Back in the old-days of the Internet, free was a very bad thing.\u00a0 It attracted the wrong crowd.\u00a0 So you never gave anything away for free…even a simple article.\u00a0 You charged for everything.<\/p>\n
These days, that’s not the case.\u00a0 Especially with new media, where the entire point is to freely give people your content, tips and advice.<\/p>\n
But over the past several months, I have noticed a new trend…a dark side that is beginning to emerge from all of this free information.\u00a0 And I know I’m not alone, because some of my friends have told me about it too.<\/p>\n
What is this dark side?<\/p>\n
Well, it seems people are starting to treat free content more and more as if it were paid content.\u00a0 That means if they don’t like what they are getting…even though it’s 100% free…they have an axe to grind.<\/p>\n
This can take many different forms…from a person who gets upset that you don’t answer their email the same day (when they are neither a client or customer of yours and just want free advice)…to people who get upset if a page doesn’t load, a video doesn’t play or a form doesn’t work exactly as they want.<\/p>\n
I even joke that if you gave away $100 bills online, there would still be people upset with it for one reason or another.<\/p>\n
Maybe I’m old-school…but for me, when someone provides me something free and useful, I’m grateful.\u00a0 And I let them know.\u00a0 If it turns out that free thing isn’t so great, I think “oh well”, forget about it and move on.<\/p>\n
But somewhere along the line, it seems the Internet world…in general…has begun developing a false sense of entitlement.\u00a0 Maybe it’s because of Google and YouTube and Facebook…where everything is always free, free, free.<\/p>\n
Funny thing is, it doesn’t work that way in the brick and mortar world.\u00a0 The only thing free is the public library.\u00a0 And no one complains.<\/p>\n
I’m curious to see what other’s have to say about this…if they’ve noticed this trend too.\u00a0 If you have, or haven’t, or have any thoughts you’d like to add, just use the comment form below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in the old-days of the Internet, free was a very bad thing.\u00a0 It attracted the wrong crowd.\u00a0 So you never gave anything away for free…even a simple article.\u00a0 You charged for everything. These days, that’s not the case.\u00a0 Especially with new media, where the entire point is to freely give people your content, tips […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[19],"tags":[60,235,86],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}