If you are the product, not the paying customer, then not only is there no incentive to cater to your needs, there exists incentive to make the product worse for you if it means the paying customer extracts more from you.
Users of freemium software are basically nothing more than willing cattle. Housed and fed for free only to be slaughtered.
Maybe people just can’t help themselves? I fear we can’t have a fair and free market if people are so easily manipulated.
I fear we can’t have a fair and free market if people are so easily manipulated.
We can’t, certainly at least in the US. People falsely believe the government will protect them from exploitation by corporations, but corporations have long since proven they can and will manipulate the government into serving them.
This is also true for open source software though, a lot of open source devs are mini dictators ruling over their own fiefdoms with an iron fist and they don’t care what the users, many of which have no coding ability, need or want.
Even those that do have some coding ability will be ignored if they try to change things upstream that the main devs don’t agree with, even if most users would welcome such a change.
The point, in one sentence:
If you are the product, not the paying customer, then not only is there no incentive to cater to your needs, there exists incentive to make the product worse for you if it means the paying customer extracts more from you.
Users of freemium software are basically nothing more than willing cattle. Housed and fed for free only to be slaughtered.
Maybe people just can’t help themselves? I fear we can’t have a fair and free market if people are so easily manipulated.
We can’t, certainly at least in the US. People falsely believe the government will protect them from exploitation by corporations, but corporations have long since proven they can and will manipulate the government into serving them.
This is also true for open source software though, a lot of open source devs are mini dictators ruling over their own fiefdoms with an iron fist and they don’t care what the users, many of which have no coding ability, need or want.
Even those that do have some coding ability will be ignored if they try to change things upstream that the main devs don’t agree with, even if most users would welcome such a change.