Which is a beautiful way to live life.
Until you quit your job and build some indie thing and try to make money and fuck, that’s difficult.
And you’re broke. And you worked really hard on this thing. Turns out ‘farming people for money’ = ‘paying rent’.
And you realise, shit man, if I make it a bit worse according to my ethics and taste, I’ll actually make money. And I won’t have to go and take some other job.
And I’ll be sad that this is how humans work, but it is how humans work, and am I going to change that or just tag along for the ride?
We’re talking about creating a flow and perception that you can use a thing built around an assumption that you then intentionally change at some next step. It’s a breakdown of an implicit contract you create with the user, for the purposes of farming data, getting more signups, increasing conversions, or whatever else. It’s just dishonest.
A few years ago a family member contacted me about this very thing. They had found a nice looking website to accomplish a thing. The website had published pricing for packages of their service, and provided a “free” sample. Except after you spent all the time to get that free sample running, you couldn’t actually use it without paying.
That's pure psychological manipulation, and is harmful.
I think this is the fundamental problem. Too many people trying to increase conversion in their onboarding funnels, crowding out people who want to put interesting stuff on the internet for purposes other than farming people for money.