Personally I use posterous as my personal site and I don't appreciate this.
as long as they're not rewriting existing affiliate links, this is about as unobtrusive as it gets
[edit: rewriting the links directly, instead of using a third party that necessarily obfuscates the url would be less obtrusive, but the principle is still the same]
I'm not against Posterous making money online to provide me a free service. However, they should be transparent and clear about it. When I sign up, I want to be notified about this. I'm going to create a blog, publish posts, make readership and stay a good time there; so I want to know whatever thing happens in my blog and not only be surprised about it when it happens.
Point 2 is that they didn't have a clear strategy how to monetize themselves (which is crucial since nothing runs for free) from the beginning.
Come on, but this is like saying "Get your free domain here" and then telling you that the domain is free, but only if you pay for the hosting :(
If they're serious about this they'll switch the feature off for all accounts up to the moment of modifying their terms of service, and make sure that new signups are properly informed.
This so called apology seems to mix up the meanings of the words 'unobtrusive' and 'sneaky'.
And they should allow people to opt out of this, either by going for a premium product or by switching it off on an account-by-account basis. And given the nasty way in which this was introduced the default for all old accounts should be OFF, new accounts know presumably what they're getting in to after the terms of service are modified to reflect reality.
Nobody wants to withhold income from posterous, it's just that this is about as bad as it gets when dealing with the trust of your users.
I'm personally pretty pissed off about it, I did a speech here in NL not that long ago comparing Ning and Posterous and presented posterous as a very good alternative without any of the nasty tricks that Ning has used over the years to lock in their users.
I wished I could eat my words now.
And don't get with the problem with will cause to the linked sites in term of Google juice.
I think this is an absolutely acceptable (and, incidentally, completely innocuous) monetization strategy. It's not like they're rewriting your blog posts to give the false impression you're a Nazi porn star child molester. (I would be against that, for the record.)
If they can't handle it, people shouldn't offer a free service. But don't run a service for "free" and then try to make money with shady business practices.
In other words, you are not entitled to running a service for free.
Well, legally speaking, they probably are, yes. You get what you pay for, and the current entitlement culture because a lot of "free" on-line services don't come with financial strings does not negate this basic fact of life.
Now, whether they should disclose that they are doing this so that those using their service can decide whether or not they wish to continue doing so is an entirely different question.
I don't think it is illegal to add those links. I for one will stay away from them, though.
Also, Facebook is free. Why did they bother to introduce new terms of service at all? According to you, they could just do whatever they want?
It is fundamentally different in law as soon as there is consideration in both directions, because then you have the basis of a contract.
However, if users aren't paying for the service (or otherwise giving some significant benefit to the service provider) then there is unlikely to be a legal basis for any obligation on the part of a service provider to those users. You can't have a one-way contract.
IANAL etc., but this is elementary contract law.
> According to you, [Facebook] could just do whatever they want?
Yes, they probably could, in law. Whether it is a smart PR move to alienate users of your free service by doing something that your user base does not like is a different question. After all, your users have no obligation to you either beyond whatever the use of your service is worth to them.
Also, it is not really free, Posterous is getting something in return. At the moment for example the affiliate links. So it would be a kind of quantum state contract? If they don't add the links, they are free, therefore it would be legal for them to add the links (or do bad thing X). Then suddenly they wouldn't be free anymore, and they would have to remove it again.
I don't think that makes much sense.
That consideration doesn't have to be financial, but there has to be something of value in the deal for both sides. Maybe in Posterous's case, a user could argue that providing the rights to use their content was consideration enough, and maybe a court would agree. This is where you start needing a real lawyer.
HN might be more of a hobby project, for the enjoyment of pg. Or it really helps YC to select candidates. If HN started showing ads, I wouldn't blame them. But maybe I would take my comments elsewhere. In fact I wonder at times how much my comments would have been worth in terms of SEO, had I put them in blog comments with a link to my web site, instead of commenting on HN. I probably made thousands of comments on HN by now. I kind of pay by contributing.
Just saying - just because no money transactions are involved, doesn't imply both sides have an advantage. Most "free" services simply want to build a user base and eventually get them to pay or monetize them in some other way. Therefore I don't feel like a freeloader just because I use a free web site.
I am not sure if there can be truly one sided contracts. At least in my country, contracts can "outrageous", for example, you can't have a contract forcing somebody to work their whole live for you in exchange for 1$. But in most cases, a mutual benefit is probably there.
It's perfectly legal to have a contract where no money changes hands at all.
The important part is that there is some kind of agreement between two parties (or more) that is defined in a formal way.
Money definitely need not change hands.
A 'one way contract' gives consideration to only one party, and in the case of posterous that is definitely not the case, after all, the user gets one thing, posterous gets another, both parties benefit, there is an agreement in place that governs the transaction which both parties have consented to. (You use webservices without reading the terms of service, which should be prominently displayed at your own peril).
edit: for reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract
This is the case in every jurisdiction in the modern world. I don't care what Wikipedia says: if it disagrees with this, literally ten seconds with any qualified lawyer will tell you that it is wrong.
So, consideration in both directions is present, the terms of service seal the conditions under which the agreement operates.
There is no 'legally speaking' here, this is not a lawsuit, it's just against the expectations that you create in the heads of your users, and that is always bad for your business.
That's why you disclose stuff, to make sure everybody is on the same page.
(a) Terms and conditions aren't worth anything unless they are legally enforceable.
(b) The terms and conditions for just about every blogging or social networking site claim a far-reaching right to use and modify any submitted material, and I've just confirmed that this includes the terms for Posterous.
(c) Whether it is bad PR for them to pull something like this is a different question.
A business operates on trust, this breaks that trust.
It's not just PR, it's a fundamental breach of the silent agreement between users and a service.
What your terms and conditions write in legalese and what you intend to do in plain English can be two different things but that isn't a long term strategy.
Nobody is going to sue posterous over this, mostly because there isn't any real damage to the end users, and yet they should have known much better than to even try and get away with this.
You are curiously pragmatic about this one moment, but then curiously hostile the next!
Sure, it is unlikely that anyone is going to sue Posterous over this. I was merely addressing the original question to which I replied, which asked whether someone running a free service was entitled to do what they want with it. I never wrote anything about this being a lawsuit.
By the same token, given that apparently this has been going on for months and it's only just been noticed, I'm betting that the impact on Posterous from all the righteous indignation on display in this HN discussion is also going to be negligible, so the guys running the free service are still entitled to do what they want (and accept the consequences, if there are any).
You brought the 'legal angle' in to it, I don't think that that has any place here at all, whether it is legally enforceable or not is not a factor at all.
If they want to do it, sure, they can but if they do it without alerting their users, in fact are going out of their way to make sure the users do not notice that's simply sneaky and counterproductive once it is - inevitably - discovered.
The fact that they did not seem to have any plans at all to disclose it belies their statement that this is 'just an experiment', as does the period it has apparently been live.
If someone feels they should apologize for this they should at least make it real, not just say we won't do it again, they should hit the 'undo' button to show they mean it.
Reasonable people can obviously disagree about whether there’s anything sneaky about what they did. I don’t think there is. What do you want them to do, send a mass email out to all their users—95% of whom could care less about this change? That’s just going to confuse a ton of their audience, and it would be completely counter-productive. I’m of the opinion that businesses aren’t obligated to be endlessly transparent to their users. Should Posterous send out a mass email to all users when they change the soup of the day in their employee cafeteria as well?
Caveat emptor. This is why I don’t store my data on free services which may decide to make changes like this. But even if I were, this change is completely harmless.
You shouldn't do it.
It's perfectly legal for me to wipe the histories of all my users from ww.com, it was equally legal for Yahoo! to wipe geocities.
But that doesn't make it right.
Sending a mass email to all the users when they change the cafetaria menu is a clear attempt at drawing this into the ridiculous, as contrasted by simply updating their terms of service and a two line blog post as to why they updated the terms of service.
I don't know what kind of email policies posterous has, maybe they have a mailing list, maybe not but that isn't really relevant.
It's common courtesy to keep your users informed and it helps to keep your users and your company aware of what the status quo is.
To wipe stuff like this under the carpet makes your company look untrustworthy.
So it's not overly idealistic, it's born from experience that you do this kind of thing at your peril.
I used to think those were 'my sites', over the past decade I have come to the conclusion that my fortune is that I hold stock in a company that owns a bunch of domain names and operates some servers that other people are good enough to stock with interesting content free of charge.
The second I start to pretend - even to myself - the content is mine to do with as I please I might as well shut it down.
The community of users owns the site, not the people nominally in charge of the data center and the domains, they're just along for the ride, as stewards, as guides and occasionally as enforcement.
If you don't believe that with all your heart do not get in to hosted content because you will eventually have a very rude awakening.
You might be right, but you haven't provided the slightest objective reasoning or empirical evidence to support your position anywhere in this entire thread that I can see. Even when you accused me directly of being incorrect, and I asked you to explain why with specific points you could debate, you still only repeated your objection to something I never actually wrote. What are you trying to prove here?
I don't find Posterous's business practices shady at all—they found a way to offer a free service to people while at the same time making some money off it in a way that users don't even need to be aware of. I think that is the definition of creating value—it's a mutually beneficial relationship. I don’t like how you’re trying to imply they're somehow immoral just because you don’t like what they’re doing.
If you don't like the way they do it, don't use it. Your content is being hosted at their pleasure. It’s like living rent-free at your aunt’s house and then getting ticked off when she sublets the basement to help cover the rent. You have no right to be upset over that—it’s her house.
Picking up on your renting example: if aunty offers me to let me live there for free indefinitely, and I move my stuff there at considerable costs, I think I would be pissed off. Not that I personally would like the arrangement to begin with, but still.
IANAL, but I think the only reason that a website offers terms of service (beyond any minimum legal requirements they must live up to whether they like it or not) is to give the appearance that they’re nice guys that care about their users. That makes users feel good; it’s a PR decision. But the business doesn’t have any obligation to make its users feel all fuzzy inside about the service. It’s just that it’s usually in the best interests of the business to do so, to the most reasonable degree possible.
And it’s good that business don’t have this obligation, because users can be stingy and irrational. Like, for example, when they get unjustifiably angry when the business finds a completely harmless way to support the free service.
Apparently this is a matter of taste.
"You shall retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions; however, by submitting material to Posterous you grant Posterous the irrevocable, fully transferable rights to use, reproduce, distribute, modify, transmit, prepare derivative works of, display and produce the material in connection with Posterous and Posterous's business, but solely in accordance with these Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy." (emphasis mine)
I don't know, legally, whether they are allowed to do whatever they want. But it doesn't appear that they broke their terms of service, what more do you want?
There is always a certain amount of goodwill in interpreting contracts and TOS. If it turns out that a company is bending the wording to their advantage, it is a natural reaction to leave and avoid the company in the future.
Share cropper mentality.
As much as I agree to with your sentiment by not owning the server you post on this is what happens. Eben Moglin has delivered a great speech on the lack of "Freedom in the Cloud" ~ http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/messages/boards/thread/8486342... The stand out quote:
"servers have gained freedom & you have not. welcome to the cloud!" - eben moglin ~ http://twitter.com/noneck/status/8700276388
Atm one could use Google App Engine for that, except I don't like being tied to their specific API.
Not saying everything should be/could be free. But the cloud could make it easier for people to have their own server (rented for a small fee), and run all sorts of stuff on top of it.
Pretty fucking much!
You've got it the wrong way around asshole. If you can't handle it, you shouldn't be USING a free service!
Sorry ?
If you can't express your disagreement without resorting to name calling I guess you feel you've lost the argument ?
And no, you're completely wrong. Running a free service does not give you the right to run roughshod over your users, the users of free services have rights just like those of paid services and you are normally required to spell those out in your terms of service, preferably in language that your users will actually understand.
In fact, the people at posterous seem to have at least come to the conclusion that that is the way things ought to be and we can consider this experiment a one-off.
Transparency is not just because you want to be nice, it is because you want to keep yourself and your users on the same page, so that people don't feel taken advantage of.
A free service does not mean there is no understanding between the parties, it simply means the price is '0'. Even if you paid or got paid, there would still be an unwritten set of expectations underlying your usage of the service, and these should be clearly expressed in the terms of service (not the corporate blog).
If the service goes out of its way to make it seem as though your content is still intact, but in fact changes it underwater then that is 'sneaky'. If the service profits from that they're not 'clever', 'smart' or merely trying to make ends meet, they've changed the terms of the unwritten agreement, after the fact.
That is what is wrong here, not that they decided to charge you.
By your logic google can turn around next month and suddenly charge you for your gmail account, after all, you don't really have any say on the matter. Or they might decide to decrease the size of your mailbox to 10 MB. But that breaks the unwritten contract, just like this does.
Sure, your 'service' continues uninterrupted, but the fact is that they added something that changed users content without 'informed consent' on the part of those users, and they did everything they could to cover their tracks. The latter is advertised as being 'unobtrusive', I read it as 'we tried very hard to make sure we got away with it'.
It's double speak to present it as a way to make it transparent to the user, after all, changing the links inline and visibly would have been more transparant, not less.
Any change to the content, especially one that you profit from should be made explicit, it's part of the 'terms' of the agreement between the users and the owners of the service.
I completely and unequivocally disagree with almost everything you said, though. I’m not entirely sure whether you’re speaking legally or on the level of what you think the company ‘should’ be doing from a moral perspective, but I think you’re speaking from a moral perspective.
But you’re attempting to say that the price does not matter, and here you can’t ignore the legal aspect, because price most certainly does matter in that respect. If you are paying for the service and there is therefore an actual honest-to-goodness contract between you and the business, then they do have a responsibility to continue to provide the service as stipulated in the contract. However, even then, it’s common for businesses to stop providing a service; if, for example, they refund your money. IANAL, but I imagine the Uniform Commercial Code provides for this sort of eventuality. Look at Lala shutting down: Apple decided to entirely remove the service off the face of the earth, leaving users entirely out in the cold. And they didn’t even refund anyone’s money—they just gave out iTunes gift certificates. I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with this: they are making calculated decisions and they need to be free to make these decisions. Users must have an implied underlying understanding that the business may make changes like this.
But in the case of Posterous no monetary consideration is even changing hands and so the obligation is necessarily far more nebulous if there is one at all.
‘Sure,’ you’ll say again, ‘but I’m not talking legally, I’m speaking morally.’ OK—I’ll say again that I don’t think a business has any obligation to live up to whichever crazy expectation you happen to have dreamed up concerning their free service. Whatever your particular understanding of the service you are getting happens to be is completely orthogonal to what the business is going to decide to provide. If there’s one crazy guy in Butte, Montana who thinks Posterous is a dating site, and then Posterous decides to remove avatar images from the site, the guy in Montana just can’t complain that Posterous has ruined his ability to use the site as a way to look at pictures of potential dates. It’s their product, it’s their right to make any change they want.
Businesses, and especially web startups, need to be free to stay agile and change direction on a dime. They need to iterate to find a business model that works. Just because they were doing one thing in the past, people have no right to think the business is therefore forever after obligated to continuing doing so in the future.
I do think that it is absolutely within Google’s rights, if it so chose, to start charging money for Gmail tomorrow. It may break an unwritten contract, but that doesn’t mean they can’t nor shouldn’t do it if they decide that it’s in their best interest to do so. You may say from a practical standpoint that they’d lose 95% of their users if they did such a thing. But they are completely free to decide to make a change that drives off 95% of their users. I assume they would have calculated that the money they will make from the 5% of remaining users is worth it. Gmail is a bad example, though, because obviously Google is giving away the service for free because it brings in tons of eyeballs on their ads. If ad revenue in Gmail fell precipitously with no hope of coming back, do you think Google wouldn’t really start charging for it or cancel it altogether?
It’s ironic that you talk about ‘unwritten terms’ between the business and user, because someone already posted the Posterous terms of service, and it explicitly says that they might do this. So there are no ‘unwritten terms’—there are written ones and they explicitly allow for this, so it’s moot.
If you position your service as one thing, change it after the fact to become another you are shooting yourself in the foot, even if you are 'completely free to do so', not communicating with your users about such course changes is simply dumb. It costs nothing and will help you tremendously in the long run.
If you pretend that you did 'an experiment' whereas to everybody but the most deluded it is clear that you were simply trying to get away with it you again shoot yourself in the foot, this time you are coming across as dishonest.
Those are not long term strategies, even if you are legally speaking in the right to do so. If you liberally interpret your terms of service, instead of taking them as indicating the spirit in which a service operates than you are again playing fast and loose with your users.
If you want to be in the hosted content business in the longer term that is not a good course to be on.
As for the money changing hands bit, we've beaten that to death I think, here where I'm from (NL) no money needs to change hands for a contract to be in place, though it definitely helps if it does, especially since you can't really claim any damage if there was no monetary factor to begin with.
The way I've done course changes like that is to simply alert the community, either through newsletters or postings on the homepage, changes to the terms of service that spell out what the deal is in plain language that we do not try to interpret in some sleazy legal way that no ordinary user would ever think of.
It has served me well. I can't imagine doing it in another way would have served me as well, and I have some empirical data to back that up.
You build up your reputation slowly, it takes only one or two cock-ups like this to lose that reputation for good.
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/6032/wwcom.png
I'm sorry dude, but Posterous found a way to finance their site without plastering their homepage with ads for 'AdultFriendFinder'. The fact that I don't have women's crotches shoved in my face when I go to a Posterous blog means they're one step ahead of you.
The fact that you couldn't pull off what Posterous did without the sky falling on your business doesn't mean that it will for other businesses. When you've got $5 million worth of other people's money on the line and you need to find a working business model, I think you'd find your priorities shift pretty quick and you'd get down to brass tacks. Your particular experience does not generalize universally.
If a business is so pussy-whipped they're afraid to cover their bottom line with a completely unobtrusive way to make some scratch, without asking their customers for it directly or pimping out their site with dirty ads, I think that's a pretty sweet way to go. I'd rather be running the business that provides incredible value to its users for free but doesn’t have to ask them whether it can please go to the potty.
I've been 100% up front about having advertising on that site as a means of making it profitable, the interesting bit here is that I enabled those ads specifically in order to produce some data, the 9 years between 2001 and the posting listed below it has been ad free.
See this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1108677
It has been a lot of work and it will be a lot more work still before it is finished.
You're pretty quick to judge here just because of adult friend finder, ww.com has always had an adult component which we've tried very hard to eradicate, but since that seems to be impossible it is an excellent place to see how much money you can make with that kind of advertising.
Or would you rather have I tested that on reocities.com or so?
Posterous is doing fine without resorting to silly tricks, and they've done just that. It's a pity because they are one of the best sites in that segment today and they stand to lose a lot if they do stuff like this and not learn their lessons from it.
Yes, they can. At least, they can impose a charge and immediately discontinue providing the service to you if you don't wish to pay that charge.
Pretending otherwise just perpetuates the entitlement culture I mentioned earlier, and results in lots of upset people who somehow thought a free service owed them something. At it happens, Google is probably a relatively safe bet for the foreseeable future, but certainly other services have just folded overnight or dramatically changed their terms, and people have lost whatever data/content they had stored there.
If you have valuable data that you want to keep safely or present reliably, host it yourself, or get a company with a transparent business model and enforceable terms to host it for you.