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Comment by WarmWash

4 hours ago

Nobody wants to pay for anything, so the services that figured out how to profit from people not paying will win.

There was this idea born in the late '90's/early 00's that everything digital should be free. The internet was dominated by teenagers with no job and no credit card, so it made sense.

But the result of that has been a whole generation with an allergy to compensation, and the inability for anyone to compete with "free" services, even if everyone hates that service.

12 comments

WarmWash

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kevin_thibedeau  1 hour ago

Prior to eternal September, the internet was dominated by college students and staff. Everything was free by virtue of there being no secure payment mechanism. That spirit continued as it opened to the broader public.

Zambyte  2 hours ago

Counter point: https://kagi.com/stats

About 70k people are paying at least $5 a month. I've been using the $25 a month plan for nearly 3 years now. I imagine Kagi is doing alright.

  • anon7000  1 hour ago

    Google could loose 70k active users and it wouldn’t even register as a blip. They have like 50,000-60,000 TIMES as many active users.

    I’m one of those 70k people and support Kagi, and I also strongly believe in companies succeeding and sustaining themselves on a small scale like this. I think our economy would be healthier if it was made of many, many small companies, not a few massive ones.

    But we can’t argue Kagi is anything more than a super niche product, for now. :(

    • saltyoldman  25 minutes ago

      Typically the reason for there being so few smaller companies is paradoxically that small companies exist to be gobbled up by the big ones.

mancerayder  2 hours ago

That's a really curious perspective. There are a few different angles of attack here, but let's start with this: it WAS free because people were making free content. Before the Internet we were hosting free BBSes (look those up), we then hosted websites which we made ourselves when the Internet was commercialized, and we paid for services like games where it made sense. You'd buy software you'd own forever (like Photoshop), you'd buy music you owned (like CDs), and there weren't 30 subscriptions randomly renewing on your credit card.

Google won because it was a single text box. Yahoo lost because it full of ads and pretended to be a phone book. Linux won in the server world because it was free and superior, Windows lost because it's shite and expensive.

I could go on, but before I do that I'd have to be convinced I'm not replying to a 27 year-old who just graduated business school.

  • rglullis  2 hours ago

    BBS were only amateur efforts. Linux would not go anywhere if it was not for IBM famously investing 1 billion in 2000.

    You can get some development and innovations built purely on "free", but without actual professionals who can make a living by developing these systems, they never take off to reach the masses. The best example is social media and the Fediverse.

    • saltcured  13 minutes ago

      I adopted Linux in college in 1993 and, like many peers, brought it to my R&D job and observed this wave of expansion through the mid to late 90s. Linux was already "going somewhere" in 2000 for IBM to even notice it. Lots of federal grant money was directly or indirectly improving Linux due to FOSS folks like me.

      It was getting so much commercial and academic engagement that we had the idioms (cliches?) of the "LAMP stack" for basic web servers and "Beowulf clusters" for high performance computing. Even SGI was already revealing a Linux plan, before 2000, when they still seemed like a fixture of the HPC industry rather than an also ran.

    • admash  1 hour ago

      That’s disingenous. Microsoft themselves considered Linux a serious threat as early as 1998, as described in their own confidential memoranda. (AKA the Halloween Documents released by ESR.)

psychoslave  2 hours ago

Most people will gladly throw large pile of money for everything that they feel convinced serve them well, provided they are not living by some ridiculously low wage that turn them into monthly paycheck serfs.

When large portion of moneyless teenagers grown up into indebted to death adults, there is no wonder they stick to lure at free services rather than unaffordable services.