I really liked this post by Tom Lee:

There are a few exceptions, but in general nobody’s willing to pay for social experiences on the web. So instead we’ve arrived at a model where open registration, open APIs and open bars at SXSW are used to attract users. Then, once network effects have given the experience value, and so long as transition costs remain inconveniently high, value can be extracted from those users. Lots of people tell lots of stories about how this can be a positive-sum interaction (usually fairytales about how valuable anonymous usage data is, or how people will suddenly start enjoying the experience of looking at ads if the sales pitch is sufficiently personalized). But in practice it seems to always be the case that user experience is degraded in some way.
This isn’t a particularly great insight, I suppose: that you can goose demand if you shift costs into the future. Discount rates exist; it’s why economists fret about declines in consumer borrowing. It’s why people still smoke cigarettes.
I have an aesthetic aversion to it — a general sense that things would be better if costs were presented up front. That it would be preferable for Twitter to be a protocol like email rather than a service like Facebook. Maybe even that it would be more moral for them to be. That the costs associated with transitioning between social networks every, what, five years are high enough to be worth complaining about.*
But this is probably is just a meaningless prejudice on part. [Emphasis added.]

I share this bias. I’m reminded of Tim Harford’s column on “Minibar Economics,” which drew on research by Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson:

Hidden charges do seem to aggravate a lot of customers—witness perennial campaigns against sneaky bank charges. So, it is something of a mystery as to why we don’t see more companies come out with advertising campaigns boasting about their what-you-see-is-what-you-get pricing.
Economists Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson recently published an ingenious explanation for why such campaigns are rare. If one bank has tempting interest rates but hidden fees while the rival offers lower rates but no hidden fees, an advertising campaign could easily backfire.
“Our prices include no hidden fees” is a nice enough slogan, but the implicit message to sophisticated customers is, “If you are good at avoiding hidden fees, you might care to bank with our rivals.”
The advertising campaign would drive sophisticated customers toward the exploitative competitor where, being sophisticated, they would not allow themselves to be exploited. Meanwhile, the no-hidden-fees bank would attract naive customers but fail to take advantage of their naiveté. The result would be that the expensive adverts pushed both types of customer to where they would spend less, and both companies would be worse off.

Suffice it to say, it is a rare occasion indeed when I’ll dive into the minibar. And by rare I mean, “I’ve only taken something from a minibar once, as my only alternative was blacking out due to hunger.”