Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 160 posts

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

#131

Post by 9rx »

lolinder wrote: post #48
catapart wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The entire premise is inaccurate, really. Nobody expects software to be free, even if they do not expect to pay with currency.

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

#132

Post by 9rx »

armchairhacker wrote: post #123
chii wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This specific example, https://jsfiddle.net, is not a monopoly and has many suitable replacements (e.g. https://livecodes.io/, https://liveweave.com).

The other two don't even have sidebars...

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.

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

#133

Post by finnthehuman »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #66

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…

> Would ads be better?

It has ads. Did you forget to turn off your adblocker? Or are you talking like even more ads?

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

#134

Post by _DeadFred_ »

alehlopeh wrote: post #51
lores wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No one needs hairdressers? How do you figure?

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.

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

#135

Post by nunez »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #106
nunez wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't think spotify is good for discovery, unless "discovery" means "more of the same." i've taken to terrestrial radio for true discovery and bandcamp for digging into a genre.

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.

Interesting, especially since I really enjoy death/speed metal. I'll give this a try; thank you!

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

#136

Post by micromacrofoot »

finnthehuman wrote: post #133
micromacrofoot wrote: post #66

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…

> Would ads be better? It has ads. Did you forget to turn off your adblocker? Or are you talking like even more ads?

thank you pihole for providing this moment of ignorant bliss

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

#137

Post by disqard »

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…

> 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.

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

#139

Post by kibwen »

fallingknife wrote: post #125
kibwen wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, I agree that people suck. But it takes two to tango. Greedy corporations don't get to divest themselves of their share of the blame.

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

#140

Post by kibwen »

disqard wrote: post #137
kibwen wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 actual…

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.

Post reply on HN