I think a better comparison would be... a community art gallery opens, they invite all local artists to show their work for free. It becomes more popular then the Louvre and the owner gets fabulously rich, and sells the gallery to MOMA.<p>One day the new owner of the gallery realizes it's losing tons of money (and taking visitors from it's money making gallery in NYC), and it knows the artists are not going to pay (and maybe can't afford to). So it starts making prints of the artwork and selling them without giving the artists a royalty.
I disagree fundamentally with the message xkcd is saying here. Instagram, facebook, myspace etc all gained traction as basically setting up a website or wordpress site was just not practical at one time. They all give the impression that it's a practical and reasonable alternative. And that's what 99.9% of their users think.<p>And then of course the funding starts to dry up and the accountants start needing to see some hard $$$$ income. And that's when the ToS start to "adapt" to enable aforementioned sites to monetize "their" content. Oh didn't you know ? It's not your website after all. Sorry ! And thanks for getting your friends on board too !!
This is the first time XKCD has struck me as being ignorant... I'm assuming that it's for the sake of the joke.<p>People have a right to be annoyed by this, in fact I wish it was more common. Rights to our own creations should not be taken so lightly. So I support the sentiments of boycotters, even though Facebook is well within their rights to make this change. I don't support the attitude that it's unjust, but overreaction is better than none.
"Chad's garage" seems like an appropriate generic term for a web startup whose users are not the company's customers, but it's not clear that anyone else wants to be the customer either.<p>As in:
"-Why did MySpace fail?
-They were basically Chad's garage."
Feeble. More like "I got this note from Chad. He sold his garage to a guy who collects interesting things, and is going to let him use my stuff".<p>But the crux of this is the complaint is <i>not</i> "That's no way to run a storage business". The complaint is "that's a dick move to pull when he invited me to keep all my stuff in his garage, and got rich as a result".
Well, in this case Instagram invited us to use their service, and only later (as far as I know) changed the terms to allow them to sell our stuff, so the comparison between Instagram and Chad's garage isn't exactly correct.
I said it the other day in another thread, but just because you pay doesn't mean you've avoided this type of treatment. Remember when cable TV was ad-ree because, you know, people paid for it?<p>There is absolutely nothing stopping Facebook or Instagram from doing the same shit they currently do, even if they start charging their users. And the services that currently get by on user subscriptions alone will one day have to find another way to grow. And the way they'll do that is by selling ads and monetizing user data.
I don't understand the disagreements.<p>>Well, I'm <i>this</i> close to not giving him any more stuff.<p>>That'll teach him.<p>The point is, unless you're paying them money, you have nothing to threaten them with. You can't stop paying for their service (like you can with other businesses), since you weren't paying in the first place. They're a business and they're not beholden to you in any way.<p>Maybe it would be more clear if we had another panel explaining that Chad has no job, yet recently took a large loan from the mob. And you still decided to put your stuff in Chad's garage.<p>The final punchline of course is that you're not going to do anything about it.
Metaphor is a too weak -- The differences between physical storage and social photo sharing are just too numerous.<p>Chad would have actively promoted that you add stuff to his garage. He'd have also encouraged you to encourage others to put their stuff there -- <i>and</i> he'd have encouraged you to put stuff there on others' behalf.<p>Plus, somehow, convincing people to put stuff in his garage (greatly, greatly) increases the value of the garage.<p>So yeah... I know it's a joke, but it's a labored one.
This is a really weak argument. It glosses over the nuances of what was originally offered from a business , and what they then tried to pivot to. Its one thing If I as an individual let you upload photos to my server, and make you a little front end to share them. It's another thing altogether If I register a business and market a product to you along with specifics about things like price and terms of service, then after I become popular and widely used I switch out the terms of service that we had originally agreed to. This is like a manufacture dumping products on the market, then once all the competitors are out of business raising prices for replacement parts.
I think this one has missed the point... Chad does everything he can to get people store their shit in his garage and is really proud that so many are using his garage.
But differently from Chad, instagram openly does care if you leave. So you've got leverage to negotiate with instagram, but not with Chad. I don't care if you prefer to label it as users or products or whatever. If they care to keep you, then you've got leverage to negotiate, period. The rest is just subjective semantics.
Well, I would say the difference is that when you put your stuff at your friend's place, he did not say that he may sell your stuff at some later date. If he had told that, you maybe would never have put the stuff at his place at all.
Chad offered me and my friends a place on his lot to store our stuff. He told us all about how safe his lot was and how easy it would be to find our stuff.<p>Now Chad says that to pay his bills in the future he's going to let strangers pay to wear our clothes. And he won't tell us when they do, or how often, or which clothes they wore.<p>Which I think is cool, because hey, free service, free market, amirite hackers?
Discovered this week when tweeting a link to an old xkcd comic that @xkcd has been registered and has more than 14,000 followers ... and only 1 tweet. (Confirming it was officially Randall.)<p>Seems to be an opportunity for some simple automation to add some reasonable distribution into the 'Twittersphere', so I was surprised to note it.
There are waaay too many comments in here stating one way or another "this is a terrible comparison! it's nothing like this!"<p>A.) it's a webcomic, not a lawyers overview of the situation.
B.) I think yall are missing out on the joke, which is not the metaphor with Instagram, it's the users reaction that is the punch line.
C.) The take from the comic is, if you're not paying for it, don't call it a business, at least not a business where you are the customer.
Would we say that WQHT 97.1 FM in NYC is not a music broadcasting business just because it's listeners don't pay for the service? Would we argue that a lot of users threatening to stop listening is meaningless because they can't stop paying the station?
How is it that when it comes to copying corporate owned assets like music the debate is always on how its not theft as the core product remains. Yet now that we are talking about user submitted content that view does not hold.
I've never been to Chad's garage so far and probably ever won't.<p>One point to see here is that digital things are unlike physical things and can be copied and stored somewhere. You wouldn't even know!
when will consumer internet businesses start charging people real money, and when will users realize that they need to open their wallets? there is no free lunch...
a direct business relationship (customer x company) is better for everyone.
lol Too true. It's inevitable that any free internet service will have to make money somehow - and if the only asset they have are photos you uploaded, well, they'll use them.