4 ms·

To be fair, there is a dramatic difference between the free you are talking about and the free that youtube, facebook, etc are. It's one thing to offer a small

by zer8k 3y ago

To be fair, there is a dramatic difference between the free you are talking about and the free that youtube, facebook, etc are. It's one thing to offer a small website or something for free. It's another thing to power a million, or even billion, dollar infrastructure and the supporting staff on charity. It's part of the reason I drew a parallel to OSS. The "free" it is isn't free in the charitable sense. It's free in the sense, ideally, you should contribute something. In the case of ads - it's your eyes. The excluded group you are talking about would've been excluded anyway. Anything that isn't a charity and held up with volunteers and a lot of hard work will not be able to sustain them. That doesn't make it okay, necessarily, but rather that luxury services (of which youtube for example is one) are just that - a luxury. It's an take-a-penny-leave-a-penny but there are more takers than leavers. Something more familiar to us might be the Linux kernel. Without the support of all of the billions of dollars pouring in via corporations, support contracts, etc the free Linux kernel would likely either be dead or not free anymore. Even something with an army of volunteers at that caliber cannot sustain the poor people who benefit from their charity and contribute nothing in return. A tragedy, but the value producers have to eat, too.

skydhash 3y ago
> It's free in the sense, ideally, you should contribute something. In the case of ads - it's your eyes. No, it's not. Either something is free or is not. Either I chose to pay or I don't. If it's not free and I choose to pay, I can enjoy the service. If I choose not to pay, they can refuse me. If it's free, and I pay (donate), good. If I decide not to pay, it's on you to bear the cost. I don't have any obligation to you. It's not mandatory to read, watch and listen to ads. And most people choose not to, or they tune out, especially when it's not related in any way to their current activity.
- zer8k 3y ago
  > If I decide not to pay, it's on you to bear the cost. I don't have any obligation to you. That is not how the actual world functions. This sort of anarcho-primitivism does not lead itself to large scale, widely available, systems. In society you pay taxes for services you perceive as (locally) free. On the internet you pay with ads (at least for now). You are correct that you can exploit a free service. In some services, the taker to giver (leecher/seeder, whatever ratio you prefer) is high enough that service can maintain equilibrium. This is largely not true for all but the most used services. Even food banks shut down because the seeder to leecher ratio is unsustainable. Nothing is stopping you from driving these services into the ground. And you will. I really hate how smug your post comes off. Do you know what this absurd smugness gets us? A centralized internet owned by 4 companies that can afford the seeder/leecher ratio. The 4 companies that will come to own the internet also hate net neutrality. Buckle up...because then we all pay. Even Stallman encourages people to contribute back to things they use. When your attitude is so smug that not even Stallman, the king of smug nonsense, agrees with you...that says something.
  - skydhash 3y ago
    > In society you pay taxes for services you perceive as (locally) free. On the internet you pay with ads (at least for now). The government also knows that it's the working part of society that pays taxes. And it has the incentive to make that part the biggest percentage of the population. I don't see the same trend with these big platforms. They don't want to provide a service, they want to sell ads. And as such, I'm not their clientele. If you really wish to provide something for free, but you don't have the means to do so, you can ask for donations or provide extra benefits for people that are willing to pay for it. If no one is willing, then that just means it's not valuable for anyone at the price it costs. The moment you start selling ads, your priority is to grow your audience, so you can sell more ads. Not to provide a better service or product, in exchange for money. Because the former is easy (add dark patterns) while the latter is more difficult. IMO, Apple has the right strategy. Provide a good ecosystem, that you can use by buying the hardware. If you don't and try to use other means of access (Hackintosh) don't blame them for stuff not working. Microsoft could have done the same and only supported valid Windows licenses, but they wanted to capture the market. And now they're showing ads driving down the quality. > Nothing is stopping you from driving these services into the ground. And you will. Nothing is eternal. If you grow beyond what is sustainable because of investors' money and then find out your product is not so valuable, and you pivot to dark patterns and ads, then yes, it's a failure. And if YouTube did not exist, maybe we would have something similar to Wikipedia for videos, with a drastic improvement in quality.
  - hightrix 3y ago
    [flagged]

by zer8k 3y ago

skydhash 3y ago

> It's free in the sense, ideally, you should contribute something. In the case of ads - it's your eyes. No, it's not. Either something is free or is not. Either I chose to pay or I don't. If it's not free and I choose to pay, I can enjoy the service. If I choose not to pay, they can refuse me. If it's free, and I pay (donate), good. If I decide not to pay, it's on you to bear the cost. I don't have any obligation to you. It's not mandatory to read, watch and listen to ads. And most people choose not to, or they tune out, especially when it's not related in any way to their current activity.

zer8k 3y ago
> If I decide not to pay, it's on you to bear the cost. I don't have any obligation to you. That is not how the actual world functions. This sort of anarcho-primitivism does not lead itself to large scale, widely available, systems. In society you pay taxes for services you perceive as (locally) free. On the internet you pay with ads (at least for now). You are correct that you can exploit a free service. In some services, the taker to giver (leecher/seeder, whatever ratio you prefer) is high enough that service can maintain equilibrium. This is largely not true for all but the most used services. Even food banks shut down because the seeder to leecher ratio is unsustainable. Nothing is stopping you from driving these services into the ground. And you will. I really hate how smug your post comes off. Do you know what this absurd smugness gets us? A centralized internet owned by 4 companies that can afford the seeder/leecher ratio. The 4 companies that will come to own the internet also hate net neutrality. Buckle up...because then we all pay. Even Stallman encourages people to contribute back to things they use. When your attitude is so smug that not even Stallman, the king of smug nonsense, agrees with you...that says something.
- skydhash 3y ago
  > In society you pay taxes for services you perceive as (locally) free. On the internet you pay with ads (at least for now). The government also knows that it's the working part of society that pays taxes. And it has the incentive to make that part the biggest percentage of the population. I don't see the same trend with these big platforms. They don't want to provide a service, they want to sell ads. And as such, I'm not their clientele. If you really wish to provide something for free, but you don't have the means to do so, you can ask for donations or provide extra benefits for people that are willing to pay for it. If no one is willing, then that just means it's not valuable for anyone at the price it costs. The moment you start selling ads, your priority is to grow your audience, so you can sell more ads. Not to provide a better service or product, in exchange for money. Because the former is easy (add dark patterns) while the latter is more difficult. IMO, Apple has the right strategy. Provide a good ecosystem, that you can use by buying the hardware. If you don't and try to use other means of access (Hackintosh) don't blame them for stuff not working. Microsoft could have done the same and only supported valid Windows licenses, but they wanted to capture the market. And now they're showing ads driving down the quality. > Nothing is stopping you from driving these services into the ground. And you will. Nothing is eternal. If you grow beyond what is sustainable because of investors' money and then find out your product is not so valuable, and you pivot to dark patterns and ads, then yes, it's a failure. And if YouTube did not exist, maybe we would have something similar to Wikipedia for videos, with a drastic improvement in quality.
- hightrix 3y ago
  [flagged]