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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

#151

Post by seec »

maccard wrote: post #50
crtasm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you have a Bandcamp store, have their zero fees Friday events been helpful to your band?

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...

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

#152

Post by seec »

phkahler wrote: post #70
Sytten wrote: post #10

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 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…

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...

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

#153

Post by seec »

lores wrote: post #39
Sytten wrote: post #10

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.

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…

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.

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

#154

Post by seec »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #69
lores wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

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.

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

#155

Post by seec »

packtreefly wrote: post #80
motorest wrote: post #55

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. 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...

SaaS exists mostly as a rent seeking strategy. It doesn't make that much sense for most software.

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

#156

Post by AbstractH24 »

maccard wrote: post #19
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#157

Post by AbstractH24 »

crtasm wrote: post #37
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.

Watch the sales scroll past on https://bandcamp.com/ - a lot of people want to support artists and own music they enjoy.

TIL bandcamp and bandsintown are not the same thing.

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

#158

Post by AlexeyBelov »

mkl wrote: post #9

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.

People would have you believe it's piracy.

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

#159

Post by AlexeyBelov »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #105
chii wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what would you do to provide yourself a salary? 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 arg…

> 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…

My view is that I have a well paid job, so I don't need to nickel-and-dime people on my software. It's free and opensource in fact.
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