What do you think about the relationship (implicit or explicit) between creators of free-to-use web products and their users?

Agree with your general sentiment that there is still bi-directional commitment in "free" products but would say services do need to segment their users. Especially as products grow & mature, they by nature will evolve and disappoint (rationally or irrationally) some groups of users.

At Second Life I was concerned that our early users weren't always showing us the way towards a mass market. And it became worse once they started paying because it created a direct financial incentive and dependency to keep them happy.

Hunter: In your opinion would Second Life have been better served jettisoning those early adopters as the product evolved as opposed to attempting to keep them as paying customers? Really curious to hear more here. Would it have been different if Second Life had remained free?

Everything certainly becomes more complicated when money is changing hands between users and a company.

More that I don't see the question of whether to listen to your customers as simply a division of free vs paid, but rather is the ask the right 'true north' for your product?

With regards specifically to Second Life, the market they serviced ended up sustaining a profitable company now in its 10th year but I do believe that if we had maintained a truer focus on delighting our non-early adopters, we might have ultimately reached more people. Now, the reasons why that didn't happen are a good chat over beers.

This is an interesting question that gets really complicated quickly. I've experienced the... under appreciation of a mostly free user-base when I created a Facebook game which was ultimately shut down due to financial concerns. I was ripped apart by the user-base, most of which got a ton of great content and fun for free and we're mad that it was going away. It didn't seem fair, right?

At the same time, we'd have never even had a shot at growing without them. And, hey, I was upset about it too. :)

Where I'm at now (Desk.com), we've got a mix of paid and free users and while we do treat them slightly differently, I value pretty much any feedback I can get from any of them. Still, as a company there are lots of hard questions about how we handle that balance between free/paid. Obviously our goal is much more clear than say Twitter: we want people to use our service for free as a path to becoming paid users. We don't really have the concept of a viral loop and while we've tossed it around I'm not sure it makes sense.

So, while we do have some of the same kinds of entitlement you're talking about, every free user is a potential paid user. As well, for me personally, a potential source to help me make better product. :)

Our consumers are actually developers for our Gimbal SDK. It's a different beast when some of the developers are still fall under our free bucket as they are under the 5k MAU, and others are on the opposite end of spectrum and far exceed the 10k MAU range and are paying healthy monthly rates.

The issue becomes weighing the feedback from both sets (free & paid) of developers. The larger developers/agencies using our SDK are driven to use newer technology because they fear falling behind the smaller developers - so even though not creating revenue directly, smaller developers do drive value/revenue indirectly for the SDK.

Therefor, feedback & feature requests from both is treated in a similar fashion.

gimbal.com