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Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)

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Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)

#351
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uBlock Origin is also an incredible success story here!

Yet the very same author turned over the OG uBlock to a shady character, having to launch a competitor to take back the momentum. To this day there is still confusion among normies.

I didn't turn over the extension in the Chrome Webstore, I always have been the owner of it since I first published uBlock in June 2014.

Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)

#352
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd still have to rely on the trust of the original maintainer, but they could set up something like a warrant canary[0], but for if they sold it or if they added tracking items. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

warrant canary assumes the maintainer is under coercion. But if the maintainer is untrustworthy, their warrant canary also won't be trustworthy, since it's trivial for the "sale" and the new maintainers to continue the existing warrant canary as though nothing has happened.

Aren't these also useless even for their original reason as they can just be given a demand from the legal system to keep updating the canary as if nothing happened?

Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)

#353
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would money be the only value, that is a really sad view on life. Good thing nobody said that. > The developer gets joy and gratitude, Your average free software doesn't get very much joy and gratitude back from users either. > they can live a happy life. Why bring money into it. Money does not make happy. If the implication was too subtle, the idea is that when you spend a lot of time making something valuable…

The post I replied to clearly equals value with money.

It connects them, it doesn't say they're the same.

Money is an important type of value, especially the context of labor.

And, let me phrase this very precisely: there isn't an obvious non-monetary value they're getting back that comes close to the effort they put in.

You mentioned joy and gratitude but again I'm not sure how much of that they get back in this situation, plus there is the flip side of lots of complaints.

Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)

#354

I don't know what the solution to this is, but I know a few trusted/legitimate companies that sell their user data for around £20/year even after having monetized their users with actual money I will never do this because violating privacy goes against the core of my beliefs, but there is a conflict I can't seem to work out. On the one hand, I KNOW that the vast majority of users prefer to sell their privacy than pay…

I actually run a service for adding paid features to browser extensions: https://extensionpay.com

From all the data I have, people will definitely pay for extension functionality, though lots of people will write negative reviews unfortunately.

I also use ExtensionPay myself in my own extensions and have found this to be true. I try to get the people who pay and have a good experience to write reviews since they’re so underrepresented in written reviews.

Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)

#355
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it even possible to not spend money on advertised things?

Mostly by not spending money frivolously.

The house I live in was advertised when it was on sale, all the food at the store gets advertised, all the non-bespoke clothes I can buy get advertised, as do most of the bespoke ones, every car gets advertised...

Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)

#356
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point a reality check should be possible. Do you find yourself spending money on advertised-things?

That's the metric I usually use. It's absolutely inconclusive, but it works for peace of mind at least. Have I seen any ads for something I bought? Usually the answer is "no". I'm still at the mercy of sort order on sites like Amazon and eBay, but that's much less scary because if I really care, I can sort by lowest price first.

By my own moral compass. If a company says "lots of people on Amazon are looking to buy what we have, let's make sure we're present in that market", that's completely moral. Compare that with, "a child is preparing for their math test tomorrow by watching a video, let's interrupt them and make them watch a commercial about our sugary, addictive, and unhealthy drink".

Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)

#357
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be immediately obvious in a cursory analysis of performance. On-device transcription is not only computationally infeasible, it would also require model capabilities far beyond what is currently SOTA. Google had (and has afaik) significant challenges implementing multiple wake-word detection for precisely this reason. Transcribing a couple of words accurately on-device without a major performance penalty (…

I would have to take your word for it but my phone is able to transcribe speech with no problem and no internet connection. Of course running it 24/7 in the background would ruin my battery, you would have to be smarter than that.

Which phone/app? I would be very surprised if a manufacturer has an entirely on-device real-time ASR model, maybe I'm behind.

Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems so weird to me. You're clearly providing value to the world, and according to my moral view, should be entitled to capturing some of that value without resorting to something shady. I'm the founder of Streak where we directly monetize our extension (as do others like Grammarly). Have you tried directly asking your users for $ given the effort you put in?

I can't speak for parent, but some (including myself) see writing free software as an act of charity, done just to make the world a little bit better. In this view, trying to make money from it corrupts the noble mission.

> In this view, trying to make money from it corrupts the noble mission.

Agreed, making money from charity doesn’t make sense.

Business revolves around secrecy and restrictions.

Whereas open-source revolves around transparency and freedoms…

Re: Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)

#360

And if you run a website you get constant emails like this: Hey There, I wanted to reach out and see if accepts guest post contributions or link insertion in existing posts? If so, I'd love to hear more about your guidelines and any specific topics of interest. Thank you for your time, and I'm looking forward to your response. Best Regards, These ones are definitely spammed out en-masse, my site doesn't even have a b…

We run an educational blog for our saas product and we get some legit emails from readers but also a lot of the spam and some of it is scary good. They feed in so much context that it does appear to be a real person and it ends up wasting a lot of time and honestly it's quite hurtful. We spend a lot of time sharing our stuff and these fake connections are a major turnoff. Recently we encountered a wave of "awards sho…

This may not be appropriate for your use case, but rotating the publicly facing email address when you get spam or on an interval may help here. For example hello-XXXXX@site.com (hello-a5b84@site.com, hello-jux8k@site.com, …).

I believe most legitimate visitors send an email shortly after visiting a page with the address while spam emails often have a much longer lead time with new addresses (it takes time to get scraped, put in a database, and then get used).

However this does mean that extended communication on that address and saved addresses will not work well.

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