Also by free I mean without ads or similar annoyances.
Because there’s no monied interests to pump the hype ahead of the rug pull.
Paid services profit if they reach a broader audience so they pay people to post on forums and other social media about their services.
I assume mostly, because the free stuff doesn’t have a marketing budget.
Slightly related, I tend to look at heavily advertised products as inferior. Because really good things sell themselves, and all that marketing money ends up in the price I pay.
No one knows about it because they don’t have marketing budgets
As a counter example, all the free/pd stuff on archive.org gets discussed pretty regularly, as does Wikipedia.
Maybe it’s that when it’s free, people just use it or they don’t. You don’t get people saying “Hey, did you see this awesome free article on Wikipedia?” because everyone already knows that Wikipedia is CC; instead, they just mention Wikipedia without mentioning it’s free.
Good points! Although I feel like I may be out of the loop on some of the discussion/mention of archive.org stuff, which likely speaks to me being out of it more broadly regarding discussions of other related materials.
There’s also plenty of discussion of public libraries, but since they’re all independent of each other, it’s not a unified discussion. Nobody online is going to recommend their local library to a random person from who knows where.
Because most people who use good free stuff assume everyone else is using it to… because it’s like free and shit.
Kind of surprised there aren’t more comments along these lines. This was floating around the back of my head as much as some of the other responses.
Yea, I think human perspective generally defaults to us assuming other people have had similar experiences to us so people can be blind when someone else is fully missing a big chunk of context.
Because we can’t agree on needs and trusted software due to liability reasons.
The brightest minds in the field can come together and give standard recommendation for use cases using free software, but they don’t. We have billionaires who could fix this problem with a snap of a finger, but they won’t.
Problems are profitable. You can’t sell a solution to a boring mature field.
Because no one’s going to make money off it and thus no one has a stake in promoting it.
If you have kids, give them the pbs kids app on a tv. There’s no ads and the programs are vastly improved from the cocomelon AI slop you see on youtube
Because no one will make money by promoting it
Oftentimes (but not always), free stuff has a lower budget and lower amounts of effort put into it by fewer people. This often results in a worse product.
On review sites in particular, there are kickbacks involved - and free/OSS products can’t pay as much as for-profits.
Because it is older material.
