Textbook shooting yourself in the foot, I really don't know what they were hoping to gain. You already had a long-lasting reputation in the online community, now you're a fucking scab
IDK, if I was contributing subtitles for an open provider free of charge who shared them free of charge, I'd be glad my subtitles were helping people who needed them. Now that labor has been turned into capital and that rug has been pulled with no back-dated compensation or provisions for free subtitles for hard of hearing or something. It's a shitty move across the board for everyone but the owner.
I would hardly consider 'power users' the ones who download via the API. I used to download them via BSPlayer, where it will prompt you in a nice user friendly interface if you needed subtitles for whatever you were watching. Well, that used the old OpenSubtitles API, and now that it's gone it's not gonna work anymore
And ancestry dot com. That one still chaps my ass. My mom spent so much time in there adding in her work, and they just fucking locked it one day behind a paywall. Fuck these sites that just take the users hard work and then try and profit off it without announcing that from the get go.
I always assume that. My mom was getting up there in age, and just having a fun time entering in her work. She had no clue that would happen, until it did.
This will just create new competition for them. I have been watching anime for several years and never once had to go through opensubtitles. Most releases now have the subtitles integrated so what is the value they bring to the whole thing?
Edit: I just realized I'm replying the one an only db0, you are the best, cheers!
Anime is a different culture. Most non-anime stuff doesn't have them embedded (especially the old stuff) and it's still useful for finding subtitles for other languages
I use it primarily because the embedded subs are often in vubsub which fucking sucks and can't be played probably on some devices, they also don't scale probably.