3 ms·

I benefit a lot from free internet services. This is preying on that convention. The web would be a very different place if people felt OK paying for the value

I benefit a lot from free internet services. This is preying on that convention. The web would be a very different place if people felt OK paying for the value brought into their lives by services that are free today. I also feel that in that world, this would not be necessary. So, the state of things is the state of things... :/

n_ary 3y ago
> The web would be a very different place if people felt OK paying for the value brought into their lives by services that are free today I believe to contrary. A lot of services paid-only doesn’t have a decent customer support even and subpar product while registering billions in profits. We can always assume “what-if” about paying, but if it was very easy for getting people to pay up, we’d have way too many subpar things and standards would be bottom the drain. I like that services work up their standards and people interested will be very happy to pay. See kagi search, fastmail, google/fb ads, netflix, all vps hosting. If you offer some good value, you’ll get paid, if you are dubious, paying will just increase the bottom line and promote bad behavior from vendors.
vishnuharidas 3y ago
People are ready to pay for something if they find it useful and worthy. But the problem is not clearly saying this beforehand. I invest a lot of time on the website and to my surprise it asks me for a payment - that's like cheating. Imagine I spent a lot of time writing a story in a brand new text editing software, and when trying to save the document, it asking me to pay to save the file!