Hacker News Reader

Comment by mym1990 | Hacker News Reader

mym1990·

There are definitely people who will and still do pay for these things, Apple News+ or whatever is an example of news...also WSJ, NYT, Economist subscriptions...Instagram verified checkmarks. The question is how do these companies capture both the paying and non paying users...and that is through advertising. If you pay any attention, the amount of ads you watch is your payment to these companies for "free" services.

View on HN

I am one of those people but this is a far cry from the days where you had to use a newspaper vending machine or walk into a video rental store. Free wasn’t really even an option.

Anyway my point is that the problem is not the lack of open standards. The problem is that we discovered how to do “free” and a lot of people prefer this way whether they want to think about it or not.

I'm not really seeing your logic here. Yes, things are "free." What does this have to do with network effect driven monopolies, or open standards as a solution?

I think we got bait and switched. Initially a lot of the services used network effects to reach a peak mass and got dependency lock in(think using FB or Google as login options as an example), and then monetized through "ads or subscription", which inherently made the experience absolute crap.

I can get behind ads in moderation or subscriptions that aren't mired in dark patterns, but I feel like 30% of my time consuming anything on social media is spent on watching ads, so I just go do something else now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com