[pessimizer]

If we ever get proper privacy legislation, or harsher penalties for companies that get hacked and lose customer data, or anything that blocks widespread data collection and monetization, you'll be paying 50 bucks a year for your favorite chatrooms and messageboards and be happy about the bargain you're getting.

There's no motivation without the surveillance to give away all of this work for free. When you do stuff peer-to-peer, it always costs money if you want it to be sustainable. Like for example, a book club. Either everyone is going to take a turn hosting, or everyone is going to give the host a few bucks/bring snacks/wine/etc. (or you're going to go to some commercial space that sells food and drink, and buy food and drink.)

None of the options are free. Peer-to-peer (as opposed to sponsor/consumer) will never be free. We should support models like this, not act like we somehow deserve better.

[kerkeslager]

I'm with you that people should be paying for services with money instead of their private data. If you were running a Slack/Discord alternative and wanted to charge for it, I'd support you. Maybe not 50 Euros support you up front, but I'd support you. You only need a few thousand users to make something like 10 Euros a year a lucrative side project, and I'm sure you could get people to pay more if you earned any trust at all first.

Where you lost me is that I don't need your help getting people together to talk about books. Sure, that's worth bringing some snacks, in person, which might add up to 50 Euros over the course of a year, but doing it on the internet with a bunch of unknown randos makes the value go down, not up. And putting a fixed price on it means you get less interesting people: on the one end, it excludes the broke intern who needs the mentoring the most, and on the other end, that senior, experienced, well-thought-out guy who brings a fuckton of knowledge to the table brings more value than the host just by opening his mouth.

Where you really go off the rails is this: "There's no motivation without the surveillance to give away all of this work for free." Yes, there is, actually. I don't know what it is about some people on Hacker News who can't comprehend that there are other motivations besides money. If you're only motivated by money, I don't want to be around you, let alone go to your book club.

[gyulai]

I disagree.

If you gave the service away for free and allowed people to be anonymous, there would be no private data that needed managing. In the 90s, a major proportion of websites on the internet had forums like that, which people set up on a weekend (think phpBB). What the hosting provider charges is small change.

If you do charge, you suddenly have sensitive data to manage, either eating into your profit or creating a liability for you and taking away from people's privacy if you don't do it right. So much so, that it might even generate a loss at 50 bucks per year.

[arunkant]

Lol no

[pc86]

Why not?

Using the in-person book club example, I'm having a hard time imagining a scenario where 1) nobody pays anything to anyone, 2) the same person hosts every meeting, 3) food and/or drink is provided and not pot luck style.

If you're in an in-person book club you'll be paying money either directly or indirectly. Small sums absolutely, but still something. This seems comparable in cost.

[kerkeslager]

> Using the in-person book club example, I'm having a hard time imagining a scenario where 1) nobody pays anything to anyone, 2) the same person hosts every meeting, 3) food and/or drink is provided and not pot luck style.

Sorry, where in the original link are they providing food? I might be more interested in that case. :D

It's wild to me that you can't imagine a non-transactional club. Do you not have groups of friends? Sure, there's some give-and-take in every healthy group, but the idea that it somehow needs to be monetized is absurd.

[pc86]

I'm not talking about monetization, I'm talking about there being a cost no matter what. It can absolutely be "free" but someone's making food or using their space to host or something else.

[miguelbemartin]

I think that the problem here is that you do not understand that organising a community takes time and effort.

Creating a slack instance is not building a community.

The "fee" is just a simple way to get commitment from the other side. As you can imagine, this is not a business that will allow me to quit my job.

[kerkeslager]

Au contraire, I understand that organizing a community takes time and effort.

I just don't feel that the rewards I receive from community organizing are monetary, and certainly don't need to be.

Nor do I want to be part of a community whose organizers are only motivated by money and don't even see any other form of motivation as valid. If that's how you see yourself and the community you're organizing, that colors everything you do and it makes you a bad community leader.

[colmvp]

I'm unclear as to why that is hard to imagine.

I live in a city that has many free tech meetups.

One of them involved going through fast.ai. Tech companies were happy to host us for free.

Another was about doing Kaggle competition to practice ML with fellow newbies. Again, tech companies allowed us to use their space after hours, or we'd just to the library and book a room for free.

Vice versa other groups that revolve around learning specific languages or going through specific technical books.

[schainks]

This.

And if you're really lucky, a large corporate enterprise will let you have hosting space for _free_ at _very specific times_. Otherwise, you must find local community resources who usually: 1. Charge a fee 2. Request you do something for them in exchange (run some publicity, sweeping floors, etc.)