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To me this seems like an odd way to approach customer acquisition. If I offer a service or product to what I assume are reasonable, rational, intelligent human

by Veen 10y ago

To me this seems like an odd way to approach customer acquisition. If I offer a service or product to what I assume are reasonable, rational, intelligent human beings, the deal is this: you pay me what I ask and you get the service I'm offering at that price. No other deal, accommodation, or offer is on the table. My services don't include being your therapist, your mother, your whipping boy, or anything other than a person who will sell you a product or service and treat you with the respect you're accorded as a fellow human being in the world. Your status as a customer gives you no more rights than that. You are not, by virtue of being my customer, excused the normal standard of interaction with a social equal. You are not entitled to take my offering without recompense. You are not entitled to abuse me or in any other way behave in an uncivilized manner. If that arrangement is not amaenable to you because you suffer from a deficiency of character or intelligence, that's not something I feel obligated to accommodate.

hermitcrab 10y ago
I sympathize with your view. I think this approach would be fine in a world with 'good guys' who always pay and 'bad guys' who never pay. But many people fall on a bell curve between these 2 extremes (this is backed up by the work of Dan Ariely on honesty). And some these people on the curve might 'do the right thing' with a nudge in that direction.
- slv77 10y ago
  Back in the day I sold shareware which used successive keyed hashes to generate the registration key. While they key generator used all the keys the software only validated against the first n keys. When the software was inevitably cracked and a key generator was published the software would be updated to validate n+1 keys which would render the cracked keys unusable. This left hundreds of pages of invalid keys across various crack sites with no way for anyone searching on Google to separate the needles from the haystack. The software phoned home during the registration process as well and our analytics showed that 30% of our paying customers had gone to one or more crack sites and attempted to enter a product key before eventually deciding to purchase the software. This was a utility in the $20 to $30 dollar range so cost wasn't a major factor.

by Veen 10y ago

hermitcrab 10y ago

I sympathize with your view. I think this approach would be fine in a world with 'good guys' who always pay and 'bad guys' who never pay. But many people fall on a bell curve between these 2 extremes (this is backed up by the work of Dan Ariely on honesty). And some these people on the curve might 'do the right thing' with a nudge in that direction.

slv77 10y ago
Back in the day I sold shareware which used successive keyed hashes to generate the registration key. While they key generator used all the keys the software only validated against the first n keys. When the software was inevitably cracked and a key generator was published the software would be updated to validate n+1 keys which would render the cracked keys unusable. This left hundreds of pages of invalid keys across various crack sites with no way for anyone searching on Google to separate the needles from the haystack. The software phoned home during the registration process as well and our analytics showed that 30% of our paying customers had gone to one or more crack sites and attempted to enter a product key before eventually deciding to purchase the software. This was a utility in the $20 to $30 dollar range so cost wasn't a major factor.