Comment by zelon88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zelon88 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There is a negative connotation with "FREE" to savvy consumers who understand, at least somehwat, the product or service they are buying. However, many consumers don't understand a) economics or b) what they are buying.

For example, look at all the Facebook posts from older people who repost things like "TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY!!! SHARE AND YOU WILL FIND $10K TODAY!!!" They don't realize it's fake. They don't understand where that $10k comes from. There could be some secret hidden value stream built into Facebook that's promoting this. Maybe I'll find out later. Maybe I'll have to sit through a seminar for a timeshare. Maybe it will all be worth it.

The people who fall for this would fall for anything. The reason why it's so dangerous here, is that the IRS wants tax filing to be free. They've been trying to make it free, actually free, for years. And taxes are something that 100% of Americans have to do. So the market is literally 1*[entire population], annually. But these capitalists keep finding predatory ways to ignore the IRS and FTC. They just need to be fined so substantially that it wipes out a couple years profit. That's the only way the risk will no longer be worth the reward and these companies will stop.

Yes. As a consumer, I try to avoid "free" services and products offered by commercial entities. They almost never are. I very much prefer to pay for things.

When I learn something is very cheap or free, my first though is definitely not "what an occasion!", my first thought is to look for the fine print and start from the position of distrust.

"You will not get what you haven't paid for."

Paying for things does not guarantee good service or product, but buying things for cheap or getting them for free (from commercial entities) pretty much ensures you get crap and/or strings attached.

I can understand people who have no money trying to get by paying as little as possible for things. And I do not criticise.

> people who repost things like "TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY!!! SHARE AND YOU WILL FIND $10K TODAY!!!" They don't realize it's fake.

What you're saying is, of course, correct. I personally know (and in some cases am related to) such people. However, you highlight an interesting aspect of this. I think this is one of those things that is "eternally true" in a meta sense. What I mean is that the ability of some meaningful number of humans to be stupid, gullible, silly or crazy will always exceed the well-meaning attempts of other humans to prevent negative consequences from those, apparently bottomless, intrinsically human abilities.

Obviously, there are many scenarios where it's reasonable and worthwhile to enact preventative measures, which is why we collectively do so in the form of laws and regulations. But at the same time, as a society, we need to remember that such preventative efforts will always be limited in scope due to costs, practicality and, ultimately, individual freedom to choose unwise things. At some point, being free includes the freedom to be stupid. The hard part is choosing where to draw the lines between "society will try to protect you from that" but "choose to do this and the consequences are on you." I'll never forget the bitter disillusionment I felt the day my teenaged self realized that the nature of reality is that some bad things will happen to good people and there's little we can do about many of those things other than grant Darwin Awards or turn them into cautionary tales (or both).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com