective.
Yeah, and after that statement, he goes on to explain the concept:
Enshittification describes a pattern of platform decay. It proposes a reason for ubiquitous platform decay and simultaneous platform decay - where all the platforms we rely on go bad - and it proposes a remedy. A way out of it. And so the pattern of platform decay, the pathology, the symptomatology is you have companies that are good to their end users and they find a way to lock the end users in. And then once those end users find it hard to leave, they make things worse for those end user in order to make things better for business customers. And they lure in those business customers and they lock them in too. […] Once the platform business customers are locked in, they make things worse for those business customers too. They withdraw the surplus from them.
Even if used loosly, shouldn’t it at least have some relevance to platforms, two sided markets, user lock in, business customer lock it or shareholder value maximization? Otherwise the concept completely looses its meaning.
IMHO enshittification is a useful way to describe a rather complex, but increasingly common phenomenon in one word.
I just don’t see how this applies to Proton, as they are not a platform, don’t lock in their users, don’t have advertising customers nor shareholders.
Everything is possible and there are no ultimate guarantees. While I deem it highly unlikely and nonsensical, Proton could disolve its non profit structure and transition to a publicly traded company (hello OpenAI), forcefully lock in their customers, spy on its users, create some form of platform business, let in advertisers and then ultimately sqeeze those dry too.
But until then, it makes more sense to say shitty / questionable business practice or customer hostile behavior.
Yes, he went on to explain his thesis for enshittification. I have never denied that enshittification is platform decay.
Cory gave us explicit permission. And when he did, he called out exactly what you are doing now. I think both definitions are useful, and Cory recognizes that, as well as millions of other people who experience the services they use getting worse because of corporate greed. That should settle the matter.
Proton does lock their users for some of their services, specifically, Proton Pass.
Try to get your data out of Proton. You can’t export your photos, can’t get your files, can’t export your mails (unless you want thousands of eml and json files). Same for aliases. You can’t even export and import aliases from Simplelogin as csv using your custom domain. It always fails. As for Proton aliases, you can recover then if they are Proton Mail aliases but if they are from Proton Pass and Simplelogin once you delete them, they are gone. Support refuses to restore your aliases on SL and PP but they restore on Proton Mail
How can you bulk export photos? Go to Proton Drive then select photos month by month? You can’t even do that properly because you need to wait for photos to load first, which is also taking a long time.
They had a proper export tool before. eml/json is accepted but that is not a proper method to export tens of thousands of emails. Paid users have Proton Bridge yes, but why do I need to install a third party app to get my email exports?
I had this alias issue when I was trying a DR scenario. SL failed miserably. I exported my aliases via Login | SimpleLogin then deleted all of my aliases, but import didn’t work. It failed many times, import process got cancelled or stuck, some of the aliases couldn’t get created, support didn’t help, etc etc.
Why shouldn’t I delete aliases? If you had hundreds of aliases like me, you would have deleted aliases too, to make management easier. Also, it is possible to deleted Proton Mail aliases but not SL / PP. Why? When you delete an alias on Proton Mail, you send a request to support, they disable blacklist on that specific alias and then you can create it again. Why can’t I do the same with SL / PP?
Proton should make tools to take out my data easily.
Yeah they really should implement a dedicated button for that! Until then, there is a work around:
1. Click checkbox on the first photo to select it.
2. Scroll ALL the way to the bottom.
3. Hold SHIFT while clicking the checkbox on the last photo.
This selects all photos, in the same manner as you would use the shift key in File Explorer.
There is also an option in the drive app for android to select all photos, but it doesn’t work for me (very slow and only selected half of the photo library):
Something like google takeout would be great! You can vote for it in Uservoice.
As an alternative to the export tool you could also follow this guide to export them in MBOX format via bridge + thunderbird. (btw both the export tool and bridge are first party apps directly from proton)
No man. Proton coerces noone; you still are free to either buy one of their offerring, buy all-in-one bundle (called Proton Unlimited), or just go somewhere else….. completely upto you.
Thats one of the reasons why Proton had been founded; to counterfight coercion so widely used left&right by bigtech.
Its generally easier to remap alias than to create new one (even on-the-go)
No idea about SL, but in PP you can restore things upto 30 days. At least on Proton Unlimited.
Hard disagree. The use of the word is, IMO, justified. Users are forced to choose between 2 suboptimal options, completely unnecessarily, when in both scenarios, Proton is getting their money.
I don’t know if that’s true, but Proton is definitely guilty of engaging in practices they call out Big Tech companies for. Even if they do it to a much lesser degree, it’s still a bad look.
