Ask HN: Where do you escape for non-clickbait thoughtful/informational content?

Re:Ask HN: Where do you escape for non-clickbait thoughtful/... by spencerchubb on Saturday October 15, 2022 @11:19AM (#33215586)

Information has a non-zero cost for the first unit, and zero cost for each unit thereafter. In other words, marginal cost is zero. These types of goods are hard to find a market equilibrium for.

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Re:Ask HN: Where do you escape for non-clickbait thoughtful/... by ghaff on Saturday October 15, 2022 @02:09PM (#33217130)

I'm not sure that's true. You're describing just about every SaaS out there. (Yes, there's some per customer cost of resources and sales/support but in general relatively little compared to initial and ongoing development.) What is true however is that you need to be able to prevent people from acquiring your product/service for that very low or zero marginal cost.

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Re:Ask HN: Where do you escape for non-clickbait thoughtful/... by oq_pmg on Monday October 17, 2022 @04:13AM (#33230942)

That's it - ongoing development. You should constantly invest in the development of your SaaS product, unlike the example with the books

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Re:Ask HN: Where do you escape for non-clickbait thoughtful/... by ItsMonkk on Saturday October 15, 2022 @02:15PM (#33217185)

Paul Samuelson[0] makes the argument here[1] when discussing how lighthouse economics works that anything with zero marginal costs that has a price other than free is by definition an economic loss. Therefore you should find other ways to fund lighthouses, and by extension, all media and software.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson

[1]: https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ335/out/lighthouse.pdf - page 359, first paragraph

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