[ryguytilidie]

Man, this is some absolutely insane over the top hyperbole.

No one tried to cast this as a conspiracy, they simply called it what it is, a company monetizing by making the user experience worse.

"Remember that the people running this company are you peers. It's disgusting watching the community salivating over burning them all at the stake today."

I don't know whats craziest here. First, equating "burning them at the stake" to "deleting their accounts on that persons website" is absolute lunacy and I don't know how anyone could take your points seriously. Second, pretending that because these people look like my friends, they should get a free pass on changing their terms to better monetize user content is just lame, just because someone looks like me and is a millionaire doesn't make them immune to incredibly correct criticism.

[marshray]

But most likely it wouldn't make the user experince worse. If anything, it would allow them to avoid banner ads and make the experience better.

That said, sounds like people aren't willing to "agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."

[cube13]

If someone's directly using my content and getting paid for it, I want a cut. It's really that simple.

[daeken]

If they're using your content to make money, you're being paid for it: you're getting access to the service.

[onedev]

Exactly.

I can't believe that people just expect everything to come to them for free.

[ryguytilidie]

So people signed up for Instagram under their old terms, where everything quite literally did come to them for free. Now Instagram changed their terms to monetize peoples content. People don't like this and would not have joined originally with these terms. People STILL mock them for "expecting something for free".

Well, when you create the expectation, as Instagram did, that things will come for free, and then you stop fulfilling that expectation, customers will leave. Not sure how long it will take startup founders to understand and it blows my mind how frequently people on HN seem to act like people "owe" a site something for the service they're providing. If I get an invite to your free photosharing site with features X, Y and Z, you're creating an expectation. If you change your offering once you get a ton of users in the hopes of monetizing them, you're changing the offering and these people leaving is justified. The reason they got there in the first place was because of your offering, which you're now changing.

[gcmartinelli]

So, make them pay for the open source they use...