3 ms·

It was always a bet. You make something and hope that people like it enough to pay for it. Just like any business. Why should businesses be entitled to my money

• ben_w 2y ago
  > Why should businesses be entitled to my money if their offerings have no value to me? That's completely the wrong framing for this idea. The problem is that you don't know if it's valuable until you've bought it, unless the seller gives it for free and just trusts you to pay later in the event you did. If I see a new-to-me fruit in the supermarket, I can buy one to see if I like it, and I can be reasonably confident that my first taste will be a reliable indicator of if I should buy more. People used to do this with entire newspapers, but (1) newspapers have been derided for taking nonsense for basically as long as we would even recognise them to be newspapers in the modern sense, and (2) dividing them up into separate web pages per article makes the challenge greater, as it's gone from 50p for the entire broadsheet based on the front page headline as an advert, to a "please subscribe" banner after seeing the headline and generic intro paragraph for a random article you were probably linked to because someone else thought it was interesting.