Not really a good point. Servers, bandwidth and employees cost money. Even if content is generated for free, those things cost money. A reasonable price is totally fair for an ad-free experience.
This. For those that understand that standing up the infrastructure costs money, I don’t think paying a reasonable price would be out of the realm. Even the Apollo dev was stating that API should not be free, but reasonable.
I feel like there’s a weird disconnect in the way that a lot of people perceive physical and digital infrastructure.
For something like a road, it’s natural to assume that maintaining it costs money - after all, you can see the wear and tear on it, you can see the guys patching it, etc. Because of this, things like paying tolls are an annoyance, but most everybody accepts it as the cost of keeping things running.
For a website, though, almost everything is hidden from the end user. You don’t know how the server is doing beyond “is it up or down,” you don’t know how big the dev team was or how many people maintain it, or what costs they incur… And so, people seem to be more prone to assuming that “it just works,” without considering the costs behind it.
Right, but the content is also what draws people in. Not just the infrastructure. So if some of that money made its way back to mods and top posters then they would be feeding the community instead of charging them for the content that brings in more viewers.
Not really a good point. Servers, bandwidth and employees cost money. Even if content is generated for free, those things cost money. A reasonable price is totally fair for an ad-free experience.
This. For those that understand that standing up the infrastructure costs money, I don’t think paying a reasonable price would be out of the realm. Even the Apollo dev was stating that API should not be free, but reasonable.
I feel like there’s a weird disconnect in the way that a lot of people perceive physical and digital infrastructure.
For something like a road, it’s natural to assume that maintaining it costs money - after all, you can see the wear and tear on it, you can see the guys patching it, etc. Because of this, things like paying tolls are an annoyance, but most everybody accepts it as the cost of keeping things running.
For a website, though, almost everything is hidden from the end user. You don’t know how the server is doing beyond “is it up or down,” you don’t know how big the dev team was or how many people maintain it, or what costs they incur… And so, people seem to be more prone to assuming that “it just works,” without considering the costs behind it.
Right, but the content is also what draws people in. Not just the infrastructure. So if some of that money made its way back to mods and top posters then they would be feeding the community instead of charging them for the content that brings in more viewers.