Bandwidth Fairy
Back in 2002 or so, the free host I was using to post journals decided to start charging. I wrote a short entry about how they were profiteering bastards, and probably only ever offered the service free to start with so that the people with a couple years' worth of entries would pay not to lose them.
It's actually a quite good racket, and that way they don't have to do like other services who offer free mediocre services but "gold packages" or whatever to paying people. Even after they stop getting new people and the business tanks (which it already has, because very few people will pay for a journalling service you can't even test-drive when there are tons of them for free...fucking morons), they still will have made a good deal of money.
I myself have gone through several different webspace hosts and quite a few journalling hosts. Charging for webspace I understand, because commie bastards like me open ten different pages under ten different email addresses to get more free space. But text documents take up practically nothing, even if you have a few hundred thousand subscribers.
It wasn't as if I kept my language so simple or explanatory, though. I probably threw out some teen angst and said something about how they were greedy motherfuckers and it was fucking bullshit and they just wanted money.
Not even a full day after I made that post, the site owner and two of his/her webmasters replied quite rudely in my guestbook about how much of a douche I was (in nasty-nice language not involving the word "douche") and that they had done their best to offer free service, but server demands were so taxing and blah blah blah, the same excuse that webmasters always use for charging far more than they'd need to simply run the site and not make a profit.
Oh, and they said they wouldn't miss people like me who decided to leave...because *cough* it'd free up server space to those who appreciated the grand deed to humanity they were doing or some such bullshit.
I would have of course assumed that the posts were by random readers, but honestly, I basically never get a random reader, especially one who finishes an entire journal, and even then they don't post in the guestbook. The only thing that really convinced me?
After I replied to their posts telling them sorry, you're still stupid fuckshits, my journal was basically wiped from the face of the earth.
Seriously, that's the fastest service I ever saw from those people, which was a shame because the layout and customizeability were really quite superb.
These days I can understand that not everyone is so hardcore about a free literary community as I was and am, and that the Bandwidth Fairy can't just hand out T-3s and terabytes of bandwidth. But still, I have to say...
Fuck you guys over at Scribble-Nu.
Right in yer poopers.
I'm still journalling for free on a much better site, and now your shitty business is dead! Fuck you all!
Thou art mine beeshes.
Wurd.
It's actually a quite good racket, and that way they don't have to do like other services who offer free mediocre services but "gold packages" or whatever to paying people. Even after they stop getting new people and the business tanks (which it already has, because very few people will pay for a journalling service you can't even test-drive when there are tons of them for free...fucking morons), they still will have made a good deal of money.
I myself have gone through several different webspace hosts and quite a few journalling hosts. Charging for webspace I understand, because commie bastards like me open ten different pages under ten different email addresses to get more free space. But text documents take up practically nothing, even if you have a few hundred thousand subscribers.
It wasn't as if I kept my language so simple or explanatory, though. I probably threw out some teen angst and said something about how they were greedy motherfuckers and it was fucking bullshit and they just wanted money.
Not even a full day after I made that post, the site owner and two of his/her webmasters replied quite rudely in my guestbook about how much of a douche I was (in nasty-nice language not involving the word "douche") and that they had done their best to offer free service, but server demands were so taxing and blah blah blah, the same excuse that webmasters always use for charging far more than they'd need to simply run the site and not make a profit.
Oh, and they said they wouldn't miss people like me who decided to leave...because *cough* it'd free up server space to those who appreciated the grand deed to humanity they were doing or some such bullshit.
I would have of course assumed that the posts were by random readers, but honestly, I basically never get a random reader, especially one who finishes an entire journal, and even then they don't post in the guestbook. The only thing that really convinced me?
After I replied to their posts telling them sorry, you're still stupid fuckshits, my journal was basically wiped from the face of the earth.
Seriously, that's the fastest service I ever saw from those people, which was a shame because the layout and customizeability were really quite superb.
These days I can understand that not everyone is so hardcore about a free literary community as I was and am, and that the Bandwidth Fairy can't just hand out T-3s and terabytes of bandwidth. But still, I have to say...
Fuck you guys over at Scribble-Nu.
Right in yer poopers.
I'm still journalling for free on a much better site, and now your shitty business is dead! Fuck you all!
Thou art mine beeshes.
Wurd.
posted by red at 16:58
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home