[icebraining]

Remember, if you aren't paying, you're not a customer, you're the product.

I use Hacker News without (as far as I know) being their product.

I pay for Cable TV and yet I'm still their product.

It's not as clean-cut as that; you need to read the small letters and always use caution, paid service or not.

[davyjones]

> I use Hacker News without (as far as I know) being their product.

Your HN usernames are required on the YCombinator app forms. There is a good chance that they will go through your comment history to get a feel of your personality. I would think that this figures in their "buying" process (they are buying a part of your company after all). If you look at it like that, you are the product.

[thhaar]

More likely than that, for the average user, is the fact that every contribution to a free, search engine indexed content site is 'unpaid work' and your content becomes the product that brings in new visitors and interest who search for the startup/web terms we all use.

Of course if you support a site, you'll be happy to help promote it. But what happens when you change your opinion on a matter that becomes important/illegal in the public eye, without the option to remove your now-offending content? Or if you plain just want to stop supporting a site? If people are guarded when making comments because of this risk, is the free service improved or worsened?

Email, picture or opinion, make no bones about it - our content is always product in some way. Content lock-in should rarely be tolerated. I'm surprised it is here, TBH. I happen to greatly appreciate this community, but I in no way agreed to give ownership of my thoughts in return for the right to interact. I'd rather pay with a content export/removal option than hand over the sum total of what little wisdom I have.

[icebraining]

I find it interesting that the terms of use (licensing and all) are nowhere to be found. Barring implied licenses (I don't know if there is relevant case law), you could probably force them to remove all your comments with a simple DMCA takedown request, since you hold their copyright.

[readme]

In addition to what davyjones says, the users of news.yc are the generators of the content. We make submissions, we comment. In this sense, we are the human resources of news.ycombinator.com. Our output is the product, but we are working the fields for it.