I may not have made it clear enough, but my first line was meant to be absurd and obviously wrong.
I think a service should focus on how it provides value to users, not the other way around. People use it because of what it provides to them, not because they desire to support the company's bottom line.
GitHub built a remarkably valuable product, which attracted 100M users and $1B in revenue. It has tons of public features that never required login. They could have put search, or any number of other things, behind a login at any point in the last 15 year. But they didn't, because that's not actually a good thing to do. Doing that can only ever make the feature less usable.
What drives them to do it now is unclear. Perhaps just wanting to juice their login numbers or whatever. But, performing little bait-and-switches on random features isn't going to make people use them more or spend more money. It's going to make them seek hedges against the destruction of the features they enjoy.
As for my link, the search result speed for users is directly related to cost per query, unless you believe that all of this is fake and the new search system is secretly just a bunch of expensive new hardware.
I think a service should focus on how it provides value to users, not the other way around. People use it because of what it provides to them, not because they desire to support the company's bottom line.
GitHub built a remarkably valuable product, which attracted 100M users and $1B in revenue. It has tons of public features that never required login. They could have put search, or any number of other things, behind a login at any point in the last 15 year. But they didn't, because that's not actually a good thing to do. Doing that can only ever make the feature less usable.
What drives them to do it now is unclear. Perhaps just wanting to juice their login numbers or whatever. But, performing little bait-and-switches on random features isn't going to make people use them more or spend more money. It's going to make them seek hedges against the destruction of the features they enjoy.
As for my link, the search result speed for users is directly related to cost per query, unless you believe that all of this is fake and the new search system is secretly just a bunch of expensive new hardware.