I can sympathise with the OP. Free accounts also costing us money but if we strip them of the key feature (NLP) or limit them, the conversion drops because it is a service that takes some time to learn and people tend to be lazy.
Users creating and using free accounts have costs associated with them. Those costs need to be met in order for the service to continue, either by tying a revenue model to the users directly, via charity, or by subsidizing their use of your resources by using something they contribute, such as content.
Selling user content is not a stable net in proportion to user use of the site; you don't know that the content will continue to sell at a rate keeping pace with user-incurred costs.
Charity is also not a stable net in proportion to user use of the site; nothing directly and reliably ties charity income to user-incurred cost, and nothing can--it's charity.
The only way to meet proportionate cost incurred by user use is by tying a proportionate revenue to user use. Even if you don't charge a user to use the service, even if you only ask that they fill out a text box to use the site, just as they might with reCAPTCHa, it suddenly becomes 'milking the user'.
Sadly, users no longer merely expect services to be free for them, they get offended if the service provider derives any money at all for their activity. (I think I sort of understand the mentality--"Why are they getting money for my work, when I'm not?"--but that logic doesn't hold up if no money was changing hands while they did the work anyway.)
You're also rather vague about what "the actual problem of spam" is. What strikes you as a mere symptom, and what strikes you as a cause? Yes, these peoples' particular implementation of challenge-response is pretty poor. Is that what you were specifically referring to, or did you have something else in mind?
>Either people will pay a subscription fee to unlock the utility of an information-distilling agent, or they won't.
This feels a bit like projection though. People in general are trained to tolerate ads for most freemium services, such as social media, search, etc., and chat is no different.
For any market involving human attention, there's a portion willing to pay money for the service, but a significant larger portion willing to trade attention time (e.g. ad impressions) for a free service instead.
Generally, these services are free because they have a low market value. Most users would not be willing to pay for them. So, they have to finance themselves by other means like ad income.
It's not really free when I'm paying via advertising revenue. It's just indirect payment. I don't see a fundamental difference between paying $20/year and contributing $20/year in ad revenue.
Anyway the laws I was proposing wasn't so much for free account closure, it was more for things like false search results, impersonation, account hijacking. These amount to defamation and psychological abuse and these companies are allowing it to happen without providing any human customer service fix.
I think the rise of 'free' services and websites presents a set of quite dis-empowering problems for users.
Previously, after buying something, if we were unhappy in anyway we'd always be able to 'vote with our cash'. It was recognised that we deserved to be compensated if our experience of a company fell short.
Modern (free-to-access) sites obviously aren't free, we pay for usage by giving attention (via eyeballs or behaviour). However, this exchange of value isn't as tangible as it once was when we had to pay money for a service.
Maybe moving to a paid-for model might actually be better for consumers / participants - because we'd be able to make more explicit demands?
At the moment we can stop using the service - but the assessment a user makes is probably quite often weighed up against this illusion of 'zero-cost'.
Right, but I think the point is that those free users are not a good analog for paying users. The things you learn from those free users will not help you figure out how to serve customers who will actually pay something for your service.
The problem here isn't necessarily being a free service and being run on a few ads, the problem is loading 15 to 20 advertisements, as well as the path of enshittification.
While I agree that the free model is unsustainable, there are better ways than charging £10/mo for one social media site. A lot of people are struggling at the moment.
I find it unfair that paid accounts essentially pay for the freeloaders. This problem is mitigated by serving ADs to the free users or selling their data. That model is broken in many cases, so just don’t do it. Offer strictly paid from the outset.
The current trend seems to be that sadly. You offer your services for free or for reduced price. Once you got enough users, you start taking all the money you can get.
(Anonymous)Visitors is not a very useful or valuable metric. Blindly pumping content into the ether isn't going to convert to value, or cashflow.
I think we are seeing the advancing erosion of (generic)ad-supported free content and services. Which is not necessarily a Bad Thing.
If you can't be bothered to identify yourself with an account, then these services do not get much value from you, and many times see you as loss/overhead, so limiting access to their content is logical on their end.
Every day results in another example of why free platforms supported by advertising might not be viable a long term solution.
I've always said that cheap is better than free. If all services like Tumblr had debuted at a nominal $0.25 or $0.50 a month and that had become normalized as a way to support the platform without mining data or being at the whims of advertisers, the internet might be in a better place.
Instead we have clickbait, engagement addiction and users as products and not customers.
You cannot feasibly provide any level of acceptable human support and remain “free” with a huge user base. Meanwhile, being “free” is crucial if your actual paying customer is the advertisers. If you stop being free, you (gasp) normalize paid service. Suddenly you are conflicted and fighting two fronts, you compete with other paid services, your users can actually demand things and vote with their money, etc.
I disagree, there is a tremendous amount of discussion here on HN about the real cost of "free" services, particularly in light of the recent end of Google Reader, sale of Instapaper, etc.
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