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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

People want free stuff. How do they expect it to get funded? Out of the kindness of a corporate heart?

Seriously, though, I do wish there was a non-profit (similar to signal) that focused on providing free first class email.

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> People want free stuff.

I'll also point out that it takes two to tango and most every internet content company is actively offering free stuff. I suspect one reason that ad-based revenue models are so hard to remove are because eliminating it would require coordinated effort on two separate axes:

1) Consumers would have to coordinate on, "From now on, let's pay for all our services"

AND

2) Companies would have to all agree, "Let's stop providing free product subsidized by ads"

Without some sort of drastic fundamental shift in technology or radical technological invention, I just don't see it happening. Maybe someone makes a killer OS or product that has ad-blocking built-in from the ground up and is also so amazing that everyone switches to it, and so suddenly ad revenue drops to near zero? I guess we can dream.

There's also taxes to consider.

If your site makes its money by showing ads from some third party ad network, that is just going to be ordinary corporate income which you will deal with when dealing with the corporate income tax in your country and/or state.

If your site makes its money by selling products or services to end users it will still be ordinary corporate income in your country and/or state but it will also be sales income and so may also be subject to sales taxes or VAT where your customers reside. That can easily result in you having to deal with taxes in several dozen or more jurisdictions.

If you can make enough money from ads it will almost always be a lot less hassle than making your money by charging customers.

So... lobby for a more unified tax code?

Haha good luck, both the states and Europe have moved towards more complicated vat rules in the last years

> Maybe someone makes a killer OS or product that has ad-blocking built-in from the ground up and is also so amazing that everyone switches to it, and so suddenly ad revenue drops to near zero? I guess we can dream.

I'm not even sure that's the dream I want. There has to be a middle ground with free services paid for by privacy-respecting ads, right?

Can’t you literally just use a POP client with any free email provider and get your free first class email, with no ads?

Of course but Nana gets mail through the mail slot and keeps pop in the fridge.

I'm assuming most people have no idea about the "advanced" options when it comes to email. Most non-tech people use a browser based gmail/yahoo/etc. account or (ugh) their ISP email

Yes, for example GMail with Thunderbird or iCloud with the native mail app, probably some people just don’t know that they can connect their Outlook mail to another mail client.

Unfortunately Google is increasingly making it harder to use gmail with a native mail client. They don’t use normal means of authentication so your client has to have built-in Google support. They’re introducing new types of emails that can only be opened from a web browser or Google’s proprietary email client. I won’t be surprised if I wake up one morning to see that gmail simply doesn’t work with normal mail clients anymore.

I think Microsoft does it with MS365 too. Admins can turn on SMTP/IMAP if they want, but MS makes sure to warn you that it’s less secure.

I think Google requires that you perform a web login every now and then to keep the account active. IIRC They don't count POP/IMAP auths as logins.

if everyone did that they'd have to start injecting ads into your email feed

I don't believe that it's healthy for society to rely on free stuff from a private entity. Free stuff should come from the government, which we keep up with our tax money, and private entities should be paid for their services directly, so that they can build a healthy business, and not rely on bullshit like burning investor money for a couple of years or surveilling everyone for some ad money.

Hm, I think free stuff could/should also come from individuals and non-profit organizations, not just the government directly. Free stuff from for-profit corporations is always free() with a big () though, even if the cost is not directly paid by the user.

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