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It makes me sad to see the negativity that this experiment has attracted, even in this HN discussion thread there seem to be a lot of dismissive and patronising
by fergie 7y ago
It makes me sad to see the negativity that this experiment has attracted, even in this HN discussion thread there seem to be a lot of dismissive and patronising comments directed towards Feross.
I'm genuinely unsure if this is because people think that Feross has much lower ability than he actually has, or if they are jealous of the attention he has received for Standard.js, or if it is just because JS programmers are still looked down upon.
Either way we are talking about somebody with a pretty impressive CV who has made countless meaningful contributions to Open Source. Personally I think the work that he has done around WebTorrent is amazing, and WebTorrents may even end up saving humanity by making it possible to recentralise the web (only slight hyperbole, and if they dont, it will be something very similar).
Its true that Open Source is now an industry that generates billions if not trillions of dollars a year, yet very little of that makes its way to the people who actually make the stuff. Feross is right to explore ways to pay OS maintainers, even if those attempts sometimes fail. We will all be better off for it.
- lacker 7y agoThe negativity is because people do not want to see this becoming a trend, where CLI tools start advertising. One practical way to fight against new forms of advertising is to complain in public, complain to the advertiser, and make sure that form of advertising is associated with user complaints. That seemed to work here. I don’t think the majority of the pushback was about Feross personally. But when people see a new form of advertising that seems especially annoying, it is quite logical to respond negatively.
- pjmlp 7y agoWhat about making a trend to actually pay for the tools one uses?
- mrosett 7y agoThe feedback on HN was harsh but not personal. The 1k comment thread on /r/programming was very nasty and made me less likely to engage with that community again.
- fergie 7y agoJust took a look at the Reddit thread in question -> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cus0zu/a_3mil_downloads_per_month_javascript_library/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cus0zu/a_3mil_... Not good.
- makomk 7y agoYes. We've seen where this trend of people building and promoting useful free utilities, waiting until they build up a large audience and lots of trust, and then turning them into adware ends - it happened before with freeware on Windows. That's reached the point where the older well-known, formerly trustworthy utilities for tracking down the software spamming you with ads are now obnoxious adware themselves. The entire ecosystem is so poisoned that Apple created a hugely successful series of ad campaigns around the fact that their platform wasn't like that and technical people direct their friends elsewhere.
- dang 7y agoIf the comments in such a critique cross into personal attack or otherwise break the site guidelines, we'd appreciate users alerting us to that at hn@ycombinator.com. That's not ok on HN and we moderate such comments when we know about them. We just don't always know about them because we can't read all the posts here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html