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Comment by courseofaction | Hacker News Reader

I agree, and people's unwillingness to pay for the things they value causes the thing to no longer be 'for' them. It's for those who are willing to pay for it (investors).

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This seems like a yesteryear problem. People today are paying for EVERYTHING in a subscription model.

Streaming services. Midjourney. YouTube. Twitch. Even ChatGPT4.

I would gladly pay $10/mo for an information-centric search engine that filters out all blogspam and supports power queries.

Totally agree. But I believe we are at the beginning of the willingness to pay for internet services cycle. Many people can't or don't want to yet, but I think in the next 5 to 10 years it will get a lot more main stream adoption.

That's called Kagi. It exists.

Once someone had something for what he perceived as free, it's hard to convince that person to pay.

The evolution of cable television in the U.S. might be instructive.

At first, TV (broadcast) was free, with ads.

IIUC, when cable TV later rolled out, it was ad-free. Viewers paid for it instead.

But eventually even those paying for cable TV were shown ads.

So one lesson is that paying for a service might only delay its enshitification.

EDIT: It seems I was wrong about cable TV starting out ad-free [0]. So my example isn't strong evidence for my enshitification claim.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18409942

I think the lesson is that unsolicited advertising should be banned because it corrupts everything it can touch.

On the other hand, when I was growing up, HBO, Cinemax, and The Movie Channel were all part of my local cable system's basic lineup. Feature-length, commercial-free movies were part of the basic cable fee. I guess that was the hook to convince people to sign up for cable, since this was not a fringe reception area. It was only later that the ad-supported channels began cropping up and ultimately taking over, cable fees be damned.

Which points to the tragedy of people confusing libre software with gratis software.

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