Unfortunately I think people have a tendency here to downvote comments they disagree with rather than weighing them on their merits. Although I concede that perhaps it had something to do with the Nazi stripper comment ;)
I completely and unequivocally disagree with almost everything you said, though. I’m not entirely sure whether you’re speaking legally or on the level of what you think the company ‘should’ be doing from a moral perspective, but I think you’re speaking from a moral perspective.
But you’re attempting to say that the price does not matter, and here you can’t ignore the legal aspect, because price most certainly does matter in that respect. If you are paying for the service and there is therefore an actual honest-to-goodness contract between you and the business, then they do have a responsibility to continue to provide the service as stipulated in the contract. However, even then, it’s common for businesses to stop providing a service; if, for example, they refund your money. IANAL, but I imagine the Uniform Commercial Code provides for this sort of eventuality. Look at Lala shutting down: Apple decided to entirely remove the service off the face of the earth, leaving users entirely out in the cold. And they didn’t even refund anyone’s money—they just gave out iTunes gift certificates. I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with this: they are making calculated decisions and they need to be free to make these decisions. Users must have an implied underlying understanding that the business may make changes like this.
But in the case of Posterous no monetary consideration is even changing hands and so the obligation is necessarily far more nebulous if there is one at all.
‘Sure,’ you’ll say again, ‘but I’m not talking legally, I’m speaking morally.’ OK—I’ll say again that I don’t think a business has any obligation to live up to whichever crazy expectation you happen to have dreamed up concerning their free service. Whatever your particular understanding of the service you are getting happens to be is completely orthogonal to what the business is going to decide to provide. If there’s one crazy guy in Butte, Montana who thinks Posterous is a dating site, and then Posterous decides to remove avatar images from the site, the guy in Montana just can’t complain that Posterous has ruined his ability to use the site as a way to look at pictures of potential dates. It’s their product, it’s their right to make any change they want.
Businesses, and especially web startups, need to be free to stay agile and change direction on a dime. They need to iterate to find a business model that works. Just because they were doing one thing in the past, people have no right to think the business is therefore forever after obligated to continuing doing so in the future.
I do think that it is absolutely within Google’s rights, if it so chose, to start charging money for Gmail tomorrow. It may break an unwritten contract, but that doesn’t mean they can’t nor shouldn’t do it if they decide that it’s in their best interest to do so. You may say from a practical standpoint that they’d lose 95% of their users if they did such a thing. But they are completely free to decide to make a change that drives off 95% of their users. I assume they would have calculated that the money they will make from the 5% of remaining users is worth it. Gmail is a bad example, though, because obviously Google is giving away the service for free because it brings in tons of eyeballs on their ads. If ad revenue in Gmail fell precipitously with no hope of coming back, do you think Google wouldn’t really start charging for it or cancel it altogether?
It’s ironic that you talk about ‘unwritten terms’ between the business and user, because someone already posted the Posterous terms of service, and it explicitly says that they might do this. So there are no ‘unwritten terms’—there are written ones and they explicitly allow for this, so it’s moot.
If you position your service as one thing, change it after the fact to become another you are shooting yourself in the foot, even if you are 'completely free to do so', not communicating with your users about such course changes is simply dumb. It costs nothing and will help you tremendously in the long run.
If you pretend that you did 'an experiment' whereas to everybody but the most deluded it is clear that you were simply trying to get away with it you again shoot yourself in the foot, this time you are coming across as dishonest.
Those are not long term strategies, even if you are legally speaking in the right to do so. If you liberally interpret your terms of service, instead of taking them as indicating the spirit in which a service operates than you are again playing fast and loose with your users.
If you want to be in the hosted content business in the longer term that is not a good course to be on.
As for the money changing hands bit, we've beaten that to death I think, here where I'm from (NL) no money needs to change hands for a contract to be in place, though it definitely helps if it does, especially since you can't really claim any damage if there was no monetary factor to begin with.
The way I've done course changes like that is to simply alert the community, either through newsletters or postings on the homepage, changes to the terms of service that spell out what the deal is in plain language that we do not try to interpret in some sleazy legal way that no ordinary user would ever think of.
It has served me well. I can't imagine doing it in another way would have served me as well, and I have some empirical data to back that up.
You build up your reputation slowly, it takes only one or two cock-ups like this to lose that reputation for good.
I'm sorry dude, but Posterous found a way to finance their site without plastering their homepage with ads for 'AdultFriendFinder'. The fact that I don't have women's crotches shoved in my face when I go to a Posterous blog means they're one step ahead of you.
The fact that you couldn't pull off what Posterous did without the sky falling on your business doesn't mean that it will for other businesses. When you've got $5 million worth of other people's money on the line and you need to find a working business model, I think you'd find your priorities shift pretty quick and you'd get down to brass tacks. Your particular experience does not generalize universally.
If a business is so pussy-whipped they're afraid to cover their bottom line with a completely unobtrusive way to make some scratch, without asking their customers for it directly or pimping out their site with dirty ads, I think that's a pretty sweet way to go. I'd rather be running the business that provides incredible value to its users for free but doesn’t have to ask them whether it can please go to the potty.
I've been 100% up front about having advertising on that site as a means of making it profitable, the interesting bit here is that I enabled those ads specifically in order to produce some data, the 9 years between 2001 and the posting listed below it has been ad free.
It has been a lot of work and it will be a lot more work still before it is finished.
You're pretty quick to judge here just because of adult friend finder, ww.com has always had an adult component which we've tried very hard to eradicate, but since that seems to be impossible it is an excellent place to see how much money you can make with that kind of advertising.
Or would you rather have I tested that on reocities.com or so?
Posterous is doing fine without resorting to silly tricks, and they've done just that. It's a pity because they are one of the best sites in that segment today and they stand to lose a lot if they do stuff like this and not learn their lessons from it.
I completely and unequivocally disagree with almost everything you said, though. I’m not entirely sure whether you’re speaking legally or on the level of what you think the company ‘should’ be doing from a moral perspective, but I think you’re speaking from a moral perspective.
But you’re attempting to say that the price does not matter, and here you can’t ignore the legal aspect, because price most certainly does matter in that respect. If you are paying for the service and there is therefore an actual honest-to-goodness contract between you and the business, then they do have a responsibility to continue to provide the service as stipulated in the contract. However, even then, it’s common for businesses to stop providing a service; if, for example, they refund your money. IANAL, but I imagine the Uniform Commercial Code provides for this sort of eventuality. Look at Lala shutting down: Apple decided to entirely remove the service off the face of the earth, leaving users entirely out in the cold. And they didn’t even refund anyone’s money—they just gave out iTunes gift certificates. I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with this: they are making calculated decisions and they need to be free to make these decisions. Users must have an implied underlying understanding that the business may make changes like this.
But in the case of Posterous no monetary consideration is even changing hands and so the obligation is necessarily far more nebulous if there is one at all.
‘Sure,’ you’ll say again, ‘but I’m not talking legally, I’m speaking morally.’ OK—I’ll say again that I don’t think a business has any obligation to live up to whichever crazy expectation you happen to have dreamed up concerning their free service. Whatever your particular understanding of the service you are getting happens to be is completely orthogonal to what the business is going to decide to provide. If there’s one crazy guy in Butte, Montana who thinks Posterous is a dating site, and then Posterous decides to remove avatar images from the site, the guy in Montana just can’t complain that Posterous has ruined his ability to use the site as a way to look at pictures of potential dates. It’s their product, it’s their right to make any change they want.
Businesses, and especially web startups, need to be free to stay agile and change direction on a dime. They need to iterate to find a business model that works. Just because they were doing one thing in the past, people have no right to think the business is therefore forever after obligated to continuing doing so in the future.
I do think that it is absolutely within Google’s rights, if it so chose, to start charging money for Gmail tomorrow. It may break an unwritten contract, but that doesn’t mean they can’t nor shouldn’t do it if they decide that it’s in their best interest to do so. You may say from a practical standpoint that they’d lose 95% of their users if they did such a thing. But they are completely free to decide to make a change that drives off 95% of their users. I assume they would have calculated that the money they will make from the 5% of remaining users is worth it. Gmail is a bad example, though, because obviously Google is giving away the service for free because it brings in tons of eyeballs on their ads. If ad revenue in Gmail fell precipitously with no hope of coming back, do you think Google wouldn’t really start charging for it or cancel it altogether?
It’s ironic that you talk about ‘unwritten terms’ between the business and user, because someone already posted the Posterous terms of service, and it explicitly says that they might do this. So there are no ‘unwritten terms’—there are written ones and they explicitly allow for this, so it’s moot.