This thread has gone on for ever. If we get back to the first post we will see that Irene was asking about how we could encourage more people to become paying members.
Irene is one or our most active and constructive members, as a learner and as a creator of great content for learning German. She is obviously concerned that without enough paying members a site like LingQ cannot survive. She also recognizes the effort that we have put into creating this resource, that most people use either free or at relatively little cost.
My answer is the following. We have to first increase the total number of people using the site. If we continue to improve the functions and benefits of the site, the site will spread by word of mouth. You will be seeing a number of new features over the next few months. As a part of this process, we will be increasing the difference in benefits between free and paying membership.
On a philosophical level, I see no problem with using free services on the web, and many such services and programs are excellent. I recognize that competition from free sites is a fact of life on the Internet.
Where I have a problem is the position that services that are free are somehow morally superior to services that charge a fee, or that on the Internet everything should be free. This is, to me, nonsense. Most sites based on donations hardly earn anything unless they have millions of visitors. The sad fact is that most people, if they have the opportunity to take something and not pay for it, will do so, and in some cases even feel that it is their right to do so!
Every product and service has a source of income to cover its costs, or at least the hope that it will acquire enough income to cover its costs and make money some day. The source of income might be advertizing, or special up-graded services, or the tax payer, or a sponsor or funding sourceā¦ We live in a money economy where people exchange their services and expertise for money.
This money economy coexists with a voluntary sector. Once people have covered their basic needs with a source of income, they volunteer their help and expertise in many ways, in their own community, with friends and family and even on the internet. At LingQ we rely on our volunteers for content and in many other ways. The two impulses, the desire to earn a living, and the desire to help others, are not mutually exclusive.
I have no problem with people using the services of LingQ free of charge. It is up to us to convince more people of the benefit of paying for the services that we provide.
What I do find annoying is Pierre. His contribution to the community consists mostly of repeated posts denigrating the value LingQ, which he does not even use, We recently canceled the account of the crazy spammer girl who posted on everyoneās wall. At what point do I consider Pierre a spammer?
This would also show that you had spent your available language learning time constructively learning words as opposed to spending countless hours scouring the internet, cutting and pasting into spreadsheets, building networks and visiting used computer stores looking for ways to avoid having to pay $10 a month to LingQ.