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The 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 ad
by lacker 7y ago
The 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.