Things that USED TO BE FREE...

Comments · 134

• EC

  @ecg3152 · 8 months ago

  I hate how it became "Lets start charging more for revenue" instead of "What can we do for the populous to gain revenue"

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• AR

  @artsysabs · 7 months ago

  Speaking of craft/holiday fairs… it also sucks being a vendor and paying those fees. I did a craft holiday fair in November and paid $75 for vendor fee (the cheapest option). I made 2 sales that were $75, so the fee paid for itself, but I made no profit… There’s no guarantee of the vendor making any money.<br>ALSO what REALLY ticks me off is it’s a CRAFT fair… so you expect it to be handmade goods and crafts… which some of it was. But other vendors were selling items that they clearly purchased in bulk from wherever and were just reselling. And those tables made the most sales 😭

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• SA

  @safebox36 · 8 months ago (edited)

  Some of these make sense.<br>- Paid parking (at least in the UK) is meant to cut down on traffic so more people use more public transport and leave the carpark sooner. I&apos;m worried you said &quot;starting&quot; to do it at malls in the US when shopping centers here have done it since they were first introduced decades ago 😅.<br>- And baggage charge is free with most airlines unless you check-in on the day, where they need to add more fuel than they intended to for the extra load.<br>- If a charity is sponsoring a public fair or venue then charging makes sense instead of making it optional. That&apos;s been common as far back as the 1800s.<br>- This is more UK-specific, but our national parks and heritage sites are maintained by a private charity called the National Trust. It gets some government funding but is otherwise independent, though has some unique powers which allow it to overrule the government trying to acquire protected land or demolish protected buildings.<br>- Convenience fees for credit cards are a result of how the system itself works which hasn&apos;t been updated in a while. Even with automated bots, it&apos;s not directly connected to the main system that handles the transactions in most cases, but instead goes through a different system which has to convert the data and send it to the main one. Newer companies will usually have it all into one so there&apos;s either no fee or a reduced one that only exists to cover the cost of that part of the system. The reason it used to be free at all was more that it was a courtesy and they&apos;d accept the loss in fees that they&apos;d pay to staff to input it, but when enough people started doing it then the costs added up.<br><br>Though some of those seem US-specific.<br>- Almost all public fairs and venues are free in the UK. The only thing you pay for is parking if they even have that, but that&apos;s usually a year-round carpark or land owned by a farmer who&apos;d offering his field for the event so it&apos;s going directly to him.<br>- ATMs are still free in the UK, even the ones that do charge only do so for cardholders that aren&apos;t members of the bank that owns the machine. And even then it&apos;s only the ones directly attached to the bank that tend to do that. It&apos;s not a law or anything here, it&apos;s just something that they don&apos;t do because the largest bank is owned entirely by its customers and the majority voted against the charges. So it helps other banks compete for new and existing customers to also forgo the charge in most cases.<br>- Gas attendants are a weird concept. Some stations in the UK don&apos;t even require you to go inside anymore, you just pay at the machine. Some stores don&apos;t even have someone in them anymore or might just have a security guard so no one tries anything.<br>- Around 800 channels in the UK are still free, we literally call it Freeview. The good shows are mostly on subscription services like Sky and Britbox and streaming apps, but the free ones are fine most of the time. The obvious caveat is that we&apos;re supposed to pay a licence which helps maintain the infrastructure for both radio and television. They&apos;ve tried to extend that to YouTube and Twitch but the courts shut them down, so it only applies if you watch tv on either of those.

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• S0

  @s0hlless · 8 months ago

  i saw in the news recently it is cheaper. For West Coast travelers, flying to Tokyo Disneyland can be cheaper than visiting Walt Disney World in Florida, especially when factoring in flight costs, park tickets, and accommodations

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• BA

  @BaronHex · 1 month ago

  ima say anyone who told them to chill, aint real.

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• GR

  @GrandmaRavenLovesYou · 8 months ago

  @<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpiaUCKOBfE&amp;t=2266">37:46</a> OH MY. Okay. I zoned out for a few minutes, then zoned back in to being screamed at. Goodness gracious!!!

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• SA

  @safebox36 · 8 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpiaUCKOBfE&amp;t=2622">43:42</a> As a developer, I actually highly doubt this. Most games that already do this require you to login to their system to play and they make money off your data. And most multiplayer models start off paid then move to free as the number of players increase because there&apos;s enough paying subscriptions to cover the costs of the free players.<br>Then there&apos;s the microtransaction models which vary from speeding up timers which are technically free but still lock you out of content, to just being skins which I think is the best cause it doesn&apos;t lock you out of mechanics and it seems to make most studios far more money in that approach.<br><br>Steam is a complicated one, cause they&apos;ve always championed player choice so they&apos;d never do it in their own games. But a lot of studios use the Steam API for connecting to the servers which costs them.<br>Steam are also weird when it comes to microtransactions cause it&apos;s how TF2 and CS sustain themselves but they both technically ban third-party gambling and they&apos;ve went back on a previous decision to ban games featuring in-game microtransactions and cryptocurrency.<br><br>tldr; PC gaming has gone in the opposite direction when it comes to paid multiplayer, it used to be expensive but now it&apos;s almost always free because your data and you buying skins are worth more.

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• SH

  @Shayne-H · 7 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpiaUCKOBfE&amp;t=955">15:55</a> I can&apos;t get over the fact that over there you need to pay for air to pump up tyres! Still free over here in Australia and im sure almost every other country on earth lol

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• GU

  @GuessxWhox21 · 8 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpiaUCKOBfE&amp;t=755">12:35</a> this explains why I can go to an ATM that says it&apos;s fee is 3 dollars and then still get charged 5

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• DA

  @darealhectormaxwell · 8 months ago

  I remember getting air from the gas station. If you rode a bike, all you had to do was tell the gas teller you needed to fill your tire, and they would give you a code to activate it for free and only charge for car tires.

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• JA

  @JayT1197 · 8 months ago

  That Mikey was there when it happened joke hits every now and then 😂

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• MA

  @Majuub7 · 8 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpiaUCKOBfE&amp;t=1680">28:00</a> You can still get TV for free just by buying a box from the 20th century, or the new box that they send to you if you &quot;qualify&quot; or something like that.

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