Software is weird because it is expected that should be free (as in beer) for most consumers while while being for profit and giving high salaries to its workers. I struggle to think of any other privately owned sector of the economy that works that way.
Music pretty squarely fits that bill. We used to beam it out over the air, now we transmit it through the internet, but everyone has always expected it to be free. And musicians are still expected to make a ton of money off of their music, if a lot of people like it.
Your last sentence is inaccurate, though: there's a broad understanding that only the absolute top performers will make money on music and everyone else will make an amount that rounds down to nothing. Software stands out in that even the median software developer is making about double the median salary in the market as a whole, all while the products of their efforts are expected to be free.
It is a lie to pretend that only a select few at the very top can live decently from their music.
There are not a lot of musicians making big bank like your typical pop star, but there are plenty that just live decently from their craft.
Very often they are making less than a career in a lucrative field would bring but still more or at least equal to a median job. And they have a lot of benefits that are just not very easy to put a price on (freedom to do what you love is priceless for some).
I think there is a distortion coming from the "bottom of the barrel musician" that spends way too much time complaining instead of trying to improve (or moving on to something else if they don't have what it takes). The reality is that the vast majority of music produced/performed is so bad it has absolutely no value commercial or otherwise.
I don't think the software craft is very comparable, it's just not the same incentive and constraints at work...
i think the analogy holds because there is also an established idea of software developers being passionate about what they do and hence create and maintain open source projects for free. never thought about it but music/musician <> software/developer is pretty isomorphic. also it simply isn't true that software developers make double the median - that's just true for the sv bias here and a few other hot spots.
> also it simply isn't true that software developers make double the median - that's just true for the sv bias here and a few other hot spots.
On a US national basis it is basically true. Median weekly earnings for full-time workers is $1,192[1]. Median hourly pay for a software developer is $62.58[2], which, assuming a 40 hour week, is $2,503.20.
Yes, this. SV and similar are even more extreme, but if you take all software engineers across the country and compare to the nationwide workforce, we make double the median.
That may not be a fair comparison to the extent that software devs are concentrated in high CoL areas, though, so you don't see a ton of us out in the cheaper and poorer regions. The effect of that is somewhat ameliorated by taking the median instead of the mean, but not fully.
That figure is in the above link as well: $1,705. So, yes, only one and half times more than the median bachelor degree holder. What is sadly absent from the report is the median weekly income of those who own a Ferrari. I expect that gap is even smaller.
I've taken to buying CDs again. I still stream, but for artists I like I at least own the CD and might pick up some merch too because the reality is that only the big artists make a ton of money, or even any money at all.
I’m in a hobby band, and Spotify is important but we’ve made absolutely nothing from it with a few thousand listens. 50 people buy our album digitally and we have enough to record another track.
Problem with buying a digital album is the same one as buying anything digitally rather than subscribing - since it's digital how do I know it'll stand the test of time? Does it have resale value?
I don't know the answer, considering I don't want to find room to store CDs or carry around a discman, but that's the problem.
Honestly, I would rather listen on Spotify and Venmo the band $5 towards their next track. Not sure what that looks like in a scaleable way.
That's good to know. Yeah, I think Spotify is great for discovering new bands, but if you want them to keep going you gotta chip in. We need more than just the same top 40 artists in our world.
I don’t mind the homogenisation- I work in video games and benefit from it in that side.
But you are right if you want it to succeed then you need to chip in. We sell an album for £7 digitally, or £30 for vinyl + digital, but it’s basically just donating to us to say “please keep recording stuff”. We’ve made more off selling a single vinyl than all our combined streaming income
Honestly, I've found Youtube Music great for discovery. There's a lot of metal bands that are small enough that you can't find their album preorders on Amazon that I found only by following the musical recommendations down the rabbit hole. In my city smaller bands from Europe don't tend to get a lot of playtime on the radio.
Great to hear some people are buying - I discover a lot of music through spotify (more through instagram to be honest) just wish more of the bands I like would play near me!
I had a look and it doesn’t seem to. There’s basically no tail on our last release so what we actually need is more eyeballs, which means making more content. The marketplace is saturated, like the App Store, so really our audience is coming from organic growth - playing gigs, and trying to get radio play or playlisted on Spotify
That's the thing with music, there is so much supply that even if your stuff is good, you are up against plenty of other good stuff that there is no logic to something becoming more popular than the other.
But if we are being realistic, if your stuff is truly great and unique, it will blow up. You just need to realize when you are not part of the great that you can do this just for your own pleasure, with no intention of success or anything like that, a hobby like any other...
Good luck and do keep reminding your fans to follow you on there, maybe you have a demo/live recording that could be released on the day if nothing new? I get a lot of emails from followed artists doing a temporary discount code but even just a "hey this is a great day to buy our music!" + reminding me of past releases makes it more likely I'll visit and buy something.
CDs just feel so utterly pointless to me these days, since I can have the 100% identical content on a hard drive. Not trying to diss what you do, it's just a weird state of mind I entered once MP3 players and bluetooth speakers replaced CD players everywhere and I can't seem to shake it.
Agree about the principle though, I try to buy merch at every gig I go to. Makes me feel slightly less bad about using Spotify.
Having something physical is nice, though. You can have the exact bits off the disc and maybe even the artwork on your hard drive, but you can't hold the album and look at it all together - especially for more elaborate packaging than your standard jewel case with inserts. In my mind, having something physical and not implicitly copyable makes it feel more real.
I'm in my own weird state of mind where I prioritize collecting physical over digital to the point of neglecting digital-only releases - digital is always going to have a copy somewhere I can listen to or purchase, but physical is limited and there's no guarantee I'll be able to get a copy later. This is probably an overly materialistic view, though.
I've been thinking that what I would like as far as "physical copy" of my media would be more like a card than anything that is actually used to play the media.
Something like an NFC-equipped greeting card (maybe more than just a cover; pages can be inside for fun stuff that used to be in the CD inserts/jackets/etc), that I could set on a stand which would then interface with the card and start playing music. Pull the card, playback stops. You get the idea. I just think something like that would serve both purposes - look and display nicely, while giving a conversation piece and more content from the creators; but not prone to damage causing issues with playback and as durable as you want them to be (could be more like HID Prox cards; plastic instead of cardboard. Or even more "exotic" materials. Lots of room for creativity).
Was it free though? iTunes sold music for $1/song. Spotify and Pandora were ad-supported. People like me may have sailed the high seas as a teen in the 2000s, but those people didn't make up the majority of music listeners.
Today, I only buy physical media and from Bandcamp. The younger generation seem happy to pay subscriptions for Spotify and Apple Music. I think this has to do with mobile OSes hiding filesystem access and banning P2P apps from the walled garden.
>> Software is weird because it is expected that should be free (as in beer) for most consumers while while being for profit and giving high salaries to its workers. I struggle to think of any other privately owned sector of the economy that works that way.
Software is the only industry where the marginal cost of the product is ZERO. All software you use has already been developed, you are presumably paying for updates and future versions - otherwise it's just rent. Something like Reddit is not pure software though, they have infra costs.
This is why Free Software is worthwhile to use and contribute to - it only needs to be written once for everyone to benefit from. Notice I didn't say "Open Source" because a lot of people want to commercialize that. YMMV.
>> The same is true of anything where all the value is in the bytes -- news, film, music, the written word.
Good point. I consider those "media or content" to be "played", "read", "watched" whereas software is more a thing to be used - or a set of capabilities added to a physical thing. Video games OTOH are software meant to be played so that occupies both of my mental categories. Stop it! You're making me think! ;-)
Not so for movies, the marketing budget and press junket tours end up costing as much as the film production itself. Music is also pay-for-play, but buying off radio stations and promotional spots on Spotify is not nearly as expensive as movies.
In fact most industry have marginal cost which is zero or otherwise negligible, as was remarked by French economist Maurice Allais in his discussion about the train to the city of Calais.
Think about a restaurant: the food has been bought and will rot if not sold, the cook and the waiter are being paid and so is the rent, so the only truly marginal cost in such a scenario is the cost of the energy needed for the stove or the oven (and only for dishes that get cooked at the last minute and not upfront), which is negligible compared to all of the upfront costs.
> Think about a restaurant: the food has been bought and will rot if not sold
This is a good point to raise, though I think we can refine the meaning of "marginal" to preserve a meaningful distinction between, say, restaurant meals and software:
Although the ingredients for making the meals have already been purchased, so there is no direct causative link between an additional customer arriving and additional ingredient cost, there remains a statistical link: Ingredient purchases are done based on a statistical model of what number of customers, with what preferences, are likely to arrive in the near future. I would very roughly characterise this as: There is some duration x such that if n more customers than expected show up during the next x days, n additional portions of ingredients will be purchased sometime later (in anticipation that this increased demand is now "the new normal").
The above could do with improving, but what's important is that software (and media) do not have any such statistical link: If 100 people buy your program this month, 200 the next month, 300 the next month, there is no additional cost outlay for you to make in order to meet the requirements of selling an (estimated) 400 copies the following month.
That's entirely true. I just like to point out that the marginal cost is an impractical concept in most cases.
The only thing that matters IRL is the average cost, and as you point out, it is always monotonically decreasing for software and other IP-based businesses, which isn't the case doe for other kinds of industries.
This is why the large commercial operation keeps updating their stuff with plenty of useless nonsense or unnecessary look lifting (looking at you Apple).
The problem is that we mostly don't have a correct mechanism to price software in a way that would be fair to both the developer and users.
For example, even if you calculate exactly what it costs to build a particular piece of software (all the devs salaries, plus all the office costs plus all the infrastructure costs) and you arrive at a particular number.
How do you divide that number for customer? The more there are the cheaper, but also if it became "free" after everything has been paid (because the marginal cost of copy is effectively zero) it looks like a better strategy to let others front the money.
It's like plenty of things in life, if people were honest things would be very easy but since they aren't we need to have suboptimal systems in place...
The Hitchiker's Guide already had a rant about useless jobs like telephone sanitisers and hairdressers. While I don't necessarily agree with hairdressers being useless, I feel like much of the economy is selling stuff no one really needs to solve problems no one really has in order to justify one's employment, and that share is increasing as automation scales the useful things with proportionately less effort. That's just the software section of it. Other sectors can bundle the useless into a product you need to buy as a whole, like cars or TVs, one-purpose software has no bundling.
I see automation scaling the less useful things, while the stuff we really need (on site trades, healthcare, child care, farming, etc) is having a hard time scaling.
Oh, yes, some stuff scales badly for sure, but for example farming scales hugely! Medieval societies required 80-90% farmers in Western Europe, it's now somewhere around 1-2%.
Yes, but we seem to have plateaued there. Also, that 1% to 2% is for grains and other stuff that can be easily harvested with large machines, which is awesome, but the delicate fruits and vegetables and nuts from more tropical places seem to be far above 1% to 2%.
By headcount, but I am not sure that tells the whole story. After all, a retiree who owns farmland, but lets another farmer do the work, can still be legally considered a farmer himself. I suspect even the average farmer working in the fields is spending considerably less time there than he would have in the past.
And that's with most farmers not even using the latest and greatest technology. If we imagine a world where only the highest capacity state-of-the-art machines are put to use, a lot of the farmers would struggle to find any work to do.
Completely autonomous farming vehicles have only been a thing for a few years and not been universally adopted yet (partly due to the high cost). I suspect there are still some ways to go here.
You are confounding what's necessary for our survival from what people may want/desire.
Fruit/vegetables as we know today are largely unnecessary and a luxury we have learned to love. In fact, most of the love for it comes from rich people posturing about it because they have both the means to buy them and time to process them.
When you look at them objectively, they are extremely bad from an effort to payoff point of view, making them purely pleasure/status driven food.
If you clock back just a hundred years you will realize that most fruits/veggies were not even well known (at least not in their modern form) and not something to worry about.
The pizzas with tomato sauce were created because basically nobody wanted this weird unknown fruit coming from the new world. Brussel sprouts so bitter that most people could not even digest them properly and they were truly disgusting to eat (basically food poisoning).
I could go on and on but the fact is vegetable and fruits are something we do purely for pleasure, we have improved the farming efficiency on many of them but it hardly matters for most of them because more supply doesn't mean the surplus will necessarily get eaten (you need to have people both richer and with more time for that).
In fact, the whole "organic" thing is something related to this fact, it's rich people who wanted to raise the stakes for purchasing veggies because it has become "too cheap" with imports (thanks to low wage cost in exporting countries).
The proper farming that actually feeds the world has already scaled beyond the point where it's reasonable to try and squeeze more out of it. In fact, the problem has become to manage the thing economically because over supplying makes some extremely large operations with big fixed costs a gamble.
I think other people see that as well and they see that it's no longer sustainable. I feel like that is, in part, what is driving the current political climate in the U.S.
Hairdresser are extremely useful even from just a utility standpoint (no going for any fancy cut) because that is something that is extremely hard to do yourself (almost impossible if you don't want basic army cut in fact).
I don't know how one can come up with such nonsense as hairdresser being a bullshit job. What's next, cooks?
There are indeed plenty of bullshit jobs, but they are systemically the bureaucratic paper pushers that has all the power in today's society (both in monetary terms and political terms), because they have some sort of diploma (which is mostly a way to show allegiance to the regime).
Those people are demonstrably dumber than many of the people doing actually useful jobs (often less paid with none of the advantage of the bureaucrats) but they hold most of the power collectively, and they are not giving it up.
As someone who spent most of my life with short hair but only started growing it longer in the past few years, I suspect that a lot of people who haven't had long hair drastically underestimate how much work goes into keeping it healthy and neat.
My mom was the first in her family to pay for haircuts. Before that either your mom did your hair, or your mom's friend came over and did hers. I didn't get a paid haircut until junior high. So people don't need them in the way they don't need automatic dishwashing machines to have clean dishes.
Need vs desire. A buzzcut, which is easy to give yourself, is all you need. Of course, it is understandable why you might desire a different style that is beyond your own capabilities.
All jobs fulfill something desirable for someone, but they aren't necessarily needed.
I take it as just a joke, not as Douglas Adams pointing out no job is useless, because management consultants were included too and I can't see him think THEY are useful, but it's possible.
One of the problems I have with paid solutions is that they generally use open source softwares and don't contribute a dime to them once their paid solutions are generating cash.
As long as they aren’t violating the license they aren’t legally or even socially obligated to fund any of the open source projects they use. If you release software under an open source license that allows free commercial use and redistribution you are explicitly saying you are fine with this.
If you don’t want this to happen, use an open source license with more restrictions on commercial use.
Open Source is just the free-but-profitable trend that OP is talking about taken to the limit. It's software that developers make for free and release for free—most often under a license that requires nothing but attribution. Then a not insignificant portion of those developers feel entitled to be paid for their work, preferably at something north of the median salary in their native country.
If you're developing open source software because you believe in the commons, license it under (A)GPL to ensure the propagation of the commons. If you're developing open source because it looks good on a resume, then you've already been paid for it in reputation. But if you're developing open source because you think you'll get paid for it, I don't know what to tell you except that that is not how the world works.
(Which is, of course, a totally different conversation than whether we wish it were how the world works.)
> If you're developing open source software because you believe in the commons, license it under (A)GPL to ensure the propagation of the commons. If you're developing open source because it looks good on a resume, then you've already been paid for it in reputation. But if you're developing open source because you think you'll get paid for it, I don't know what to tell you except that that is not how the world works.
This is not so simple. Even in the FOSS community, some people are allergic to copyleft licenses. I usually choose a license based on the practice of a community. Also, if you make the choice of copy-left in a world or copy-free is king, you are just isolating yourself from others. Often in big projects, you cannot alone, and the decision of license is a collective one.
I prefer the idea of regulating this mess: enforcing that everyone who has contributed to the success of a project - directly or indirectly - gets paid. It looks more fair and is based on merit - which this society seems to value.
> I usually choose a license based on the practice of a community. Also, if you make the choice of copy-left in a world or copy-free is king, you are just isolating yourself from others. Often in big projects, you cannot alone, and the decision of license is a collective one.
Fair, but in that case your compensation is choosing a license that gets you acceptance in the community that you're working with.
I'm not in favor of regulating that people who put stuff out into the world for free should get paid for that work, unless we're talking straight up UBI for everyone. If you want government to fund open source, it should do so by employing people to work on open source or by funding everyone to work on their hobbies via something like UBI.
And absent government funding, if you want to get paid you need to have a business model that allows for that. The existing practice in portions of the open source community is to put things out with extremely permissive licenses but then throw a fit when people don't pay you for them. This is what's known as a bait and switch.
The cost of software has been a matter of much debate since long before I was born (and I wasn't exactly born yesterday…). It was a bit of a scandal when software first started costing more than the hardware it was to run on (due to rising complexity in the software requirements needing more human resource to satisfy, and reducing hardware costs from technology improvements/refinements).
People programming for fun has always skewed its worth in the eye of some, and we also get the old “doing it for the exposure” expectations that is endemic in all creative realms.
But something as simple as the minimal code needed for this particular feature, which is essentially a QoL UX feature, is something that I think should be standard if present, not an added extra charge on top of what is already being paid (this isn't a free service, payment is through letting them sell you to there stalky ad-tech partners). It definitely feels like very deliberate price gouging.
> Software is weird because it is expected that should be free (as in beer) for most consumers while while being for profit and giving high salaries to its workers.
Shoppers expect shopping carts at a supermarket to be free, but you still have for-profit factories that employ many people to produce shopping carts that they sell for-profit to supermarkets. Do you also struggle to understand how that works?
To keep with that analogy, customers expect the SaaS company to respond to the HTTP requests for free, but you still have for-profit factories producing servers...
Comically high salaries are an aberration due to zero interest rates. SWEs should earn well, but not 3-4x as much as the median (and conversely, median salary should pay the rent, the housing market also being distorted by ZIRP).
High prices are due to supply and demand. While ZIRP can cause high demand (and high supply of currency to fulfill that demand), the underlying demand still comes from the fact that software has near zero marginal cost, near zero liability, the ability to easily collect rent, AND high barriers to entry. The ideal business.
This means a business that sells software solutions can earn high profit margins, which is a necessary component to be able to then pay high prices to labor sellers. A buyer has to be both able and willing to pay a high price for the seller to be able to sell at a high price.
If the labor buyer is only earning 5% profit margin, then the labor seller is going to have a harder time extracting more money. But if a buyer is earning 20%+ margins, and their business is growing to boot, the buyer will be able and willing to part with more, hence higher prices for labor sellers.
Software is very scalable and can provide a lot of value. If you look at the revenue per SWE for Microsoft, Alphabet, Netflix, etc, then it's hard to compare them to the person whose job isn't scalable, to say a truck driver, nurse, or bartender.
So I agree with this but I think it distorts the true value. A nurse is worth way more to society than another SWE but the SWE gets paid way more. Bankers get paid a lot because they control money supply but I don’t think most people believe bankers are helping them or wish we had more bankers. Software is going down a similar path (see artist outrage over AI) because the pull of money is too great.
I agree that the value to society and the economic value are two completely different things. I shining example of this principle is the 1980s corporate raiders that would buy a company, gut its pension program, and ride off with the profits.
Not unlike “free” online services with pay options. If you pay to go ad-free they'll probably still at least some background requests so their ad-partners can stalk you around your online life.
If a mathematician’s discovery has commercial applications (for example in creating arbitrage for trading, or breaking cryptography, or increasing security), then they can choose to keep it to themselves and commercialize it.
JSfiddle has been around forever (~15yrs) and managed to amble along with non-Google ads (which I whitelisted). Sad that they have pursued the path of enshitification annoyance as a business model.
i think there's been some recent events of yc companies being a bit controversial, and as much as im sure a lot of us appreciate HN and that we have YC to thank for that in some capacity, given the site we're on it's noteworthy when yc companies do... strange stuff
Or you could spend 5 minutes in TamperMonkey and replace the button with a working one. 10 minutes if you want to hide the other upselling interface elements.
I pretty often make little fixes to websites I use. It's quite satisfying.
Sometimes I hear people say that to succeed in our economy you need to offer the best product for the lowest price--or rather, the right balance between the two.
But so often in my career and in general, I have seen the most successful companies doing extra work to make their product worse. It's both obvious and subtle how bad this is; if the people who implemented this feature had instead spent their time doing nothing, it would have improved the product.
"Competition is fierce, so let's spend time and money making our product worse"--is this the winning strategy from the company at the forefront of technology? Apparently. This is a testament to the health of our free markets.
> This is a testament to the health of our free markets.
no, it's not. it's a statement that applies to a monopoly. And software is a monopoly - because each piece of software is unique enough, that there's no replacement possible.
If there are monopolies everywhere, and a lack of competition (which is the definition of a monopoly), how does that not reflect on the health of the free market and competition?
This specific example, https://jsfiddle.net, is not a monopoly and has many suitable replacements (e.g. https://livecodes.io/, https://liveweave.com). While in some cases (like YouTube vs alternatives) there are clear advantages to the former, in this case I don't even think that holds (I imagine most people only use JsFiddle to interactively build client-side webpages then share them via a link).
That people pay for JsFiddle (although do they? Maybe this is another "unprofitable" company) is a testament to...the fact that humans are not rational actors. Even in a "perfect" (competitive and easy to enter) market, a brand's quality can tank and they'll continue to get sales, despite objectively superior alternatives, simply because of brand recognition.
I doubt regulation can solve this. Try to imagine a ban on "enshittification". How do you measure it? How do you enforce it? How much does it cost to measure and enforce it? What if a company has "enshittify" because they're losing money? What if that company deliberately entered the market losing money, to gain brand recognition so they could recoup via "enshittification" later? What about small would-be companies that decide not to enter the market because this regulation is too complex and potential consequences (they think may someday apply to them because it's so complex) are too severe?
Instead, I believe the best solution is to try to be a smarter consumer yourself, and convince others to if possible; and if you can, start a company where you deliberately try to maintain quality even though it will sometimes directly contradict increasing profit (because humans aren't rational actors, enshittification won't lose you too many customers; and yet, there are companies that seem to avoid it and still make $millions+).
They are suitable replacements in the same way that crickets are a suitable replacement for beef: It'll get the job done. But usually the customer wants more – the whole experience – and jsfiddle does have a monopoly over that. Attempts to truly compete against them will be marred with legal challenges.
> Sometimes I hear people say that to succeed in our economy you need to offer the best product for the lowest price--or rather, the right balance between the two.
That statement is for where you are able to compete. If you produce, say, wheat, the best quality product at the lowest price is going to win over the marketplace.
But the tech industry doesn't allow competition thanks to patents, copyright, etc.
Such a great observation. I find this broadly applies to every aspect of humanity but especially government, more so than corporations could ever manage. Corporations at least have SOME competitive pressure, much less scope, many more constraints and far less power.
Governments are actually less nefarious by this metric because they don't have a perverse incentive to make things worse. If a government wants more money out of you, it just raises taxes. If a corporation wants more money out of you, it needs to induce demand, which at the limit means actively working to make the product worse. Our modern world is proof that relying on competition isn't enough to save us from the enshittification.
> Governments [...] don't have a perverse incentive to make things worse.
I hate to break this to you, but in the USA, this has happened multiple times: for instance, allowing Govt to shutdown due to spending limits, to push some extra pain + score political points, and then paint oneself as a savior when the shutdown is eventually lifted.
You could argue that they're not making things worse for the folks that actually matter (and you'd be right), but there is immense hardship and pain inflicted on ordinary people routinely (esp. of late), so I didn't want to leave your comment unchallenged.
The political gamesmanship in the US is beyond shameful, but that's different in an important way. When the government passively denies you a service by shutting down, that's negligence. When the government actively makes a service worse, that's cruelty for the sake of cruelty, and rightfully gets called out. But when a company actively makes a service worse to induce demand, that's a fat bonus for a PM, where instead we should be calling it out for the cruelty that it is.
Or to put it another way, for a government, cruelty is done for its own sake. In a corporation, cruelty is economically incentivized.
I can also see a "unifying mental model" -- whatever increases the "health" is pursued.
A corporation needs to "feed" on money, so its actions reflect this (e.g. PMs worsening services intentionally, in order to be able to charge more and thereby boost revenue).
A party in power needs to "feed" on support from its "base", so its actions reflect this (you said it best: "for the sake of cruelty")
Enshitification is not something that happens to customers. Free software is not free to the advertisers, and as such, the companies will go to great lengths to meet their needs. And this makes sense. Why would a company do anything for you if you aren't paying?
If people preferred a good paid solution over a shitty free one then Kagi would be a trillion dollar company and nobody would ever have heard of Google. But that's not what people want. They want shitty but free. This is the market working as it should. Enshitification is not something done to us. It's something we do to ourselves.
With shareware, if something had been working for years and the developers released a new version when everything became premium, you could have stayed on the previous version. Not with these cloud tools, and that's why enshitification is a thing when it wasn't before.
No one's gonna pay just for the sidebar being collapsible. Maybe someone is going to because it was the last straw, but most are just going to be annoyed. Better ask for money only for something with real value (which I'm sure the pro tier also includes).
It's been a while since I saw anyone post that Philip K Dick quote, from the book Ubik... it's about time I feel.
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob.Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
Use it as an opportunity. I just found out that you can locally install JSBin. I was a bit fed up with jsfiddle being so slow recently, so I will try that one.
This is absurd, I do agree with this framing... but rather than trash the company in the comments I'm curious about what people think.
Would ads be better? If JSFiddle were your project, what would you do to provide yourself a salary?
I think we've discovered that the "buy me a coffee" strategy is just that, enough to generate a little bonus income... but is it simply unreasonable to expect that a project on the web that requires ongoing maintenance can generate a reasonable income for most people?
How do we get off the enshittification treadmill? is this a corporate owner being too greedy? are we expecting too much? have our lifestyles become unsustainable?
the fundamental answer is that you cannot, because this site does not produce sufficient value for the cost to provide that salary (without resorting to ads i meant).
And in fact, the majority of sites are of this nature. The value provided simply does not support the continued cost of maintenance and operations.
> have our lifestyles become unsustainable?
i would argue yes. People have come to expect their cost to get rounded down (to zero), because the value they derived from the site is also rounded down to zero (in their minds). It's also a fact that it is impossible for a real, cost effective microtransctions platform to exist on the net, unless it's a full walled garden (and this directly contradicts the open web).
Both of these facts means the inevitable destiny of external monetization (such as ads, or "enshitification" to force subscription), or exiting/selling out to someone else who would.
It's a miracle so many sites, and products, have held out due to sheer obstinance of their creator to push thru. It's altruistic, but like fighting the tide, eventually they get worn down.
> It's a miracle so many sites, and products, have held out due to sheer obstinance of their creator to push thru. It's altruistic, but like fighting the tide, eventually they get worn down.
Yes I feel the same way, but it feels so sad to me. These sites are valuable to many people! I'd imagine millions are familiar with JSFiddle but our idea of what things should cost is so warped. Then there's the fact that even if I were ok with giving JSFiddle a fraction of a dollar every time I visited it, I have no great way of doing it that's not ad-based.
I hope we can find something more reliably between enshittification and donation.
What's genuinely premium feature? Donations just doesn't work. Even the open source projects used by all of fortune 500 is unable to raise one full time position funding.
And tbh anything is better than ads in a site aimed for developers.
so, collapsing the sidebar is a genuine premium feature isnt it? It's not restricting the basic functionality, and you dont need to collapse it to have the site do what it needs.
And for those who would donate, they get a psychological benefit of paying for a feature!
