10 ms·
xkcd: Instagram
- jnazario 14y agobear in mind that the complaints appear to have worked. instagram reverted their policy, it seems (via the front page at present on hn).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- drcube 14y agoI said it the other day in another thread, but just because you pay doesn't mean you've avoided this type of treatment. Remember when cable TV was ad-ree because, you know, people paid for it? There is absolutely nothing stopping Facebook or Instagram from doing the same shit they currently do, even if they start charging their users. And the services that currently get by on user subscriptions alone will one day have to find another way to grow. And the way they'll do that is by selling ads and monetizing user data.
- brown9-2 14y agoRemember when cable TV was ad-ree because, you know, people paid for it? No, I don't. Do you recall how far back this was?
- SatvikBeri 14y agoThat's the point. Even services that charge you still might pull this kind of stuff.
- drcube 14y agoI'm pretty sure MTV was ad-free when it began. Same with HBO, etc. I'm thinking early 80s. I'm sure not every cable channel was ad-free, but plenty of them were because they got enough revenue from subscriptions. The thing is, services that start out free can't begin charging users without losing more users than it's worth. But services that start out being paid for can easily find ways to grow revenue by monetizing their user base and selling ads, in addition to maintaining or raising subscription fees. Satellite radio is yet another example.
- DoubleMalt 14y agoIf you're not paying for the product, YOU are the product.
- MikeTaylor 14y agoI hear this slogan a lot, because it implies that if you're paying for the product then you're NOT the product. Which is false and misleading. (That's "implies" in the English language sense, not the mathematical sense. Substitute "suggests" if you prefer.)
- piqufoh 14y agoPurely out of interest, when are you the product (when you pay for the product)? - newspapers / magazines with ads - subscription TV with ads others?
- betterunix 14y agoWhenever you shop at a store like Target or Walmart.
- betelnut 14y agoHow so?
- mediacrisis 14y agoThey mine purchase data. Any store with a "customer rewards" card does as well.
- philwelch 14y agoDon't get a discount card. Pay cash. Problem solved.
- 14y ago
- pavlov 14y ago"Chad's garage" seems like an appropriate generic term for a web startup whose users are not the company's customers, but it's not clear that anyone else wants to be the customer either. As in: "-Why did MySpace fail? -They were basically Chad's garage."
- jpswade 14y agoOnly Tom sold the garage for quite a lot of money in 2005 but there was no stuff in it, just a dusty list of people who had left the area never to return.
- pavlov 14y agoApparently quite a few local bands had moved their stuff into the garage, spray-painting the walls and keeping loud music blaring all night. This had given Tom the false impression that the garage is a popular nightclub, so he expected to make his money back by selling $10 drinks but it turned out that nobody except stoned band members ever visited the garage.
- JonnieCache 14y agoThen the band members all went to holland to use this modern, well outfitted studio space in a fetching shade of orange. The owners of the studios had the sense to charge them a reasonable fee and so they actually stayed, and all was well.
- unimpressive 14y agoWhat site is this? Soundcloud?
- ojr 14y agoMyspace failed because the UI was inconsistent from user to user and better solutions were availible As in: Im moving to Marks Garage because the shelves in Chad's Garage keeps rearranging
- nutanc 14y agoWell, I would say the difference is that when you put your stuff at your friend's place, he did not say that he may sell your stuff at some later date. If he had told that, you maybe would never have put the stuff at his place at all.
- kennywinker 14y agoHe didn't tell you he wouldn't sell your stuff thought. And you'll notice it's not "my friend Chad" implying a level of trust reserved for friends. It's just Chad. This guy Chad. His garage has nice shelves.
- jeltz 14y agoIt is still legally theft though to sell stuff belonging to someone else even if it happens to be in your garage. For it to not be theft you need an agreement which says he may sell it.
- ithkuil 14y agoYou might be right, in the sense that I probably cannot make profit from your stuff you left in my house, although I'm not sure about it. But imagine this scenario: I don't know you, but I dump a pile of stuff in your backyard. A lot of stuff, with some relatively valuable stuff in it, like copper. You get home and what? Are you expected by the law to put your sweat and/or money to get rid of that stuff from your backyard? Or is it perfectly legal to call somebody which will clean that up for you in exchange for the value of the stuff? They might even profit from that (after all that's profit in exchange for work)
- summerdown2 14y agoNo one jumped a fence to place things in Instagram's back yard. They were invited in and told to leave things there.
- JacobAldridge 14y agoDiscovered this week when tweeting a link to an old xkcd comic that @xkcd has been registered and has more than 14,000 followers ... and only 1 tweet. (Confirming it was officially Randall.) Seems to be an opportunity for some simple automation to add some reasonable distribution into the 'Twittersphere', so I was surprised to note it.
- kennywinker 14y agoMaybe he doesn't want to pass out flyers for his band practice in Chad's Garage. By publishing on Twitter, he is essentially handing some control over his output to Twitter. Not a lot, but some. By registering @xkcd, he's just protecting his online identity.
- vetler 14y agoWell, in this case Instagram invited us to use their service, and only later (as far as I know) changed the terms to allow them to sell our stuff, so the comparison between Instagram and Chad's garage isn't exactly correct.
- adhipg 14y agoIt is correct. Chad never told the user that he'd one day give him a notice about putting stuff up on Craigslist.
- AndrewDucker 14y agoWhen Instagram invited you to use their service you should have considered how they might make some money out of that...
- marcosdumay 14y agoYes, and the most common way of achieving that is by showing me ads, not by selling my photos. Now, why should I have assumed the latter, and not the former? Hell, I don't have an Instagram acount anyway...
- Tyrannosaurs 14y agoIf people wanted their photos hosted on an ad driven site they existed, if they wanted them on a paid for site they existed too. But instead they chose one with uncertainty over what might happen and this is what you get. Sure it might not be what they would have expected but that happens sometimes when you open yourself up like that.
- belorn 14y agoWhile I wish users would screen services providers before using them, in reality only a very few people actually do this. And for the few people who actually try to screen services providers, most tend to go against better judgment in favor of convenience. In the end, it tend to be up to the activists and hackers to fix the problem.
- fallenhitokiri 14y agoI have one problem with this comparison: If Instagram would start selling my photos I could still access and display them. I would not lose anything.
- mjhagen 14y agoSame thing as the "you wouldn't steel a car" analogy. Didn't think XKCD would fall for that mistake.
- thirdtruck 14y agoIn this case, the "car" and other garage contents in the analogy equate to the exclusivity of one's legal claims to one's own copyrighted material. Under the Instagram ToS, that would have gone away, in that they asserted a perpetual, broad-scoped license to your copyrights. A large gulf lies between having individuals infringe your copyright and having the legal ability to enforce that copyright taken away.
- ragmondo 14y agoI disagree fundamentally with the message xkcd is saying here. Instagram, facebook, myspace etc all gained traction as basically setting up a website or wordpress site was just not practical at one time. They all give the impression that it's a practical and reasonable alternative. And that's what 99.9% of their users think. And then of course the funding starts to dry up and the accountants start needing to see some hard $$$$ income. And that's when the ToS start to "adapt" to enable aforementioned sites to monetize "their" content. Oh didn't you know ? It's not your website after all. Sorry ! And thanks for getting your friends on board too !!
- panacea 14y agoI just think we should stop using Instagram as a noun. Facebook.com/instagram is a very reasonable name for it now. Anyone have any objections?
- adaml_623 14y agoI disagree with your second sentence. Anyone who can afford a device to take photos and an internet connection has had a lot of practical alternatives for creating their own website or photo sharing site.
- bbaker 14y agoInstagram, and other social networks, are fundamentally different than wordpress sites in a number of important ways. 100 million users didn't join because it was an alternative to a blog. Their funding didn't dry up. They raised a substantial round, and then were purchased by another company that had itself just raised billions of dollars. They didn't need money. But they did want to make it. Because they're a business.
- Tyrannosaurs 14y agoI'm not sure what your point is here. Raising money or being bought doesn't give them the revenue streams they need to turn themselves into a real business with a sustainable future. They could have carried on burning through capital sure, but that could only go on for so long and ultimately some sort of direction change was inevitable, whether it was asking users to pay, selling advertising or whatever.
- gprasanth 14y agoI've never been to Chad's garage so far and probably ever won't. One point to see here is that digital things are unlike physical things and can be copied and stored somewhere. You wouldn't even know!
- error 14y agoI think this one has missed the point... Chad does everything he can to get people store their shit in his garage and is really proud that so many are using his garage.
- vibrunazo 14y agoBut differently from Chad, instagram openly does care if you leave. So you've got leverage to negotiate with instagram, but not with Chad. I don't care if you prefer to label it as users or products or whatever. If they care to keep you, then you've got leverage to negotiate, period. The rest is just subjective semantics.
- jwilliams 14y agoMetaphor is a too weak -- The differences between physical storage and social photo sharing are just too numerous. Chad would have actively promoted that you add stuff to his garage. He'd have also encouraged you to encourage others to put their stuff there -- and he'd have encouraged you to put stuff there on others' behalf. Plus, somehow, convincing people to put stuff in his garage (greatly, greatly) increases the value of the garage. So yeah... I know it's a joke, but it's a labored one.
- elemenohpee 14y agoYeah, how does that work? If someone uploads a photo they took of me to Instagram, can Instagram now sell that to an advertiser and use the image of me without my consent?
- icebraining 14y agoIt's probably not an easy question to answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#United_State...
- sp332 14y agoChad would have actively promoted that you add stuff to his garage. That would be true if Chad were running a storage service, which he isn't!
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoSUre, but it illustrates the other side of the coin - the fact you got no rights to stuff in Chad's garage, and that should have been obvious, and you're a sucker to expect better treatment from Chad.
- ry0ohki 14y agoI think a better comparison would be... a community art gallery opens, they invite all local artists to show their work for free. It becomes more popular then the Louvre and the owner gets fabulously rich, and sells the gallery to MOMA. One day the new owner of the gallery realizes it's losing tons of money (and taking visitors from it's money making gallery in NYC), and it knows the artists are not going to pay (and maybe can't afford to). So it starts making prints of the artwork and selling them without giving the artists a royalty.
- piqufoh 14y agoThat may be a better comparison, but it's not what you'd say... you know, 'funny'.
- 001sky 14y agoThe whole idea of instagram was "instant postcards". The idea that they would help you do make these. Not that they would go creep out shots of your family and sell them for a profit to 3rd parties without consent. Or sell your data to be analyzed and fed into behaviroual profiling for junk mail. If they want to charge for postcards, then nobody would complain in this way. Instagram is (now) just a clever form of social engineering...not a product.
- schraeds 14y agoI'd say that was true before the billion dollar sale or recent monetization efforts.
- kunaalarya 14y agoI'd agree if Instagram was widely used for artwork, but it isn't. If Instagram had pictures like Flickr has, then I'd see the comparison
- DanEdge 14y agoSurely it would have made a better analogy if Chad had ended up hiring out stuff stored rather than selling it.
- bonaldi 14y agoFeeble. More like "I got this note from Chad. He sold his garage to a guy who collects interesting things, and is going to let him use my stuff". But the crux of this is the complaint is not "That's no way to run a storage business". The complaint is "that's a dick move to pull when he invited me to keep all my stuff in his garage, and got rich as a result".
- simonh 14y agoThe better analogy is that Chad got rich by selling the well-stocked garage to someone else. The new owner didn't get rich by hosting your stuff, in fact they have paid good money for the privilege and now want to find a way of making that money back. Facebook is in the hole for one billion dollars on this deal and so far haven't made back a single cent.
- dkhenry 14y agoThis is a really weak argument. It glosses over the nuances of what was originally offered from a business , and what they then tried to pivot to. Its one thing If I as an individual let you upload photos to my server, and make you a little front end to share them. It's another thing altogether If I register a business and market a product to you along with specifics about things like price and terms of service, then after I become popular and widely used I switch out the terms of service that we had originally agreed to. This is like a manufacture dumping products on the market, then once all the competitors are out of business raising prices for replacement parts.
- Tyrannosaurs 14y agoThe issue with that argument is it was (or at least should have been) clear to everyone that Instagram didn't really offer anything "as a business" initially, it was an unsustainable land grab. That means that the pivot was always going to come, whether it be to an advertising driven model, a merchandising model, a paying user model or whatever. While I'm not wild about the direction they've chosen, anyone using Instagram should have known that a change was coming and accepted that risk from the outset.
- ttt_ 14y ago>> anyone using Instagram should have known that a change was coming and accepted that risk from the outset The ability to perceive a business agenda should not be pre-requisite to use any kind of service that is being offered. Even if the service is free to the user and it implies that the business must get revenue somehow, most people don't get that, and it doesn't mean it's alright to take advantage of them. Lots of people are ignorant, have low education or are plain naive. They are easy to manipulate, fool and con. Doing so is fine then?
- dkhenry 14y agoThat's the same kind of argument that people use to say you should only buy "American" cars, or read the labels of where your clothes or smartphones were made. It doesn't work.
- smosher 14y agoThis is the first time XKCD has struck me as being ignorant... I'm assuming that it's for the sake of the joke. People have a right to be annoyed by this, in fact I wish it was more common. Rights to our own creations should not be taken so lightly. So I support the sentiments of boycotters, even though Facebook is well within their rights to make this change. I don't support the attitude that it's unjust, but overreaction is better than none.
- dfxm12 14y agoI think the punchline here is that it is a Sisyphean task to find (or expect) a "free" web service that doesn't already profit from user submitted content. I don't think it is making light of people who are annoyed/boycotting... It is making light of the line of thought that companies we give our data to (for free) are ever going to use it for what we want them to, and not what they want to (make money). This comic is saying that if we care about the rights to our work, don't give the work to anyone.
- 001sky 14y agoThis comic is saying that if we care about the rights to our work, don't give the work to anyone Publication is a method of promulgating copyright. When you publish your ideas/images online one you are not "giving" your image rights to instagram (or to any publisher). In the same way, when you make a telephone call, you are not giving your data to the police and 3rd parties (or the phone company) to listen to. Consumers and producers are both better off with "dumb pipes", than this alternative reality. Businesses are continually trying to exploit their position, and are not beyond unethical/shady/opportunistic behaviour. This incident is a sort of 'Exhibit A'.
- sethist 14y agoExcept Instagram isn't and was never designed to be a pipe. HTTP and email are the dumb pipes you are looking for in this situation.
- 14y ago
- WettowelReactor 14y agoHow is it that when it comes to copying corporate owned assets like music the debate is always on how its not theft as the core product remains. Yet now that we are talking about user submitted content that view does not hold.
- gbeeson 14y agoSpot. On. Except Chad wants us to store our crap in his garage. Hmm.
- gbeeson 14y agoSpot. On. Except Chad wants us to store our crap in his garage. Hmm.
- debuggerpk 14y agothis is actually spot on
- jere 14y agoI don't understand the disagreements. >Well, I'm this close to not giving him any more stuff. >That'll teach him. The point is, unless you're paying them money, you have nothing to threaten them with. You can't stop paying for their service (like you can with other businesses), since you weren't paying in the first place. They're a business and they're not beholden to you in any way. Maybe it would be more clear if we had another panel explaining that Chad has no job, yet recently took a large loan from the mob. And you still decided to put your stuff in Chad's garage. The final punchline of course is that you're not going to do anything about it.
- Dirlewanger 14y ago>The point is, unless you're paying them money, you have nothing to threaten them with. That self-righteous attitude being made fun of (i.e. That'll teach them!) is the morose self-righteousness so many of our generation feel these days when they figure out that they aren't the special flower who produces sacred works of art and are rather an id in a database who needs to be exploited for revenue somehow. No one gives a shit if you stop using Instagram over this perfectly legitimate (in my eyes) move that was unfortunately retracted. Don't announce it over Twitter, because no one is listening but yourself.
- macspoofing 14y agoIt's funny but the analogy doesn't really hold.
- gcmartinelli 14y agowhen will consumer internet businesses start charging people real money, and when will users realize that they need to open their wallets? there is no free lunch... a direct business relationship (customer x company) is better for everyone.
- ImprovedSilence 14y agoThere are waaay too many comments in here stating one way or another "this is a terrible comparison! it's nothing like this!" A.) it's a webcomic, not a lawyers overview of the situation. B.) I think yall are missing out on the joke, which is not the metaphor with Instagram, it's the users reaction that is the punch line. C.) The take from the comic is, if you're not paying for it, don't call it a business, at least not a business where you are the customer.
- smackfu 14y agoDoes he think he's writing a editorial cartoon now?
- jmilloy 14y agoWould we say that WQHT 97.1 FM in NYC is not a music broadcasting business just because it's listeners don't pay for the service? Would we argue that a lot of users threatening to stop listening is meaningless because they can't stop paying the station?
- bckmn 14y agoI just wrote about his same idea: http://bckmn.com/pay-for-your-life-online/ http://bckmn.com/pay-for-your-life-online/
- jerrya 14y agoChad offered me and my friends a place on his lot to store our stuff. He told us all about how safe his lot was and how easy it would be to find our stuff. Now Chad says that to pay his bills in the future he's going to let strangers pay to wear our clothes. And he won't tell us when they do, or how often, or which clothes they wore. Which I think is cool, because hey, free service, free market, amirite hackers?
- smspence 14y ago"...he's going to let strangers pay to wear our clothes..." How does this match up with Instagram's TOS in any way? I still do not understand what Instagram is doing that is getting everyone so riled up.
- jerrya 14y agoInstagram put forth a new TOS in which they could sell your photos to be used in advertising and you would have no rights over that. They wouldn't pay you for it. They wouldn't tell you when it was happening. They've since recanted.
- smiddereens 14y agoxkcd: often right, rarely funny.
- sageikosa 14y agoI think Chad blinked when he heard the sound of multiple trucks backing up to his garage to collect all the stuff he thought he was going to sell.
- chrisringrose 14y agolol Too true. It's inevitable that any free internet service will have to make money somehow - and if the only asset they have are photos you uploaded, well, they'll use them.