A world where people pay for software • Hacker News Board

Re: A world where people pay for software

#391

Post by AnthonyMouse » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

robalni wrote: post #350

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How fast they will get more could depend on the current value of their account, where the value could be calculated from the credits and the number of subscribers they have. So are you then implicitly setting the price yourself because anyone who doesn't charge enough can't get more credits? Suppose someone develops an app which takes hardly any effort to make -- it's a hundred lines of code -- but it does somethin…

> So are you then implicitly setting the price yourself because anyone who doesn't charge enough can't get more credits? Everyone can get more credits. The idea is that when we think we need more subscriptions to sell, every developer would get a number of additional credits that is proportional to the number of credits they have (with active subscriptions converted to credits for the calculation). > But to do that y…

> Everyone can get more credits. The idea is that when we think we need more subscriptions to sell, every developer would get a number of additional credits that is proportional to the number of credits they have (with active subscriptions converted to credits for the calculation).

This is what I mean by implicitly setting the price. You set it indirectly by rate limiting the number of subscriptions.

A service with high cost and low volume gets priced out, even if it's only somewhat above average, because people can buy a subscription from someone else for less.

Conversely, if subscriptions are rate limited then no one has any incentive to sell them for less than the market rate, which is in turn set by supply and demand (and you having your hand on the supply knob). Why would anyone charge less, or pay more, than the median price?

Then anyone who needs more than that is priced out, and if you allocate credits based on how many people sign up or use a service, the service that provides only trivial value but to a large number of people gets a ton of credits disproportional to the value of their service.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#392

Post by JackMorgan » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 10:10 PM UTC

dunham wrote: post #267

ryandrake wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the very least it must be patched up with newly discovered security threats. I'd say at the very most it needs security updates. Too much software changes just to change. UI redesigns for the sake of redesign, cramming features that nobody wants so a product owner can get promoted, adding telemetry and analytics to chase metrics that no user cares about, adding annoying notifications and popups to juice "engagem…

> I'd say at the very most it needs security updates. and then you move the bar a little (although I agree): > Bugfixes only, please. I would also add updating to work with the current OS / hardware. (I have unusable games that are a recompile away from being usable.) But I agree with the rest of your points. Especially when, in addition to asking you to fund new features, the new features make the app worse for your…

Software compatibility with current modern platforms is a feature, and an owner of software isn't entitled to forward compatibility any more than an owner of a car is entitled to new parts as the old ones degrade.

Software degradation is much like hardware degradation: it happens with time as underlying platforms change.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#393

Post by radiator » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 10:11 PM UTC

steveBK123 wrote: post #185

vbezhenar wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm buying a lifetime thing, it's an investition. I spent money and got thing that will never get old. As time goes on, I'm getting more things and I need to spend less. If I'm buying a subscription, it's an obligation. I'll have to spend money from now until I die or I'll get reduced QoL. Even if today I have spare $200/month, that might not be the case tomorrow. Maybe I'll get fired. Maybe government turn my cas…

Lifetime thing is a rather large statement, especially with software though isn't it? Most of the pre-subscription model compares were never lifetime purchases. Software that needed paid purchase update every 3-5 years to get OS support / features. No software I used in 1995 will run on my current computers. Even 2005 or 2010 is dubious in some cases. Content constantly changed delivery mechanisms and people had to b…

> No software I used in 1995 will run on my current computers.

I don't think you have tried too much to run it.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#394

Post by PeterisP » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 10:11 PM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #378

derefr wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there would be very many programmers in such a world? Personally, I think that a lot of people who right now go into programming "because it's a good career", would instead do things that are equally creative but also capture other things high on the Maslow hierarchy — e.g. fame. Personally, despite enthusiastically enjoying my programming career and puzzle-oriented problem-solving more generally, I'm st…

It is hard to guess what people would work on without needing to worry about money. You might try your novel, and one of two things could happen: You find out you love it, you write a really good novel, and society wins. You try it, find out that the actual experience of writing a novel is a drag. No harm no foul, you move on and keep trying things until you find something you are really passionate about and good at,…

You can also find out that you love it despite the novels (or software or paintings or poems or whatever) not being interesting for almost anyone else or even being available to anyone, but as you don't need the money you can keep doing that (and only that) and society simply loses out on whatever you're doing currently.

The key part of what people would work on without needing to worry about money is that there is literally zero reason to assume that the thing worked on would be useful to society in any way whatsoever, it can be useless or even detrimental to it - the current mechanism of monetary compensation is the thing aligning the work to interests of others, remove it and you can't expect that alignment to persist.

Unconditional income is a solution to the problem when we don't need people's labor anymore - it makes all sense when people can just go off and do whatever without worrying if it benefits others enough to justify the basic goods and services they need, and the society is okay with that. But while we still do need the labor of most people, there needs to be motivation to guide that labor to the specific things society needs.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#395

Post by ilyt » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 10:11 PM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #320

My question is: why isn't there yet a thing (or is there?) that works like AWS, but has the UX experience of a smartphone: you can install "apps" on it -- which you pay for hosting / bandwidth -- and it handles integration with all your devices, while leaving you in charge of how they're configured and what happens with the data? Sorta like expanding the mobile phone experience to encompass your whole internet experi…

Coz that's a lot of work to make and someone needs to pay for it.

In world when people would rather throw another $5/mo on another single service doing the thing.

I do think it might've been pretty popular if the experience was truly seamless but that takes a lot

Re: A world where people pay for software

#396

Post by guidoism » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 10:12 PM UTC

smolder wrote: post #355

thorncorona wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact same answer every leftist I've talked to says when I ask them who will run the garbage system, and who will clean the sewers.

I know it seems crazy on its face. And I'm sure those leftists you refer to didn't have a coherent concept of how such a system would actually work . There's no way we could just replace paychecks today with rations and social credits and have a functioning system. It'd be an extreme destabilizing change to a system we built incrementally over a long time to be self reinforcing. But I also have the view that people a…

I like to think about how this works at smaller scales. When there is an office full of people all being paid about the same and (critically) where they all want and care about the same outcome, the shit jobs will get done. I have often called myself a "code janitor" since I clean up shit that was left behind. It's not because I didn't want to be working on fun greenfield projects but because it was shit that just needed to get done. So I did it. And so did others.

Another example to play around with is when you go camping with friends. There's some shit work that just needs to be done. People pitch in. The same with staying at a friends house or a vacation rental with friends. Or cleaning leaves off of the storm drains. We all do this sort of work because it makes our lives better. If literal shit was piling up in front of my house I would probably shovel it even if it took 8 hours.

Natural disasters are also examples where people do work for free without expectation of compensation. I think people are more like that than what happens in apocalyptic novels (even though I love reading them).

Re: A world where people pay for software

#397

Post by rightbyte » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 10:13 PM UTC

johnny99k wrote: post #248

rightbyte wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your software need security maintainance it mostly has a failed architecture from the get go. Like 9/10 apps need no internet connectivity at all, unless they are spyware of course, which most commercial apps are nowadays.

"If your software need security maintainance it mostly has a failed architecture from the get go." There are plenty of open source libraries, that many software developers used in their applications, that have had to have security updates. No software will be 100% secure. "Like 9/10 apps need no internet connectivity at all" This might have been true 10 years ago. Almost all apps people want need internet connectivit…

Software that does not interact with remote computers is 100% secure. You just got the risk when loading malicious save files or what ever, but the floppy disk kind of viruses is a whole other level of security risk and the user need to load the files. It doesn't just happen (I know some Windows computers could get infected by merely plugging in some USB stick, but you get my point).

The whole connectivity thing is the fundamental problem. Transferring files between devices have never been as easy as during the floppy disk days. Usability is not the driving factor behind forcing the internet into everything.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#398

Post by aleph_minus_one » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 10:14 PM UTC

steveBK123 wrote: post #185

vbezhenar wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm buying a lifetime thing, it's an investition. I spent money and got thing that will never get old. As time goes on, I'm getting more things and I need to spend less. If I'm buying a subscription, it's an obligation. I'll have to spend money from now until I die or I'll get reduced QoL. Even if today I have spare $200/month, that might not be the case tomorrow. Maybe I'll get fired. Maybe government turn my cas…

Lifetime thing is a rather large statement, especially with software though isn't it? Most of the pre-subscription model compares were never lifetime purchases. Software that needed paid purchase update every 3-5 years to get OS support / features. No software I used in 1995 will run on my current computers. Even 2005 or 2010 is dubious in some cases. Content constantly changed delivery mechanisms and people had to b…

> Lifetime thing is a rather large statement, especially with software though isn't it? Most of the pre-subscription model compares were never lifetime purchases.

You should hang around more in retro-gaming and retro-computing communities. They invest a lot of time, blood, sweat and tears to get to run some old software on modern devices, or preserve old computing/games devices that is able to run this software.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#399

Post by thfuran » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 10:14 PM UTC

chromoblob wrote: post #336

thfuran wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy a car and the airbags randomly deploy, would you consider it reasonable for the manufacturer to respond "oh, yeah, that'll happen if you drive it on roads rougher than polished stainless steel. You should only be driving on polished roadways"?

If this requirement was known to me before I bought, sure. I think that this is a bad analogy to hardware, though. Polished steel roads are unreasonable to ask for, but bugless processors are reasonable to ask for.

No, they aren't. You can only buy the buggy processors that exist, not notional bugless ones.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#400

Post by scottyah » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 10:17 PM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #376

pfannkuchen wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem is that most necessary projects aren’t fun, and most fun projects aren’t necessary. Does anyone design dishwashers as a hobby, as an easy example? How do you propose we motivate people to do work that isn’t fun? Currently the carrot of higher pay or ownership in a more valuable thing is doing that, so we would need something to replace it if that goes away.

I get the point that some jobs are boring and need actual materialistic motivation to be done but... I'm absolutely sure someone would design one out of sheer annoyance with existing solution (if existing solution would be bad). It would be interesting if system with very short copyright (say 3-5 years) would work. You'd still have leader's advantage for investing in development, but overall winner would be companies…

There would be a perfect design for that one person, and everyone else would either do it themselves (not many could) or suffer