I think it's important to remind people of this, but to add more examples and to mention the alternatives as well.
I agree that something being free does not always equal "its exploiting you" - however that does not discount the importance of remembering that a free service likely has ulterior motives compared to a premium service - but not always of course.
I remind myself and others about how free services are likely to change eventually so don't end up 'all in' on a free service as things can change when the company changes or gets sold or goes premium or whatever.
eg - people that built a business using an fbook page that saw the friend feeds change got screwed. News businesses that added fbook share this stuff to their pages to later find fbook putting more pressure on them than google..
When a video converting / hosting plugin was released for wordpress I had to pipe up and ask what the monetization plan was for this new thing - as it would not be tenable to have unlimited video hosting without ads or data sharing and other limits in the future..
When people do not think about these things, it's easy to take advantage of a free service and depend on it, sometimes at the expense of otherwise good competition - only to find later that vendor lockin is evil and can turn exploitative - even at times when the original creators intent was not to do that.
Even in those cases where you are not currently being exploited, you can still indeed be the product, if nothing else other than "our app has 100,000 users so we can have a value of..."
If people thought about this more, they would ask about exporting their data before signing up for a service, for continuation of service for example.
This kind of selling of users is more often with free services, but can also occur with paid services (many banks sell your info by default and only limit it when you opt out, and they still charge you fees for accounts for example)
However a service you pay a fee to like spotify perhaps? needs to be more careful about taking care of their primary customers (subscribers) so long as there is competition and all.
Sorry the rhetoric is annoying to you, it would be nice if people really understood this and thought it through.
from Hacker News - New Comments: "WordPress" http://bit.ly/2QQO3ey
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