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| ▲ | learingsci 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Drug dealers invented this business model, they would give heroin to young children for free and then once hooked hike the prices or force them to turn tricks to pay for their habit. It’s effective but not very admirable to say the least. |
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| ▲ | stavros an hour ago | parent [-] | | I've also seen this done for cheese, do you find that equally reprehensible? Or is the argument just rhetorical sleight of hand, where "drug dealers do X, so therefore X must be bad"? Drug dealers also consume food, and you know who else consumes food? You. | | |
| ▲ | learingsci 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Cheesemongers have a bit less impact on society than drug dealers or Google. If Google were raking in hundreds of billions giving kids free cheese then charging them full price for parmigiana some might complain and I would not find fault in that. Scale matters. | | |
| ▲ | stavros 31 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It's not that we got hooked on YouTube (that would maybe be ok in a free market), it's that YouTube used "free" to make itself a monopoly. That's what the issue is, that you have no other options now. |
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| ▲ | lurk2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| YouTube got to where it is by making intentional moves to be the only game in town. They aren’t the most user-hostile platform by any means, but they have been coasting on the network effects of backlogged content for close to a decade now. Even if a competitor could deal with network and storage costs, and somehow manage to attract a network of uploaders, the platform would be 20 years behind, and there’s certain content (e.g. older content) that you simply wouldn’t ever be able to find there in any appreciable quantity. |
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| ▲ | deaux 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I'm sure the US government will be appreciative of a Chinese car manufacturer selling free cars in the US to obtain market share, and there definitely won't be calls of "dumping", no siree. |
