Man, if a mod already proclaimed out loud that you are a ___ hater then it'd be best if you just bow out gracefully, hahaha.
It may be strategically better but since I feel he misunderstood what I wanted to say, I just treated him as another user who happens to, as I see it, misunderstood what I wanted to say and clarify this. In principle I think it is the nicer way of treating people, as long as he does not make an authority statement, I'll just discuss with a mod as with any other person, because if I were in the mod's position, I would not want people to run away the moment I say that I step into a discussion.
Make your next response in this thread something that establishes you have read the OP and the thread and you understand what it even is you're arguing about.
To ensure I did what you asked for: The next post I made hopefully made clear my miswording above and made clear I have read the op (and a sizable amount of the thread, but, I confess, not every single posting in it). So to make sure it is clear what I am talking about:
If you do not add funds of at least 5$ to your account (or have done that in the past), you won't be able to add new people to your friends list on Steam, a service, that is tied not only to a vitual store, but to a huge amount of retail games, too. The friendslist, and here I'm not 100% certain, is the only (convenient?) way of reliably playing with a selected person or gourp of persons online. You cannot buy full membership of the online service outright, the funds you add only have the side effect of unlocking the ability to add new friends to your friends list.
Now, one could compare paying 5$ on PC for full online functionality, or 10$ per month on two of the current five consoles (or 0 whatsoever on the reamining 3). However, the difference I see and something that is a problem on princple for me, is, that you do not get any guarantee from Valve wrt online play in return, because you are not buying into the system from Valve's perspective. So if you pay the 5$ just to enable
fully-featured online play, you have no contract ensuring your purchase, instead you get a guarantee for something different you may not be interested in at all. From this perspective, this system is worse, because it allows for arbitrary behaviour of Valve (for instance, taking away your ability to add friends the very next day, or lock online-play behind a pay wall like MS and Sony do, or whatever the hell I cannot think of right now).
To give an analogon: There are internet cafés where you can go and use the internet for a given amount of time. You pay for the internet. At Starbucks, you get free Wi-Fi, if you are a customer there, however, if Starbucks turns of the router, you cannot access the internet anymore and you have no contract over the internet connection, so you're just out of luck. So, while it might be cheaper to buy a coffee at starbucks and just use their internet as an added bonus, than going to the internet café, if you are only really interested in the internet, you might still prefer the internet café that guarantees you access to the internet for instance for an hour.