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The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

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Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#71

Post by amelius »

saidajigumi wrote: post #68

> I can't win the complaint. The card was stolen, the £6 belongs to the original card owner, no question. This is so wrong. Business owners, on average, have little to no information or power to deal with this. The only agencies that have ultimate ability to deal with fraud are the card issuers and banks. IIRC, it was Bruce Schneier who first clearly articulated this for me. By placing all fraud risk on the issuers,…

Card issuers should make sure that cards are password-protected in the first place.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#72

Post by PythonicAlpha »

pjlegato wrote: post #65
bluecalm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VATMOSS is a nightmare for small businesses. I am lucky that authorities in my country decide that I can avoid it with my project (because it doesn't fit exact definition of electronic service so I can pay VAT in my country as it's a place the service is provided in according one interpretation of the new law) but they have plans to extend it and I may be forced to go through accounting hell to comply with this regul…

> I guess they think typical business is like Google or Amazon or something. Exactly. Many in the EU imagine that "business owner" is a synonym for "evil capitalist plutocrat." For them, if you are not someone's employee, you are by definition rich. Questions of scale are ignored.

I don't think, that so many (at least educated) people in the EU believe that ... but the problem is (and I saw evidence for that again and again), that the politicians like to talk about the "Founder culture" or that they want to aid smaller businesses ... but in fact, they do the absolute opposite.

I see that, because at least in Germany (where it is very chic in the political class to talk how to aid smaller businesses and startups ...!) the tax rules are in favor of the big corporations (they have been changed in the last decades, so the corporations got better and better conditions) ... but of course this relieves for the big ones must be compensated somehow -- so the smaller companies have to pay even more taxes.

The current VATMOSS legislation is also a good example: It was announced to be a means to counter the fact that bigger corporations like Amazon avoid VAT by having subsidiaries in Luxembourg. But the biggest problems with the new rulings have now the smaller companies, that never had the chance to open subsidiaries in Luxembourg. For Amazon it is a small drawback and they may have to raise some prices -- but the troubles of other companies are tremendous.

So: The politicians are talking much about smaller companies -- but are only thinking about the bigger ones. And in Germany, many laws are even written by people from the bigger corporations.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#73

Post by ChuckMcM »

teddyh wrote: post #56
ChuckMcM wrote: post #6

I discovered a similar problem with writing, which is that writing an email or a comment takes no time at all, but when someone is paying for what I write it takes a lot more effort . I wrote a column for a couple of years and it wasn't until the second year that I actually took my editors advice to just send her the first version and work on it collaboratively rather than try to get it perfect. I see side projects a…

Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

That was a good read, but there was a different mechanism at work for me. When I do something for free, and someone complains about it or finds it wanting, it does not bother me. Sort of like "Double your money back on Free Advice you don't like." But when I am being paid to provide the thing I am providing, a big sense of my wanting to make sure they are getting their value kicks in, and since I undervalue my time tremendously I try to over deliver on value. And that slows me down. Letting my editor have an early draft let her decide if there was sufficient value and on at least one occasion she took my column as written and said, "This is great, we'll have proofs ready tomorrow." Had I not sent the draft I would have spent at least another week writing and re-writing.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#74

Post by umziehennachbar »

StillBored wrote: post #67
umziehennachbar wrote: post #42

If $6 is too cheap and encourages fraudsters to test credit cards on your service because banks don't get concerned about transactions at that cost, how much should he have charged at a minimum? $10 $20?

I wondered that myself, especially since it doesn't have to be more expensive to the end user. Instead of selling them 1 month for $6, sell them 12 for $72 or some such, or make them buy a minimum of 10 accounts to get a monthly rate. Yah, I know the trend is to do a bunch of little micro payments, but its not like you can't do the math for them an say "$6 a month" then when they go to order it, limit the minimum num…

does Fivvr.com experience this problem?

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#75

Post by ricardobeat »

pjlegato wrote: post #64
finnn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like this should be on the credit card processor to deal with?

Unfortunately for merchants, no, the legal responsibility for fraudulent transactions rests entirely with the merchant. Not only that, but processors routinely penalize merchants who fail to screen fraudulent transactions sufficiently with fines and eventually banishment from the processor. A few processors might provide something like this as a paid value-added service, but it's unusual. The next-gen all-in-one card…

By "all-in-one card processors" do you mean payment gateways? The majority of them do offer built-in fraud protection, though the efficacy varies a lot. In fact, Stripe also offers it: https://stripe.com/docs/fraud

But if you think about the case he describes in the article, there is very little distinguishing a fraudulent purchase to test the validity of a credit card vs a legitimate one, unless they are completely careless and initiate multiple transactions from a russian IP, in the middle of the night.

The biggest problem is the very expensive chargeback fee from Stripe. It looks like he could avoid some of them by, for example, reporting accounts that had no activity as fraudulent and refunding the purchase before being hit with a chargeback claim, but I don't see how putting such a burden on businesses makes sense to begin with. A fee that grows in proportion to the % of chargebacks the company generates would be more fair.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#76

Post by hughw »

saidajigumi wrote: post #68

> I can't win the complaint. The card was stolen, the £6 belongs to the original card owner, no question. This is so wrong. Business owners, on average, have little to no information or power to deal with this. The only agencies that have ultimate ability to deal with fraud are the card issuers and banks. IIRC, it was Bruce Schneier who first clearly articulated this for me. By placing all fraud risk on the issuers,…

Does Paypal ameliorate the problem? Is there less fraud if you accept Paypal only?

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#77

Post by Paul-ish »

Namrog84 wrote: post #54
munificent wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then you'll have people creating new accounts every time the trial ends, instead of paying! These would be malicious users . Both words are significant here. People using the service just to check credit cards are malicious, but not users. Free users are users but not malicious. I think for most services, the set of actual malicious users—people who do want to use the service for its intended purpose, but don't…

Yeah and if heavy users want to constantly deal with changing email addresses and moving accounts just to get out of it. Like you said is few. Let them be? It's likely they generate word of mouth and other value being invested enough to go thru the hassle.

>Like you said is few. Let them be? It's likely they generate word of mouth and other value being invested enough to go thru the hassle.

This sounds a lot like the arguments piracy apologists use. A lot like the arguments people looking for free web design use. I am very skeptical whenever anyone asks for anything to them for free now because it will somehow (nebulously) come back to me later in a good way.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#78

Post by Mz »

The second, major issue was that I had hoped, naively, that the web community will swoop in and pony up some cash.

With JS Bin, everything users need is given away and open source. That's honourable, but doesn't pay the mortgage.

He has come up with a very jaded either/or point of view. You can visit Patreon and find sites being supported by user "donations". There are sites making money on ads. There are sites making money on product sales. There are sites supporting staff from a combination of the above.

It is naïve to think "If you build it, they will throw money at it," but that doesn't mean you can either cut your own throat by giving it away for free until you feel like a chump or you can hold everything hostage until people pony up.

It's fine if you have a service that works well with a pay per use or subscription model of some sort, but lots of services are not monetizable that way. Television, print magazines, newspapers and on and on have to find ways to pay the bills using a combination of charging the end user and selling advertising and possibly other things I am not thinking of. As far as I can tell, it would not work to only charge the end user for quite a lot of things we use regularly.

The world would be a poorer place if the only services that lived were ones that charged the end user. There are some services that are just not conducive to that model.

I hope he revisits the question of how to monetize JS Bin. Do some brainstorming. Do some research. Try to figure out a monetization scheme that is a good fit for the specific service in question.

I think the best salve for this wound would be a monetization scheme that works. There are enough embittered, jaded people in the world already. We need to find more ways for people to follow their bliss and also pay their bills.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#79

Post by Lawtonfogle »

bluecalm wrote: post #34
ffn wrote: post #11

Okay, say you're a US citizen building some digi service like JS Bin, and VATMOSS starts fling threats at you, for how long can you go about ignoring them? I mean 3.5k GBP and however many weekdays it took isn't exactly affordable for every small business, and if you don't even have many Euro pro-users, I don't see the cost-benefit justification of giving VATMOSS priority unless they can reach across the Atlantic.

VATMOSS is a nightmare for small businesses. I am lucky that authorities in my country decide that I can avoid it with my project (because it doesn't fit exact definition of electronic service so I can pay VAT in my country as it's a place the service is provided in according one interpretation of the new law) but they have plans to extend it and I may be forced to go through accounting hell to comply with this regul…

>It's a hostile piece of regulation which very severely disincentivize you from starting a business

Would this fall under regulatory capture? I'm not sure to what extent existing international businesses worked to get this established.

Re: The toxic side of free – how I lost the love for my side project (part 4)

#80

Post by scrollaway »

This was a great read. The VATMOSS stuff was especially scary. I don't understand why there isn't a lower bound on how much money you have to make before you have to worry about bureaucracy like that =/

Monetizing foss projects is hard. It's funny... at this very moment, in another corner of Github, there are people fighting against ads being introduced in Flyspray, a self-hostable gpl issue tracker. There's good discussion in the commit and it's a perfect lesson in how not to monetize FOSS projects.

I thought it was relevant so I submitted the details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10235858

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