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Comment by gorena | Hacker News Reader

Why is the "independent web" in all of these articles exclusively referring to people trying to make money with ads? I make software and put it on the web for free. There are millions of Github repositories like this, are they not the "independent web"? I post pictures on various sites, under CC0. In high school, I made games and put them on the web, always for free.

It's disappointing to see the web portrayed as so profit-minded :(

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People like to eat food and pay rent. Not everyone can afford to give away their hard work for free.

What if their hard work is determined by the marketplace to have no value?

Then people won't use it.

But knowing the internet, people will claim up and down that it doesn't have any value, while still using it. And then call the person greedy for wanting to feed their family.

Something can have a value to me at free, and if the price were to rise at all, I would shift my consumption elsewhere.

Like Taylor Swift on Spotify.

You're paying for Spotify with ads.

Just barely. I hit mute when they come on. I'd rather miss the next song than listen to an ad.

Then pay for Spotify.

Like I said above:

> Something can have a value to me at free, and if the price were to rise at all, I would shift my consumption elsewhere.

I don't consider those things to be work, though. I make things because I like to, and because making public domain work available improves the world.

I like to make those things too. I also like getting paid for doing something I like.

And like I said, not everyone is lucky enough to where they can give away a lot of their labor.

That's one way of putting it. Another way of putting it would be: people that make a living wage, with enough time off, have the resources to donate to the creative commons.

If you frame it that way, the problem isn't how can people charge for their passion, but how can we get people decent working conditions so that they can have a meaningful and rich life outside of work?

> millions of Github repositories

Every 'free' github repository is an ad/tie-in for their payed services. If you are not paying for something, it's because you are the product.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

For one thing, I'm talking about the people that are posting things on Github, and Github itself is just an example. You can replace it with "a personal website on a server in your living room" if you prefer, although I suppose that's just an ad for your ISP's services?

Secondly, you are not the product. You are never the product, unless you live in a country where slavery is still legal. "Inclusion of text and image content in HTML sent to you" is the product Facebook et. al. are selling, but that doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?

> "a personal website on a server in your living room"

Which you pay for. Otherwise, your information, and activities on the website belong to someone else.

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