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I think the most astonishing aspect of this is how quickly consumers flipped from paid to free models for communication: we spent most of modern history paying
by rhplus 2y ago
I think the most astonishing aspect of this is how quickly consumers flipped from paid to free models for communication: we spent most of modern history paying for communication tools - from messenger boys, to stamps, to telegraph, to landlines, long distance, pagers, SMS and VOIP. And then over the course of 5-10 years services like AIM, ICQ, Hotmail and Gmail flipped the value proposition and changed the default consumer model from “communication is expensive and limited” to “communication is free and unlimited”.
All it took was for companies to figure out how to make users pay indirectly or pay with their data.
- jemmyw 2y agoWe still pay for the connection itself, which seems more on par with the historical examples. The internet has just removed needing to pay to connect to a particularly endpoint, you connect to it and then you've already paid your fee to communicate with anyone else on it. Maybe that's why all these internet services are free, they don't offer enough value proposition that another middleman can replace. It's a race to the bottom and the bottom is where we are now.