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> network effects Unless you have a true captive market or some crazy sales-focused enterprise business, you can't get network effects without first achieving

> network effects Unless you have a true captive market or some crazy sales-focused enterprise business, you can't get network effects without first achieving that critical mass of users more or less on your product's own merits, and if your software is shitty and/or pointless then you are not going to get there. > Lots of users complain about it Discord has like 200M+ MAUs, so of course "lots" of users complain about it. > But it's strange and pointless to just praise Electron apps for a minimum of sketchy practices if you don't. I'm not praising them for any such thing—I was just calling out the fact that most consumer software these days is abusive, so we have to be careful to speak about abuse in relative terms. I don't think Electron "apps" are on average better or worse, and if (looking at data) they did turn out to be better or worse in this regard then I would attribute that to the widespread adoption of Electron "apps" in certain market segments that tend toward abuse, rather than some inherent property of the framework that encourages it. In other words, the baseline for modern consumer software is to abuse the user, and I don't believe there is some inherent property of Electron that encourages (or discourages) that trend.

pseudalopex 5y ago
> you can't get network effects without first achieving that critical mass of users more or less on your product's own merits No one said VS Code and Discord had no merits at all. Discord's core users were gamers. People who can afford to run much more demanding software for fun. People who don't care about accessibility mostly. It's free like I mentioned. It competes with Slack mostly. Slack has the same problems mostly. And 1 of Slack's merits on its way to critical mass was compatibility with other apps. VS Code's early merits were it was faster than Atom and free unlike Sublime Text. > Discord has like 200M+ MAUs, so of course "lots" of users complain about it. A large fraction in my experience. "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."[1] > I was just calling out the fact that most consumer software these days is abusive, so we have to be careful to speak about abuse in relative terms. Who said anything about abuse before you? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

pseudalopex 5y ago

> you can't get network effects without first achieving that critical mass of users more or less on your product's own merits No one said VS Code and Discord had no merits at all. Discord's core users were gamers. People who can afford to run much more demanding software for fun. People who don't care about accessibility mostly. It's free like I mentioned. It competes with Slack mostly. Slack has the same problems mostly. And 1 of Slack's merits on its way to critical mass was compatibility with other apps. VS Code's early merits were it was faster than Atom and free unlike Sublime Text. > Discord has like 200M+ MAUs, so of course "lots" of users complain about it. A large fraction in my experience. "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."[1] > I was just calling out the fact that most consumer software these days is abusive, so we have to be careful to speak about abuse in relative terms. Who said anything about abuse before you? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html