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Comment by kurtvarner | Hacker News Reader

Great, now all the bitching can change to be about their plans to advertise. The sense of entitlement that people have is getting ridiculous. Why do you deserve an absolutely free service?

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We (consumers) deserve to have an honest description of how our data is and will be used. We also deserve to receive the service we signed up for and not have the ToS switched on us midway through the lifecycle of the product. The fact that that is happening is dishonest, and is called a "bait and switch" in most other industries.

>We also deserve to receive the service we signed up No you don't. They can shut the whole thing down and don't owe you a damn thing.

If you don't like the new ToS, when they switch to them and an accept/decline option comes up in the app you can feel free to decline and delete the app.

I don't generally mind free services adding whatever advertising or other things they want, but imo it gets into considerably different territory when there's anything like a transfer of ownership or substantive licensing of ownership-like rights. Those kinds of transfers should be very explicit, where users consciously and knowingly agree, "yes, I agree to license this content for [x,y] use". Of course, Instagram claims they didn't do that here (though EFF's lawyers seem to disagree).

For example, I use Flickr as a free service, and I don't think they owe me anything. They could add advertising if they want, they could remove the free tier and shut down my account if I don't pay, they could shut down the service entirely, etc. That's all well within their rights, since they run the service. But imo it's a qualitative difference from those kinds of changes if they were to add new ToS terms claiming ownership or ownership-like rights over my photographs. That's very different because it can actually damage my career outside their service if I fail to notice the relevant ToS change and they grab some rights I didn't intend to license to them.

No one is asking for a free service. But businesses are giving it. I don't see why businesses deserve to monetize my private information. I'd gladly pay for a feature-rich gmail or facebook where my privacy was guaranteed. But no business is standing up to take my money.

I don't think users feel that way. What they want is to be acknowledged and respected for helping build the server to what it is today. No users = no service. Don't sell us out just because you chose to take money and sell for a cool bil.

The users didn't help build anything. Instagram built a cool service, and the users used it. They didn't build anything.

Now obviously network effects help something like this grow, but don't kid yourself. They aren't running a charity. They are running a business. At some point you have to start making money or the service just goes away. Then all that those amazing users "built" will be gone in a second when they flick the power switch.

They aren't running a charity, you're right about that. But I think they misrepresented their business by giving it away for free, knowing full-well that it won't be sustainable in the long run under that model. Their response? "Oh ok, no problem, we'll just switch the terms of use while nobody is looking."

You could characterize it that way, or you could assume that all of your users aren't complete fools and realize at some point they will have to make money to pay for the costs of running the service. They also know full-well that it isn't sustainable to run this service for free forever.

They know and they don't care. It's not a customer's prerogative to worry about how a company makes money. As much as people like Instagram, if it disappeared or went under, people would move on and forget about it. I would say that the onus is on the company to find a way to monetize that does not insult, mislead, or deride their users.

How does adding ads "insult, mislead, or deride their users"? This whole discussion is silly. 99% of the users will keep happily using the service with ads. They were smart enough to know they were coming eventually. A 1% very vocal minority will piss and moan on internet message boards about how pissed they are and how absurd it is that this coming isn't continuing to give away a nice service.

Everyone bitched when Facebook added ads, but guess what, they keep growing and people keep using it. Shocking.

So what you're essentially saying is, it's ok to lie to your users as long as you assume they know you are lying.

There is no lie. They offer the service for free. Nobody said they would never ever add ads. That's just being silly. What possible reason could people have for being angry with someone adding ads to this thing they are giving away for free.

Just because a company offers a service for free does not give it the (moral) right to try to sneak in changes to what you signed up for as a customer. Unfortunately, legally they can pretty much do whatever they want as long as they include enough fine print that nobody ever reads in the ToS. I think you are arguing from a legal perspective, which you're absolutely right about; I'm talking about "the right way to treat your customers" perspective.

If I as a customer pay any amount (including $0.00) and agree to the terms of service, the company should honor those terms, or, at the very least, be forthcoming with how they will handle my data.

The reason people are angry is because:

a) They didn't have any inclination of how Instagram will try to monetize. I think you are giving users way too much credit in how these startups work (ask your non-tech-savvy friends how Facebook or Google make money; I guarantee you will get blank stares). The customers who joined before Facebook took over signed a completely different set of ToS. Again, there is nothing obliging them legally to grandfather these customers, but it's not a nice thing to do "Thanks for the ToS. Btw, Facebook took over, so good luck!"

b) They tried to sneak in the changes and got caught. Nobody likes to have stuff done behind their back, so a big announcement with enough lead time to switch services would be nice. I don't use Instagram anyway, but I think this applies in general in how to treat your customers.

And users will move on to something else. Product/Customer is a mutual thing.

That seems unlikely. They're still using Facebook. A few thousand people are paying App.net $50 a year and a billion people are using Facebook. I suspect people would rather have a few ads in their Instagram feed than start paying Flickr. Just a very vocal minority pissing and moaning because they can.

Really? Only 5 days ago this was on the front page of HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4917689. And what about the complaints of Twitter and Facebook ads? You can't say that people don't whine about companies monetizing via advertising.

The big psychological difference is that they are taking something that was free and then starting to charge/advertise versus having it be that way from the start. Kinda like how people would get annoyed if they have to pay to use the bathroom, or for napkins at a restaurant. Or checking you bags on an airplane. It's about setting expectations.

The other thing is that a lot of people use Instagram to share photos they only want their close friends seeing, so people are more sensitive about privacy changes.

No. I'll hold my judgement until I see the new TOS, but what they propose in this blog post is much more reasonable. If the new TOS reflect that, I see little reason to bitch about it.

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