Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mgraczyk 1702 days ago
You mean like museums, PBS, NPR, the military, CO2 scrubbers in power plants? There are plenty of examples of obviously-good products and services that require alternative funding mechanisms for a variety of reasons, including network effects (increasing returns to scale), inability to collect small payments, and inability to track usage. Social media has elements of all of these.

It's a well studied problem that applies to a long list of markets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem