5 ms·

How do you persuade people who have been using your services free to start paying $5 or $10 a month? User: OMG this service is sooooo important! Compan

by gaius 9y ago

How do you persuade people who have been using your services free to start paying $5 or $10 a month? User: OMG this service is sooooo important! Company: would you pay one Starbucks per month for it? User: Nah And there you have it in a nutshell. For all the handwringing, noone actually is willing to put their money where their mouth, ermmm, ears are.

wolfgke 9y ago
It is a difference to pay some single amount of money vs. paying some recurring sum.
- gaius 9y ago
  So what? Users of this service can afford laptops, phones + bandwidth, a lifestyle necessitating streaming music etc - but its so valuable to them that they can't afford the equivalent of one latte per month? I call shenanigans.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    Our current Internet lifestyle is unsustainable and will crash sooner rather than later. I say this with no sarcasm: if I had to pay for everything I used online, I would be broke. $5 to HN, $5 to Reddit, $5 to ArsTechnica, $5 for Gmail, $5 for Google Docs, $5 for Google Search, $5 to Github, $5 to Medium, $5 to Wordpress, $5 to StackOverflow, $5 to CNN, $5 to NYT, $5 to Wikipedia, $5 to Weather Channel, $5 to each site I click on from HN or Reddit or Wikipedia, we could be talking hundreds of dollars per month. You could make your argument about anything. "If Reddit is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" "If HN is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" "If Google is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" You'd run out of money quicker than you'd run out of websites to pay, or you'd seriously scale back what websites you visit. It's coming crashing down on us that either you have to pay for something or that something goes away. And we can't pay for everything. Maybe the next Rails or Node can focus on making the cost of hosting infrastructure so inconsequential that sites don't have to make that choice.
    - wolfgke 9y ago
      > Maybe the next Rails or Node can focus on making the cost of hosting infrastructure so inconsequential that sites don't have to make that choice. Isn't the much larger cost driver the salaries of the employees than the infrastructure cost (serious question!)?
      - CryoLogic 9y ago
        Depends on what you are hosting. A text-based site like reddit is almost nothing to host. All of the data is stored as strings, and only references media hosted elsewhere. HQ Video and Audio files are still expensive to host. Not even just hosting, but bandwidth can be killer. Look at S3 bandwidth costs.
        wolfgke 9y ago
        Costs of bandwidth vary a lot worldwide: > https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a... [2014] > https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world... [2016]
    - yellowapple 9y ago
      An alternative direction would be for everything to be decentralized (whether federated or peer-to-peer). That way, if reddit/HN/Google/etc. (or perhaps some new equivalents) are important to you, you can set aside some resources on your computer to let them run.
      - wolfgke 9y ago
        I would be very careful with this kind of statement: Even if it were technically feasible, this would quasi require trusted computing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing), since the company can never be sure that you won't influence some computations. This is something that probably every hacker should oppose.
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    > but its so valuable to them that they can't afford the equivalent of one latte per month? Ignoring the fact that the prices in the student café in Germany where I get my coffee specialties are much cheaper - which is why I find this comparison unsuitable: All these equivalents of one latte per month sum up when concerning multiple services that think similarly. And these individual "one lattes" sum up over many years when they are recurring.

by gaius 9y ago

wolfgke 9y ago

It is a difference to pay some single amount of money vs. paying some recurring sum.

gaius 9y ago
So what? Users of this service can afford laptops, phones + bandwidth, a lifestyle necessitating streaming music etc - but its so valuable to them that they can't afford the equivalent of one latte per month? I call shenanigans.
- freehunter 9y ago
  Our current Internet lifestyle is unsustainable and will crash sooner rather than later. I say this with no sarcasm: if I had to pay for everything I used online, I would be broke. $5 to HN, $5 to Reddit, $5 to ArsTechnica, $5 for Gmail, $5 for Google Docs, $5 for Google Search, $5 to Github, $5 to Medium, $5 to Wordpress, $5 to StackOverflow, $5 to CNN, $5 to NYT, $5 to Wikipedia, $5 to Weather Channel, $5 to each site I click on from HN or Reddit or Wikipedia, we could be talking hundreds of dollars per month. You could make your argument about anything. "If Reddit is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" "If HN is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" "If Google is so important to you, why can't you pay them money?" You'd run out of money quicker than you'd run out of websites to pay, or you'd seriously scale back what websites you visit. It's coming crashing down on us that either you have to pay for something or that something goes away. And we can't pay for everything. Maybe the next Rails or Node can focus on making the cost of hosting infrastructure so inconsequential that sites don't have to make that choice.
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    > Maybe the next Rails or Node can focus on making the cost of hosting infrastructure so inconsequential that sites don't have to make that choice. Isn't the much larger cost driver the salaries of the employees than the infrastructure cost (serious question!)?
    - CryoLogic 9y ago
      Depends on what you are hosting. A text-based site like reddit is almost nothing to host. All of the data is stored as strings, and only references media hosted elsewhere. HQ Video and Audio files are still expensive to host. Not even just hosting, but bandwidth can be killer. Look at S3 bandwidth costs.
      - wolfgke 9y ago
        Costs of bandwidth vary a lot worldwide: > https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a... [2014] > https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world... [2016]
  - yellowapple 9y ago
    An alternative direction would be for everything to be decentralized (whether federated or peer-to-peer). That way, if reddit/HN/Google/etc. (or perhaps some new equivalents) are important to you, you can set aside some resources on your computer to let them run.
    - wolfgke 9y ago
      I would be very careful with this kind of statement: Even if it were technically feasible, this would quasi require trusted computing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing), since the company can never be sure that you won't influence some computations. This is something that probably every hacker should oppose.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > but its so valuable to them that they can't afford the equivalent of one latte per month? Ignoring the fact that the prices in the student café in Germany where I get my coffee specialties are much cheaper - which is why I find this comparison unsuitable: All these equivalents of one latte per month sum up when concerning multiple services that think similarly. And these individual "one lattes" sum up over many years when they are recurring.