subscriptions are great for handling black hole callbacks - callbacks that you cannot return back control to the callie.<p>Examples of this would be web-socket , http-requests , etc.<p>however elm and cycle.js try to shoe-horn this idea everywhere - which I think is not needed.<p>Not every event needs to be subscribed to - it pollutes your global stream. Use global stream only when you need to deal with things that move out the execution context of your program.