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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Everything is hosted by someone’s effort and will. Where the service is hosted or how well the service operates under load is irrelevant. You could have racks of metal in a data center that you rent, host infra with SaaS providers, or have a single host at home. A person can absolutely set up whatever they want at scale, and it’s not in bad form to have someone help them and pay them for their effort.

    In my opinion, it’s the content and practices that matter, not how well the service works. People choose to use most providers because they want to use them. As an example, there are thousands of social media sites, yet Facebook is one of the dominant platforms. Every user could never log in forever starting tomorrow, and they would dry up, but realistically, this won’t happen. Personally, I don’t mind that lots of people are on Facebook. I just don’t like their practices, which are so exploitative that they regularly break laws.

    My point in asking all these questions is that I don’t think it matters if 5 users choose to use something you’re hosting or 5 million, or even if you make money off it. If your service is successful because it’s a good service, and you’re being ethical about it, I don’t think that someone should come take it away. I do think that you should be obeying laws and paying taxes, but that just reinforces my ethics position.

    However, this is just my opinion, which is just as valid as yours. You made an example with YouTube; what opinions do you have about YouTube, and what actions would you take? How would you describe little to no competition, and how would you create competition? What problems do you see with a product name?