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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

You wouldn't expect D&D players to have much psychological overlap with elementary school English teachers, but in this regard they totally do. And this gets repeated over and over and over again in the experience of a lot of companies, B2B and B2C alike. It's like the iron law of customer support: non-paying users consume the most support for the worst reasons and constitute the overwhelming majority of abuse of the support staff. There's a quantum leap getting even to $1, and after that, you tend to see a less-dramatic-but-still-remarkable increase in general satisfaction, decrease in customer-has-unique-understanding-of-how-reality-operates, and decrease in abusiveness as price paid increases.

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I'm thinking that some monkey software buried in the human psyche is interpreting giving someone money as an act of submission, while another bit is assuming that free is a promise of all-you-can-eat and thereafter interprets limits to that as cheating.

Someone with actual professional psychology experience could probably shoot that full of holes.

Are you implying that a person behaves differently whether they paid or not? I would instead guess that paid apps attract a generally nicer subset of people.

Both seem reasonably plausible - can we get some empirical data?

I can attest to this. Having run quiet a few freemium model sites, the time and energy wasted on unwanted support is astounding. God forbid if something goes wrong, some people will take time to email you just to yell at you. Still can't understand how people expect absolute perfection for something they aren't paying a dime for?

However, one thing I noticed is that freemium clients are more likely to click on ads and subscribe to your social networks than others. Some pain for some gain I guess.

As an aside, you may want a new metaphor--"quantum leaps" are actually extremely small.

Small, compared to what? I understand the metaphor as a leap with an impossible gap in between, rather than a very large leap.

Compared to, say, an actual leap.

What do you mean by "an impossible gap?" If it wasn't possible, it wouldn't happen. Even beyond that, "impossible" does not entail great magnitude, but simply something outside the set of possibilities, which could be good or bad.

It has nothing to do with size of the jump and everything to do with continuity along the path. A "quantum leap" from A to B implies that the path from A to B was discontinuous and therefore completely unpredictable given the knowledge you had at point A.

In other words, You went from A to B without going through any intermediate steps.

Said yet another way: B is a post singularity relative to A.

To my reading, OP didn't intend to convey "unpredictable" so much as "large," and if he did, then I'm not sure what he was thinking; "quantum leap" isn't even colloquially understood to mean "unpredictable change".

In quantum physics, a particle can be found at energy level 0 or energy level 1, but cannot be found at any level in between. (for example, this is a result of the infinite 1D quantum well). That is the impossible that I was talking about.

It's a very tiny jump in energy according to human perception - the interesting part is that the particle is only in state 0 or 1, never "in between".

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