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You're using their service completely free, so I don't think you are really entitled to any say on the matter. If you were paying for it you might have some rea

You're using their service completely free, so I don't think you are really entitled to any say on the matter. If you were paying for it you might have some reasonable expectation that they leave your content intact, but you're not. It's like complaining about high taxes and then turning around and complaining that the government isn't sending everyone's children to college for free. You can't have it both ways. I think this is an absolutely acceptable (and, incidentally, completely innocuous) monetization strategy. It's not like they're rewriting your blog posts to give the false impression you're a Nazi porn star child molester. (I would be against that, for the record.)

Tichy 16y ago
So whenever I use a free service, they are basically entitled to do whatever they want? What kind of logic is that? If they can't handle it, people shouldn't offer a free service. But don't run a service for "free" and then try to make money with shady business practices. In other words, you are not entitled to running a service for free.
- Silhouette 16y ago
  > So whenever I use a free service, they are basically entitled to do whatever they want? Well, legally speaking, they probably are, yes. You get what you pay for, and the current entitlement culture because a lot of "free" on-line services don't come with financial strings does not negate this basic fact of life. Now, whether they should disclose that they are doing this so that those using their service can decide whether or not they wish to continue doing so is an entirely different question.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    Why would there be different rules for businesses, depending on whether their offering is free or not? Suppose posterous would charge 5$/month for their blog hosting, and still would add the affiliate links, what would it change in your opinion? I don't think it is illegal to add those links. I for one will stay away from them, though. Also, Facebook is free. Why did they bother to introduce new terms of service at all? According to you, they could just do whatever they want?
    - Silhouette 16y ago
      > Suppose posterous would charge 5$/month for their blog hosting, and still would add the affiliate links, what would it change in your opinion? It is fundamentally different in law as soon as there is consideration in both directions, because then you have the basis of a contract. However, if users aren't paying for the service (or otherwise giving some significant benefit to the service provider) then there is unlikely to be a legal basis for any obligation on the part of a service provider to those users. You can't have a one-way contract. IANAL etc., but this is elementary contract law. > According to you, [Facebook] could just do whatever they want? Yes, they probably could, in law. Whether it is a smart PR move to alienate users of your free service by doing something that your user base does not like is a different question. After all, your users have no obligation to you either beyond whatever the use of your service is worth to them.
      - Tichy 16y ago
        Hm, I don't know how contracts work in the US, but at least where I live, I don't think "a service has to cost money" is part of what makes a contract legal. A contract is a contract, it doesn't matter if it is about money or anything else. Also, it is not really free, Posterous is getting something in return. At the moment for example the affiliate links. So it would be a kind of quantum state contract? If they don't add the links, they are free, therefore it would be legal for them to add the links (or do bad thing X). Then suddenly they wouldn't be free anymore, and they would have to remove it again. I don't think that makes much sense.
        Silhouette 16y ago
        Where do you live, where contracts don't have to involve consideration in both directions? That consideration doesn't have to be financial, but there has to be something of value in the deal for both sides. Maybe in Posterous's case, a user could argue that providing the rights to use their content was consideration enough, and maybe a court would agree. This is where you start needing a real lawyer.
        16y ago
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Incorrect. Free services have terms and conditions just like paid services. If they change your content on the fly that's part of the agreement and it should be disclosed. Whether you pay or not is immaterial, if you paid they could do it just the same. There is no 'legally speaking' here, this is not a lawsuit, it's just against the expectations that you create in the heads of your users, and that is always bad for your business. That's why you disclose stuff, to make sure everybody is on the same page.
    - Silhouette 16y ago
      I'm sorry, but how was my post incorrect? (a) Terms and conditions aren't worth anything unless they are legally enforceable. (b) The terms and conditions for just about every blogging or social networking site claim a far-reaching right to use and modify any submitted material, and I've just confirmed that this includes the terms for Posterous. (c) Whether it is bad PR for them to pull something like this is a different question.
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        This is not a lawsuit, and to pretend it is is not really correct. It's simply one side not informing the other fully of the status quo, which is not 'actionable' in any other way than by simply quitting the service, which probably quite a few people will do. A business operates on trust, this breaks that trust. It's not just PR, it's a fundamental breach of the silent agreement between users and a service. What your terms and conditions write in legalese and what you intend to do in plain English can be two different things but that isn't a long term strategy. Nobody is going to sue posterous over this, mostly because there isn't any real damage to the end users, and yet they should have known much better than to even try and get away with this.
        Silhouette 16y ago
        > Nobody is going to sue posterous over this, mostly because there isn't any real damage to the end users, and yet they should have known much better than to even try and get away with this. You are curiously pragmatic about this one moment, but then curiously hostile the next! Sure, it is unlikely that anyone is going to sue Posterous over this. I was merely addressing the original question to which I replied, which asked whether someone running a free service was entitled to do what they want with it. I never wrote anything about this being a lawsuit. By the same token, given that apparently this has been going on for months and it's only just been noticed, I'm betting that the impact on Posterous from all the righteous indignation on display in this HN discussion is also going to be negligible, so the guys running the free service are still entitled to do what they want (and accept the consequences, if there are any).
- codyrobbins 16y ago
  The answer to your first question is unequivocally yes (within the confines of the law, of course). Unfortunately for you, and fortunately for the rest of us, you don't get to dictate the terms under which people offer free services. I don't find Posterous's business practices shady at all—they found a way to offer a free service to people while at the same time making some money off it in a way that users don't even need to be aware of. I think that is the definition of creating value—it's a mutually beneficial relationship. I don’t like how you’re trying to imply they're somehow immoral just because you don’t like what they’re doing. If you don't like the way they do it, don't use it. Your content is being hosted at their pleasure. It’s like living rent-free at your aunt’s house and then getting ticked off when she sublets the basement to help cover the rent. You have no right to be upset over that—it’s her house.
  - Tichy 16y ago
    Even a free service has some "terms", as you said. Neglecting certain aspects of the service (hidden costs) in the terms is fraud in my opinion. Now in this case it probably isn't illegal, but I just don't understand your logic in general. How does offering anything for free justify anything? Picking up on your renting example: if aunty offers me to let me live there for free indefinitely, and I move my stuff there at considerable costs, I think I would be pissed off. Not that I personally would like the arrangement to begin with, but still.
    - codyrobbins 16y ago
      Just being blunt, but if you got pissed off at your aunt like that, I would call you an ungrateful spoiled brat. Doesn’t matter how much you paid to move your stuff in. I don’t actually think you’re a spoiled brat, because it’s just an analogy and expecting something from Posterous as you do is at a much lower level of entitlement than expecting something from someone letting you live with them rent-free. I see your point of view regarding Posterous and I can respect it although I disagree. IANAL, but I think the only reason that a website offers terms of service (beyond any minimum legal requirements they must live up to whether they like it or not) is to give the appearance that they’re nice guys that care about their users. That makes users feel good; it’s a PR decision. But the business doesn’t have any obligation to make its users feel all fuzzy inside about the service. It’s just that it’s usually in the best interests of the business to do so, to the most reasonable degree possible. And it’s good that business don’t have this obligation, because users can be stingy and irrational. Like, for example, when they get unjustifiably angry when the business finds a completely harmless way to support the free service.
- bootload 16y ago
  "... So whenever I use a free service, they are basically entitled to do whatever they want? What kind of logic is that? ..." Share cropper mentality. As much as I agree to with your sentiment by not owning the server you post on this is what happens. Eben Moglin has delivered a great speech on the lack of "Freedom in the Cloud" ~ http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/messages/boards/thread/8486342/ http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/messages/boards/thread/8486342... The stand out quote: "servers have gained freedom & you have not. welcome to the cloud!" - eben moglin ~ http://twitter.com/noneck/status/8700276388 http://twitter.com/noneck/status/8700276388
  - Tichy 16y ago
    I don't own my root server either (it is rented), but I have my own ad-free Wordpress installation running on it. So I don't think the cloud has to imply sharecropping. With a good open source blog engine that everybody could set up at the push of a button (without any knowledge about computer administration), such problems could be avoided to some extend? Atm one could use Google App Engine for that, except I don't like being tied to their specific API. Not saying everything should be/could be free. But the cloud could make it easier for people to have their own server (rented for a small fee), and run all sorts of stuff on top of it.
- dandelany 16y ago
  From the Posterous Terms of Service: "You shall retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions; however, by submitting material to Posterous you grant Posterous the irrevocable, fully transferable rights to use, reproduce, distribute, modify, transmit, prepare derivative works of, display and produce the material in connection with Posterous and Posterous's business, but solely in accordance with these Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy." (emphasis mine) I don't know, legally, whether they are allowed to do whatever they want. But it doesn't appear that they broke their terms of service, what more do you want?
  - Tichy 16y ago
    I don't think what they are doing is illegal (IANAL, though). But nobody reads TOS, and even if I read something like the above, I would maybe assume they just need that to be able to publish the blog posts at all. It's difficult to get such formulations right - what does "in connection with Posterous and Posterous's business" mean, for example? Does it mean they may do whatever they want to do, as long as they earn money with it? Ie wrap your blog posts into a book and sell it? Print T-Shirts with the drawings you posted? There is always a certain amount of goodwill in interpreting contracts and TOS. If it turns out that a company is bending the wording to their advantage, it is a natural reaction to leave and avoid the company in the future.
- DannoHung 16y ago
  > So whenever I use a free service, they are basically entitled to do whatever they want? What kind of logic is that? Pretty fucking much! You've got it the wrong way around asshole. If you can't handle it, you shouldn't be USING a free service!
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    > asshole Sorry ? If you can't express your disagreement without resorting to name calling I guess you feel you've lost the argument ? And no, you're completely wrong. Running a free service does not give you the right to run roughshod over your users, the users of free services have rights just like those of paid services and you are normally required to spell those out in your terms of service, preferably in language that your users will actually understand. In fact, the people at posterous seem to have at least come to the conclusion that that is the way things ought to be and we can consider this experiment a one-off. Transparency is not just because you want to be nice, it is because you want to keep yourself and your users on the same page, so that people don't feel taken advantage of.
jacquesm 16y ago
I really don't like the downvotes just because you express an unpopular opinion, instead let me try to show you what is not good here. A free service does not mean there is no understanding between the parties, it simply means the price is '0'. Even if you paid or got paid, there would still be an unwritten set of expectations underlying your usage of the service, and these should be clearly expressed in the terms of service (not the corporate blog). If the service goes out of its way to make it seem as though your content is still intact, but in fact changes it underwater then that is 'sneaky'. If the service profits from that they're not 'clever', 'smart' or merely trying to make ends meet, they've changed the terms of the unwritten agreement, after the fact. That is what is wrong here, not that they decided to charge you. By your logic google can turn around next month and suddenly charge you for your gmail account, after all, you don't really have any say on the matter. Or they might decide to decrease the size of your mailbox to 10 MB. But that breaks the unwritten contract, just like this does. Sure, your 'service' continues uninterrupted, but the fact is that they added something that changed users content without 'informed consent' on the part of those users, and they did everything they could to cover their tracks. The latter is advertised as being 'unobtrusive', I read it as 'we tried very hard to make sure we got away with it'. It's double speak to present it as a way to make it transparent to the user, after all, changing the links inline and visibly would have been more transparant, not less. Any change to the content, especially one that you profit from should be made explicit, it's part of the 'terms' of the agreement between the users and the owners of the service.
- codyrobbins 16y ago
  Unfortunately I think people have a tendency here to downvote comments they disagree with rather than weighing them on their merits. Although I concede that perhaps it had something to do with the Nazi stripper comment ;) I completely and unequivocally disagree with almost everything you said, though. I’m not entirely sure whether you’re speaking legally or on the level of what you think the company ‘should’ be doing from a moral perspective, but I think you’re speaking from a moral perspective. But you’re attempting to say that the price does not matter, and here you can’t ignore the legal aspect, because price most certainly does matter in that respect. If you are paying for the service and there is therefore an actual honest-to-goodness contract between you and the business, then they do have a responsibility to continue to provide the service as stipulated in the contract. However, even then, it’s common for businesses to stop providing a service; if, for example, they refund your money. IANAL, but I imagine the Uniform Commercial Code provides for this sort of eventuality. Look at Lala shutting down: Apple decided to entirely remove the service off the face of the earth, leaving users entirely out in the cold. And they didn’t even refund anyone’s money—they just gave out iTunes gift certificates. I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with this: they are making calculated decisions and they need to be free to make these decisions. Users must have an implied underlying understanding that the business may make changes like this. But in the case of Posterous no monetary consideration is even changing hands and so the obligation is necessarily far more nebulous if there is one at all. ‘Sure,’ you’ll say again, ‘but I’m not talking legally, I’m speaking morally.’ OK—I’ll say again that I don’t think a business has any obligation to live up to whichever crazy expectation you happen to have dreamed up concerning their free service. Whatever your particular understanding of the service you are getting happens to be is completely orthogonal to what the business is going to decide to provide. If there’s one crazy guy in Butte, Montana who thinks Posterous is a dating site, and then Posterous decides to remove avatar images from the site, the guy in Montana just can’t complain that Posterous has ruined his ability to use the site as a way to look at pictures of potential dates. It’s their product, it’s their right to make any change they want. Businesses, and especially web startups, need to be free to stay agile and change direction on a dime. They need to iterate to find a business model that works. Just because they were doing one thing in the past, people have no right to think the business is therefore forever after obligated to continuing doing so in the future. I do think that it is absolutely within Google’s rights, if it so chose, to start charging money for Gmail tomorrow. It may break an unwritten contract, but that doesn’t mean they can’t nor shouldn’t do it if they decide that it’s in their best interest to do so. You may say from a practical standpoint that they’d lose 95% of their users if they did such a thing. But they are completely free to decide to make a change that drives off 95% of their users. I assume they would have calculated that the money they will make from the 5% of remaining users is worth it. Gmail is a bad example, though, because obviously Google is giving away the service for free because it brings in tons of eyeballs on their ads. If ad revenue in Gmail fell precipitously with no hope of coming back, do you think Google wouldn’t really start charging for it or cancel it altogether? It’s ironic that you talk about ‘unwritten terms’ between the business and user, because someone already posted the Posterous terms of service, and it explicitly says that they might do this. So there are no ‘unwritten terms’—there are written ones and they explicitly allow for this, so it’s moot.

Tichy 16y ago

So whenever I use a free service, they are basically entitled to do whatever they want? What kind of logic is that? If they can't handle it, people shouldn't offer a free service. But don't run a service for "free" and then try to make money with shady business practices. In other words, you are not entitled to running a service for free.

Silhouette 16y ago
> So whenever I use a free service, they are basically entitled to do whatever they want? Well, legally speaking, they probably are, yes. You get what you pay for, and the current entitlement culture because a lot of "free" on-line services don't come with financial strings does not negate this basic fact of life. Now, whether they should disclose that they are doing this so that those using their service can decide whether or not they wish to continue doing so is an entirely different question.
- Tichy 16y ago
  Why would there be different rules for businesses, depending on whether their offering is free or not? Suppose posterous would charge 5$/month for their blog hosting, and still would add the affiliate links, what would it change in your opinion? I don't think it is illegal to add those links. I for one will stay away from them, though. Also, Facebook is free. Why did they bother to introduce new terms of service at all? According to you, they could just do whatever they want?
  - Silhouette 16y ago
    > Suppose posterous would charge 5$/month for their blog hosting, and still would add the affiliate links, what would it change in your opinion? It is fundamentally different in law as soon as there is consideration in both directions, because then you have the basis of a contract. However, if users aren't paying for the service (or otherwise giving some significant benefit to the service provider) then there is unlikely to be a legal basis for any obligation on the part of a service provider to those users. You can't have a one-way contract. IANAL etc., but this is elementary contract law. > According to you, [Facebook] could just do whatever they want? Yes, they probably could, in law. Whether it is a smart PR move to alienate users of your free service by doing something that your user base does not like is a different question. After all, your users have no obligation to you either beyond whatever the use of your service is worth to them.
    - Tichy 16y ago
      Hm, I don't know how contracts work in the US, but at least where I live, I don't think "a service has to cost money" is part of what makes a contract legal. A contract is a contract, it doesn't matter if it is about money or anything else. Also, it is not really free, Posterous is getting something in return. At the moment for example the affiliate links. So it would be a kind of quantum state contract? If they don't add the links, they are free, therefore it would be legal for them to add the links (or do bad thing X). Then suddenly they wouldn't be free anymore, and they would have to remove it again. I don't think that makes much sense.
      - Silhouette 16y ago
        Where do you live, where contracts don't have to involve consideration in both directions? That consideration doesn't have to be financial, but there has to be something of value in the deal for both sides. Maybe in Posterous's case, a user could argue that providing the rights to use their content was consideration enough, and maybe a court would agree. This is where you start needing a real lawyer.
        16y ago
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Incorrect. Free services have terms and conditions just like paid services. If they change your content on the fly that's part of the agreement and it should be disclosed. Whether you pay or not is immaterial, if you paid they could do it just the same. There is no 'legally speaking' here, this is not a lawsuit, it's just against the expectations that you create in the heads of your users, and that is always bad for your business. That's why you disclose stuff, to make sure everybody is on the same page.
  - Silhouette 16y ago
    I'm sorry, but how was my post incorrect? (a) Terms and conditions aren't worth anything unless they are legally enforceable. (b) The terms and conditions for just about every blogging or social networking site claim a far-reaching right to use and modify any submitted material, and I've just confirmed that this includes the terms for Posterous. (c) Whether it is bad PR for them to pull something like this is a different question.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      This is not a lawsuit, and to pretend it is is not really correct. It's simply one side not informing the other fully of the status quo, which is not 'actionable' in any other way than by simply quitting the service, which probably quite a few people will do. A business operates on trust, this breaks that trust. It's not just PR, it's a fundamental breach of the silent agreement between users and a service. What your terms and conditions write in legalese and what you intend to do in plain English can be two different things but that isn't a long term strategy. Nobody is going to sue posterous over this, mostly because there isn't any real damage to the end users, and yet they should have known much better than to even try and get away with this.
      - Silhouette 16y ago
        > Nobody is going to sue posterous over this, mostly because there isn't any real damage to the end users, and yet they should have known much better than to even try and get away with this. You are curiously pragmatic about this one moment, but then curiously hostile the next! Sure, it is unlikely that anyone is going to sue Posterous over this. I was merely addressing the original question to which I replied, which asked whether someone running a free service was entitled to do what they want with it. I never wrote anything about this being a lawsuit. By the same token, given that apparently this has been going on for months and it's only just been noticed, I'm betting that the impact on Posterous from all the righteous indignation on display in this HN discussion is also going to be negligible, so the guys running the free service are still entitled to do what they want (and accept the consequences, if there are any).
codyrobbins 16y ago
The answer to your first question is unequivocally yes (within the confines of the law, of course). Unfortunately for you, and fortunately for the rest of us, you don't get to dictate the terms under which people offer free services. I don't find Posterous's business practices shady at all—they found a way to offer a free service to people while at the same time making some money off it in a way that users don't even need to be aware of. I think that is the definition of creating value—it's a mutually beneficial relationship. I don’t like how you’re trying to imply they're somehow immoral just because you don’t like what they’re doing. If you don't like the way they do it, don't use it. Your content is being hosted at their pleasure. It’s like living rent-free at your aunt’s house and then getting ticked off when she sublets the basement to help cover the rent. You have no right to be upset over that—it’s her house.
- Tichy 16y ago
  Even a free service has some "terms", as you said. Neglecting certain aspects of the service (hidden costs) in the terms is fraud in my opinion. Now in this case it probably isn't illegal, but I just don't understand your logic in general. How does offering anything for free justify anything? Picking up on your renting example: if aunty offers me to let me live there for free indefinitely, and I move my stuff there at considerable costs, I think I would be pissed off. Not that I personally would like the arrangement to begin with, but still.
  - codyrobbins 16y ago
    Just being blunt, but if you got pissed off at your aunt like that, I would call you an ungrateful spoiled brat. Doesn’t matter how much you paid to move your stuff in. I don’t actually think you’re a spoiled brat, because it’s just an analogy and expecting something from Posterous as you do is at a much lower level of entitlement than expecting something from someone letting you live with them rent-free. I see your point of view regarding Posterous and I can respect it although I disagree. IANAL, but I think the only reason that a website offers terms of service (beyond any minimum legal requirements they must live up to whether they like it or not) is to give the appearance that they’re nice guys that care about their users. That makes users feel good; it’s a PR decision. But the business doesn’t have any obligation to make its users feel all fuzzy inside about the service. It’s just that it’s usually in the best interests of the business to do so, to the most reasonable degree possible. And it’s good that business don’t have this obligation, because users can be stingy and irrational. Like, for example, when they get unjustifiably angry when the business finds a completely harmless way to support the free service.
bootload 16y ago
"... So whenever I use a free service, they are basically entitled to do whatever they want? What kind of logic is that? ..." Share cropper mentality. As much as I agree to with your sentiment by not owning the server you post on this is what happens. Eben Moglin has delivered a great speech on the lack of "Freedom in the Cloud" ~ http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/messages/boards/thread/8486342/ http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/messages/boards/thread/8486342... The stand out quote: "servers have gained freedom & you have not. welcome to the cloud!" - eben moglin ~ http://twitter.com/noneck/status/8700276388 http://twitter.com/noneck/status/8700276388
- Tichy 16y ago
  I don't own my root server either (it is rented), but I have my own ad-free Wordpress installation running on it. So I don't think the cloud has to imply sharecropping. With a good open source blog engine that everybody could set up at the push of a button (without any knowledge about computer administration), such problems could be avoided to some extend? Atm one could use Google App Engine for that, except I don't like being tied to their specific API. Not saying everything should be/could be free. But the cloud could make it easier for people to have their own server (rented for a small fee), and run all sorts of stuff on top of it.
dandelany 16y ago
From the Posterous Terms of Service: "You shall retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions; however, by submitting material to Posterous you grant Posterous the irrevocable, fully transferable rights to use, reproduce, distribute, modify, transmit, prepare derivative works of, display and produce the material in connection with Posterous and Posterous's business, but solely in accordance with these Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy." (emphasis mine) I don't know, legally, whether they are allowed to do whatever they want. But it doesn't appear that they broke their terms of service, what more do you want?
- Tichy 16y ago
  I don't think what they are doing is illegal (IANAL, though). But nobody reads TOS, and even if I read something like the above, I would maybe assume they just need that to be able to publish the blog posts at all. It's difficult to get such formulations right - what does "in connection with Posterous and Posterous's business" mean, for example? Does it mean they may do whatever they want to do, as long as they earn money with it? Ie wrap your blog posts into a book and sell it? Print T-Shirts with the drawings you posted? There is always a certain amount of goodwill in interpreting contracts and TOS. If it turns out that a company is bending the wording to their advantage, it is a natural reaction to leave and avoid the company in the future.
DannoHung 16y ago
> So whenever I use a free service, they are basically entitled to do whatever they want? What kind of logic is that? Pretty fucking much! You've got it the wrong way around asshole. If you can't handle it, you shouldn't be USING a free service!
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > asshole Sorry ? If you can't express your disagreement without resorting to name calling I guess you feel you've lost the argument ? And no, you're completely wrong. Running a free service does not give you the right to run roughshod over your users, the users of free services have rights just like those of paid services and you are normally required to spell those out in your terms of service, preferably in language that your users will actually understand. In fact, the people at posterous seem to have at least come to the conclusion that that is the way things ought to be and we can consider this experiment a one-off. Transparency is not just because you want to be nice, it is because you want to keep yourself and your users on the same page, so that people don't feel taken advantage of.

jacquesm 16y ago

I really don't like the downvotes just because you express an unpopular opinion, instead let me try to show you what is not good here. A free service does not mean there is no understanding between the parties, it simply means the price is '0'. Even if you paid or got paid, there would still be an unwritten set of expectations underlying your usage of the service, and these should be clearly expressed in the terms of service (not the corporate blog). If the service goes out of its way to make it seem as though your content is still intact, but in fact changes it underwater then that is 'sneaky'. If the service profits from that they're not 'clever', 'smart' or merely trying to make ends meet, they've changed the terms of the unwritten agreement, after the fact. That is what is wrong here, not that they decided to charge you. By your logic google can turn around next month and suddenly charge you for your gmail account, after all, you don't really have any say on the matter. Or they might decide to decrease the size of your mailbox to 10 MB. But that breaks the unwritten contract, just like this does. Sure, your 'service' continues uninterrupted, but the fact is that they added something that changed users content without 'informed consent' on the part of those users, and they did everything they could to cover their tracks. The latter is advertised as being 'unobtrusive', I read it as 'we tried very hard to make sure we got away with it'. It's double speak to present it as a way to make it transparent to the user, after all, changing the links inline and visibly would have been more transparant, not less. Any change to the content, especially one that you profit from should be made explicit, it's part of the 'terms' of the agreement between the users and the owners of the service.

codyrobbins 16y ago
Unfortunately I think people have a tendency here to downvote comments they disagree with rather than weighing them on their merits. Although I concede that perhaps it had something to do with the Nazi stripper comment ;) I completely and unequivocally disagree with almost everything you said, though. I’m not entirely sure whether you’re speaking legally or on the level of what you think the company ‘should’ be doing from a moral perspective, but I think you’re speaking from a moral perspective. But you’re attempting to say that the price does not matter, and here you can’t ignore the legal aspect, because price most certainly does matter in that respect. If you are paying for the service and there is therefore an actual honest-to-goodness contract between you and the business, then they do have a responsibility to continue to provide the service as stipulated in the contract. However, even then, it’s common for businesses to stop providing a service; if, for example, they refund your money. IANAL, but I imagine the Uniform Commercial Code provides for this sort of eventuality. Look at Lala shutting down: Apple decided to entirely remove the service off the face of the earth, leaving users entirely out in the cold. And they didn’t even refund anyone’s money—they just gave out iTunes gift certificates. I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with this: they are making calculated decisions and they need to be free to make these decisions. Users must have an implied underlying understanding that the business may make changes like this. But in the case of Posterous no monetary consideration is even changing hands and so the obligation is necessarily far more nebulous if there is one at all. ‘Sure,’ you’ll say again, ‘but I’m not talking legally, I’m speaking morally.’ OK—I’ll say again that I don’t think a business has any obligation to live up to whichever crazy expectation you happen to have dreamed up concerning their free service. Whatever your particular understanding of the service you are getting happens to be is completely orthogonal to what the business is going to decide to provide. If there’s one crazy guy in Butte, Montana who thinks Posterous is a dating site, and then Posterous decides to remove avatar images from the site, the guy in Montana just can’t complain that Posterous has ruined his ability to use the site as a way to look at pictures of potential dates. It’s their product, it’s their right to make any change they want. Businesses, and especially web startups, need to be free to stay agile and change direction on a dime. They need to iterate to find a business model that works. Just because they were doing one thing in the past, people have no right to think the business is therefore forever after obligated to continuing doing so in the future. I do think that it is absolutely within Google’s rights, if it so chose, to start charging money for Gmail tomorrow. It may break an unwritten contract, but that doesn’t mean they can’t nor shouldn’t do it if they decide that it’s in their best interest to do so. You may say from a practical standpoint that they’d lose 95% of their users if they did such a thing. But they are completely free to decide to make a change that drives off 95% of their users. I assume they would have calculated that the money they will make from the 5% of remaining users is worth it. Gmail is a bad example, though, because obviously Google is giving away the service for free because it brings in tons of eyeballs on their ads. If ad revenue in Gmail fell precipitously with no hope of coming back, do you think Google wouldn’t really start charging for it or cancel it altogether? It’s ironic that you talk about ‘unwritten terms’ between the business and user, because someone already posted the Posterous terms of service, and it explicitly says that they might do this. So there are no ‘unwritten terms’—there are written ones and they explicitly allow for this, so it’s moot.