You point to the market but these market giants gain a lot of their stature from the free and open work done by others. The market is not the decider of the value of utility. If it was we'd not hear about donation campaigns for FOSS. We wouldn't hear stories of how there's a single developer working on critical software on nights and weekends. We wouldn't hear about yet another FFMPEG wrapper making millions while trying to demand free work from FFMPEG. We wouldn't hear that stuff because the market would be compensating them.
While there are some things where there is no alternative, you can get pretty far with FOSS, if you know where to look. I'm not trying to say people shouldn't be paid, but I am saying that just pointing to the market is too simplistic of an answer.
Framed another way: The market rejects the product at the price it would cost to provide, so companies have turned to addictive designs, skeevy tracking, and information asymmetry/user ignorance to recoup their investment.
godelski|17 days ago
You point to the market but these market giants gain a lot of their stature from the free and open work done by others. The market is not the decider of the value of utility. If it was we'd not hear about donation campaigns for FOSS. We wouldn't hear stories of how there's a single developer working on critical software on nights and weekends. We wouldn't hear about yet another FFMPEG wrapper making millions while trying to demand free work from FFMPEG. We wouldn't hear that stuff because the market would be compensating them.
While there are some things where there is no alternative, you can get pretty far with FOSS, if you know where to look. I'm not trying to say people shouldn't be paid, but I am saying that just pointing to the market is too simplistic of an answer.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software
Intralexical|17 days ago
AlienRobot|17 days ago
If it were rejecting the product, ads wouldn't appear anywhere.
Dylan16807|17 days ago
Tossing in more paying users wouldn't fix scummy ads. And ads could exist without being scummy, but it would take some other kind of pressure.