4 ms·

If you ask me it's due to a confluence of: - People like and expect stuff on the internet to be free; - The companies who produce this stuff have shareholders

by allo37 5y ago

If you ask me it's due to a confluence of: - People like and expect stuff on the internet to be free; - The companies who produce this stuff have shareholders who want to see their squiggly lines go up. Honourable mention: Because cybersecurity is hard and involves saving users from themselves. That's my oversimplified take, anyways.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago
Also when phones started becoming able to work with the Internet in the 00's, cell phone companies (namely Qualcomm) did not repeat the same mistakes IBM made in the early 80's that gave consumers an open, standardized computing platform.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
> - People like and expect stuff on the internet to be free; God damn. The race to the bottom where users are now unwilling to even pay 99 cents for an app on iOS is what kept many of us working for our Corporate Overlords instead of ushering in a new golden age for the indie developer. I'm so sad now. That would have been Easy Street; we're left now to find the niches I guess — as is usually the case with powerful corporations running the show.
elric 5y ago
I think a lot of people are willing to pay for a lot of things, as long as it's a low-friction affair. Which payments on the intertubez are not. As an example, I recently wanted to read a newspaper article that was paywalled; so I figured I'd just pay. I ended up noping out after being presented with a form that wanted so much PII that it basically reeked of identity theft. This was Belgium's largest news site. If they'd have just given me an option to pay a one time fee of €0.50, no questions asked, no fuss, no PII, then I would have paid it in a heartbeat. Online payments suck and need to be addressed (way beyond what Stripe is doing). But many companies are basically gaming this broken system to force people into hard-to-cancel subscriptions, or are profiteering off of outrageous transaction fees (looking at you, PayPal).

by allo37 5y ago

tenebrisalietum 5y ago

Also when phones started becoming able to work with the Internet in the 00's, cell phone companies (namely Qualcomm) did not repeat the same mistakes IBM made in the early 80's that gave consumers an open, standardized computing platform.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

> - People like and expect stuff on the internet to be free; God damn. The race to the bottom where users are now unwilling to even pay 99 cents for an app on iOS is what kept many of us working for our Corporate Overlords instead of ushering in a new golden age for the indie developer. I'm so sad now. That would have been Easy Street; we're left now to find the niches I guess — as is usually the case with powerful corporations running the show.

elric 5y ago

I think a lot of people are willing to pay for a lot of things, as long as it's a low-friction affair. Which payments on the intertubez are not. As an example, I recently wanted to read a newspaper article that was paywalled; so I figured I'd just pay. I ended up noping out after being presented with a form that wanted so much PII that it basically reeked of identity theft. This was Belgium's largest news site. If they'd have just given me an option to pay a one time fee of €0.50, no questions asked, no fuss, no PII, then I would have paid it in a heartbeat. Online payments suck and need to be addressed (way beyond what Stripe is doing). But many companies are basically gaming this broken system to force people into hard-to-cancel subscriptions, or are profiteering off of outrageous transaction fees (looking at you, PayPal).