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healthcare bureaucrat in philly, v adhd, orthodox jew, ect ect, im love my wife



ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

An uncomfortable idea I keep coming up against this week is that, if we want to get away from monopolies and surveillance economies, we might need to rethink the assumption that everything on the internet should be free.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that maybe we just can't have something for nothing.

I mean even from a leftist perspective, it's just obvious that labor has to be paid a fair wage, and so if a product isn't charging the nominal audience, that money has to come from somewhere.

So increasingly, I've just been trying to actually just pony up for the little guys. I bought Cohost Plus because I want to keep this site going. I'm several years in of a Fastmail subscription I've been very happy with.

I even got a Kagi subscription. I figure paid search makes as much sense as paid anything else, especially when the alternative is a massive spy operation on a universal scale, and DDG is just Bing in a funny hat anyway.

The irony that Stewart Brand said "information wants to be free" in 1984 now feels particularly thick here in 2023. The naivete of that technolibertarian set is what got us into this mess, and I think we may need to radically revisit our understanding of the price of information if we want to build a less exploitative internet.


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in reply to @ann-arcana's post:

What I want at this point isn't something for nothing but something that I can pay for in fixed amounts of plain money. I would so much rather pay $10 (or even $10/month, if it actually provides new value each month) for an app, than get a "free" app that's constantly serving ads and trying to bait me into addiction so I'll watch more ads and get the Premium Upgrade and buy tokens that are only sold in odd amounts that don't match the prices for token upgrades and you can only get the best price on tokens by buying the $99 Whale Package and

deep breath

anyway, I think this is a very common sentiment. At least in my current relatively comfortable financial state, I don't need the Internet to be free, but I would really like it to take my money in a clear and honest way.

I'm grumpy about the subscription thing for a lot of stuff but I at least understand the economics of it.

The "freemium" shit you increasingly see on mobile stuff especially is just insane. Microtransactions were evil in video games and for actual goddamn software it's just completely absurd.

I think the real tipping point is when they're motivated to try and create a psychological addiction. I don't use Adobe products because I think their monthly pricing is too high and not justified for products that should be one-time purchases, but at least it's a flat monthly rate, they get the same $$$ whether I use Photoshop for an hour or all day.

When companies set up incentives for themselves to maximize users' watch/play/read/etc. time, that's when you get into the really hostile behavior.

(Even if it's not specifically addiction-baiting, it's still putting the company and its users at cross purposes as for how the product is to be used)

I agree on being more willing to pay for something than get ad- and algorithm-supported "free" stuff, hence paying for CoHost+ and ad-free streaming. But there's vast amounts of economic privilege in being able to do that, even moreso in doing so as an early adopter. Getting large numbers of people to pay for a service right out of the gate is going to be a tough sell.

I mean... that was also the ask for nearly every piece of software or source of information that wasn't a publicly owned, non-profit entity prior to big tech getting us all hooked on free shit.

It only feels impossible because it's competing with a market they deliberately undercut.

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