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by bad_user
2546 days ago
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When consuming, it's never for free, unless it's a hobby. Look at the Hacker News homepage right now and count the websites and projects created and maintained as hobbies. If it's not a hobby and it's not paid, then the content you're viewing is an advertisement. From an economic point of view, the problem with free content is that it's killing the paid alternatives. This is capitalism and in terms of price it's a race to the bottom. And you can't beat a zero price tag. Just an example, how many visitors of Hacker News still use a @gmail.com email address or a free Dropbox account? By my estimation it's the vast majority, judging by the comments I've been reading. So we are talking about a demographic that earns well (compared with the average) and that doesn't blink when paying for lattes, but that is unable to pay for services that keep their email or data safe. And then you see people outraged whenever new limits are imposed on the free accounts, which is quite unbelievable. Not trying to shame anyone in particular here and I understand that this is simply how the market works, my rant is basically about human nature. We consume, but we never learned to give back unless we are forced and you can see this in everything we do, like for example in our relationship with nature. In my mind the problems with the environment that we've created are the same problem. |
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