3 ms·

Can you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and were shut down? I think the reason people intuitively believe this is because a free se

Can you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and were shut down? I think the reason people intuitively believe this is because a free service has to do two things to be successful: provide a good quality, useful service to people, and provide a way to make money tied to that user base. A paid service really just has to provide a good quality, useful service - since that is what the people are paying for.

pjungwir 14y ago
Charm: http://unicornfree.com/2013/why-we-shut-down-charm-on-the-eve-of-public-launch-at-48kyear-and-growing http://unicornfree.com/2013/why-we-shut-down-charm-on-the-ev... EDIT: Although I agree that it's a much bigger problem with free services.
gwern 14y ago
> Can you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and were shut down? I find that hard, because I'm not a business person nor do I usually make the money-for-time tradeoff; hence I mostly only use free services and am mostly affected by free service shutdowns - in other words, selection bias makes my personal experiences unrepresentative. (Is this similar to other techies - like Hacker News users? I think it is.) However, we can make the general observation that services only sometimes survive the business running them, and businesses shut down all the time. To give two personal examples of paid services I used that have stopped or will be stopping in the near future: Intrade has halted all trading during an investigation, and probably will wind up shutting down; Zeo Inc is shutting down as it looks for buyers of its assets, and while the web interface I've always used to export my data is not yet down, I don't give very high odds for it staying up for more than the next year. In both cases, I paid good money to use them; it didn't save them.

3 ms·

Can you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and were shut down? I think the reason people intuitively believe this is because a free se

by jeremyjh 14y ago

pjungwir 14y ago
Charm: http://unicornfree.com/2013/why-we-shut-down-charm-on-the-eve-of-public-launch-at-48kyear-and-growing http://unicornfree.com/2013/why-we-shut-down-charm-on-the-ev... EDIT: Although I agree that it's a much bigger problem with free services.
gwern 14y ago
> Can you give some examples of recent paid services that were popular and were shut down? I find that hard, because I'm not a business person nor do I usually make the money-for-time tradeoff; hence I mostly only use free services and am mostly affected by free service shutdowns - in other words, selection bias makes my personal experiences unrepresentative. (Is this similar to other techies - like Hacker News users? I think it is.) However, we can make the general observation that services only sometimes survive the business running them, and businesses shut down all the time. To give two personal examples of paid services I used that have stopped or will be stopping in the near future: Intrade has halted all trading during an investigation, and probably will wind up shutting down; Zeo Inc is shutting down as it looks for buyers of its assets, and while the web interface I've always used to export my data is not yet down, I don't give very high odds for it staying up for more than the next year. In both cases, I paid good money to use them; it didn't save them.