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Comment by klipt | Hacker News Reader

Because given the choice it seems many people prefer free with ads to paid?

I'm just thankful that mobile phone networks haven't switched to a "free with ads interspersed into your texts" model yet.

(Of course there are still ads in my texts, but at least those are officially spam rather than network endorsed.)

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This is an argument for standards. You can switch messaging clients. Platforms own you.

Yes, and ̶G̶m̶a̶i̶l̶ email is such a successful example.

It is. I switched away from Gmail; many have.

Same, but I realize that nearly everyone I correspond with uses Gmail, so Google has all my emails regardless. (Ok, they don't get my transactional email, since those are usually sent through something like Sendgrid, but... yeah.)

> Same, but I realize that nearly everyone I correspond with uses Gmail, so Google has all my emails regardless.

I know some very privacy-focused person (a friend of mine) who will stop being willing to be in contact with you (or being your friend) if you use an email address at one of these big spying email providers to write him an email.

So, it is just a matter of being consequential.

Imagine if the progenitors of email thought to require e-stamps, say a thousand emails for a buck. There's a parallel universe where 'Email co.' is a major tech player comparable to Google. Not sure it's a better universe, but bears consideration.

In the late 1980s, I worked for a company that wanted to do exactly that.

It was an X.400-based nightmare, and never took off.

I remember a joke (or conspiracy theory) from the 90’s that the US Postal Service wanted to charge people per email.

Maybe not USPS but it would be okay to pay for it somehow to make it harder for scammers, spammers and other harbingers of ruin.

This effectively does exist https://www.jpay.com/PEmessages.aspx

It is always so tragic to me that, for over a decade, I would have paid for Twitter. But by the time they rolled that out, enough had changed that there's no way I was going to pay for Twitter.

Market timing is hard.

Actually they tried. WhatsApp fucked them up.

Literally in a span of months SMS usage went the way of the dinosaur.

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