Eccentric Flower:199809/no free web space

ten september ninety eight one p m

no free web space

All these subjects I want to say things about keep stacking up. I haven't gotten to talk about the sea lions, or the window of orgasms, much less people's responses to the Myers-Briggs rant, because I don't like to make these postcards thirty miles long, and every time I sit down to write one something else has already started to happen in my head which preempts what was supposed to be here.

Right now I'm annoyed at Geocities, and Tripod too. I'd offer to make Dianne a place on one of my web servers where she could post her journal pages, just so I could avoid one more Geocities site, but I know she wouldn't accept. No one wants to work in someone else's fiefdom.

I really shouldn't go into this, because ultimately it will spiral down into a bitter money rant, and I'll upset some friends.

But as of this precise moment, some pertinent email has put me in a truly foul mood, so with heartfelt apologies to Dianne and lanalee and other friends who are using these services, full speed ahead:

These services offer pages for free. This means they get swamped with people wanting pages, and traffic to get to those pages. This means they will always be slow - there is no possible way they can load server-power into their equipment room fast enough to compete with demand, and they can't afford to always be upgrading anyway - because, after all, they don't charge any money for their pages.

The only way they can possibly make money is by posting ads. Which they do. But no user really wants a banner ad on their page - or, if they do, they'd prefer an ad they were making money from, not the service. So the users disable the ads. So the service keeps figuring out ways to make the ads more disable-proof - which also means they get more annoying. Oh, and the overhead of making these tricky ads appear also makes the site slower.

The people who use Geocities or Tripod aren't idiots - they know it's rotten. In fact, they generally hate the service just as much as their readers do, if not more so. But, after all, it's free.

And now here comes the nasty part.

I think Geocities and Tripod were fools to ever offer free web space in the first place. That's a model for disaster. And I think that the people who take such accounts basically get what they pay for, and forfeit any privilege to complain about it.

I am a firm believer in "no free lunch." I expect to pay for email, for web space, web traffic, and web access. And although I don't think Dianne or lanalee are freeloaders - I think they're just poor, and poverty is not a sin - I have met some people today who honestly don't understand why everyone in the world can't have free web access. And people like that really annoy me.

In this world you must pay for everything. Sooner or later, one way or another. That's the way it is. Live with it.

Sorry. I'll be in a better mood later today.

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