It's more realistic than smug. I run a small net-label on bandcamp and don't really care about the culture of Bandcamp outside of it being a platform we can easily slap albums on and share through other channels. I just need the site to work and exist while passing us our percentage for any sales that come through.
Bandcamp has lasted because they haven't let the place go to shit like their competition and they've been reliable enough to stay online consistently.
I don't need social tie ins, and I don't want to message my listener base about anything. The spam emails I get from labels trying to be social go directly into the trash and usually make me unfollow them (or disable notifications)
When I was working for [blank] cellphone carrier we had a competing carrier fire their entire phone repair/support staff in the area because they were keeping a USB hard drive stash of nudes. Tech support staff would pass it from store to store and dump whatever nudes they'd collected from customer phone repairs that week. I don't remember how they got caught.
I had to come down on multiple tech staff at our own store for digging around in photos anytime a hot woman came in with a phone.
Rare occasions we had this one older women that would ask us to transfer photos every year to her new phone and to "verify personally that every photo had been moved." Of course the majority of the photos would be her naked selfies or what seemed to be swinger parties. I've got a 65yo woman in a cowboy hat only seared into my brain because I was the first tech to deal with her kink of having people look through the photos.
>I'm not sure this is even useful as a rule of thumb, let alone generally true.
Because free is a limited word. Which is why we have free as in beer / free as in freedom / libre vs free, the list goes on and on.
"If its free, you're the product" is a perfectly fine statement to help average folks navigate the modern tech consumer world outside of opensource efforts.
>Everywhere I'm aware of in the world, COVID-19 vaccines are free, are you "the product" when immunised against a deadly disease? How so?
For this you do actually provide data back to the providers of the vaccine (depending on country and agreements signed of course). Most of the free vaccine sites near me (USA) have a lot of obvious data collection along with the provided vaccine which I'm fine with.
Bandcamp has lasted because they haven't let the place go to shit like their competition and they've been reliable enough to stay online consistently.
I don't need social tie ins, and I don't want to message my listener base about anything. The spam emails I get from labels trying to be social go directly into the trash and usually make me unfollow them (or disable notifications)