4 ms·

Am I the only one who believes app stores should have a minimum mandatory price of like $5 (maybe geographically customizable)?! And yes, you should also be al

by nnq 11y ago

Am I the only one who believes app stores should have a minimum mandatory price of like $5 (maybe geographically customizable)?! And yes, you should also be allowed to publish free apps, but they should be really-free, so if you set your apps price to $0, you are forbidden to have any-kind of in-app purchases (and maybe even forced to be open-source). Want to do have the in-app-purchases: then put a goddam minimum price tag of $5 on you app and over that ask for purchases! We should just create some thick and solid walls between "true free" and "paid/premium" stuff and destroy this murky area of "freemium" and whatever! Some people would want to shoot me for saying this, but even consumer-SaaS/PaaS-es like, uhm, Facebook, should be forced by law to charge a minimum fee of $1/moth or something if they are not "truly free" (eg. "if they make any kind of profit derived from their free users' data and attention).

icebraining 11y ago
Define "make profit from the users attention". Would HN have to charge? It's certainly a valuable resource for YC, even if the profit is indirect. What about Wikipedia? Do donations count as profit? Should search engines have to charge? By the way, you'd be destroying a whole lot of community-driven sites that charge for certain extra perks to keep the lights on.
- nnq 11y ago
  ...the "destroying" part seems like a pretty good thing imho. Setting some forests on fire to make room for some new sprouts seems pretty appealing :) "Community destruction" in the online landscape is pretty much a synonym for "pushing people towards better communities where they are better off anyway"... So a good thing. (And I don't see the place of Wikipedia and donations in this. Wikipedia is obviously not selling any in-app purchases and the software they run on is "open source". HN is also "true free". Even their platform is open-source: https://github.com/wting/hackernews https://github.com/wting/hackernews not that this should count that much. And donations are obvious not profit, they are not even taxed as such. No ambiguity here.)
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Fair enough regarding donations, but the idea that HN is "truly free" while Facebook isn't is shows how unclear the proposal is. HN may not sell ads, but it does have them[1], it's just for their own companies. It's more than a little naive to think that HN makes no profit for YC and its investments. The analogy of burning the forest to allow the new sprouts to grow is quite pretty, but I'm not sure you'd actually get better trees in the end. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295614

by nnq 11y ago

icebraining 11y ago

Define "make profit from the users attention". Would HN have to charge? It's certainly a valuable resource for YC, even if the profit is indirect. What about Wikipedia? Do donations count as profit? Should search engines have to charge? By the way, you'd be destroying a whole lot of community-driven sites that charge for certain extra perks to keep the lights on.

nnq 11y ago
...the "destroying" part seems like a pretty good thing imho. Setting some forests on fire to make room for some new sprouts seems pretty appealing :) "Community destruction" in the online landscape is pretty much a synonym for "pushing people towards better communities where they are better off anyway"... So a good thing. (And I don't see the place of Wikipedia and donations in this. Wikipedia is obviously not selling any in-app purchases and the software they run on is "open source". HN is also "true free". Even their platform is open-source: https://github.com/wting/hackernews https://github.com/wting/hackernews not that this should count that much. And donations are obvious not profit, they are not even taxed as such. No ambiguity here.)
- icebraining 11y ago
  Fair enough regarding donations, but the idea that HN is "truly free" while Facebook isn't is shows how unclear the proposal is. HN may not sell ads, but it does have them[1], it's just for their own companies. It's more than a little naive to think that HN makes no profit for YC and its investments. The analogy of burning the forest to allow the new sprouts to grow is quite pretty, but I'm not sure you'd actually get better trees in the end. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295614