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Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

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Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#121

Post by lolinder »

conaclos wrote: post #117
lolinder wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ope…

> 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.…

> 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.

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#122

Post by fallingknife »

saghm wrote: post #72
alehlopeh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one needs hairdressers? How do you figure?

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.

More importantly, if somebody wants to pay a hairdresser, what business is it of anybody else whether they "need" it or not?

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#123

Post by armchairhacker »

chii wrote: post #89
Buttons840 wrote: post #84

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 noth…

> 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.

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+).

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#125

Post by fallingknife »

kibwen wrote: post #119
jeetoid wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

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.

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#126

Post by Nextgrid »

legitster wrote: post #42

You know people like to complain about things and how everything is worse these days, but this is exactly how shareware operated back in the day.

Shareware at the time was generally a one-off purchase though.

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#127

Post by lolinder »

9rx wrote: post #120
rvogler wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf [2] https://www.bl…

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.

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#128

Post by relaxing »

relaxing wrote: post #68
lores wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My takeaway was the people who would decide entire swaths of society were useless were also idiots.

Whoever decided to downvote a thread on the Hitchhikers Guide of all things rather than join the conversation is an embarrassment to the profession.

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#129

Post by littlestymaar »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #90
phkahler wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 updat…

> Software is the only industry where the marginal cost of the product is ZERO. The same is true of anything where all the value is in the bytes -- news, film, music, the written word.

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.

Re: Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month

#130

Post by 9rx »

Buttons840 wrote: post #84

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 noth…

> 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.

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