25 ms·

What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized? I don't like ads, on the internet or TV, and therefore refuse

• analyte123 5y ago
  The more inequality there is in a society, the worse the consequences of not having money are. Money isn't about not having a second jet-ski or a five-star instead of a three-star hotel anymore - it's about not working 70 hour weeks while your kids are getting beat up in a dangerous school.
  • mr90210 5y ago
    That's exactly what I have been working for. For instance, I love cars, I used to love it even more, but nowadays I don't imagine myself putting USD 1 million on car, that just obnoxious. I would rather use that money to change my next generation.
• acchow 5y ago
  Yes, applause to Josh for doing such a thing. But I think getting paid for work is quite human, no?
• foepys 5y ago
  To be fair, HN is run by a startup investor, which attracts a specific audience. A lot of commenters here have kind of fetishized money and early retirement.
  • tomcam 5y ago
    I grew up not rich and not safe. You could say I've fetishized money because I've got a fair amount of it and greatly enjoy my work. But I see it as the most efficient way to protect me and mine. Living in a nearly crime-free neighborhood and having a shade tree doesn't seem like a fetish to me. This would put me in the group of people who are interested in, but not obsessed by, a choice not to monetize.
    • WHA8m 5y ago
      As I understood your parent, he/she was not talking about your kind of rich (what I'd consider a healthy rich) but rather a money at all costs and money for its own sake -kind of rich.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • bingu 5y ago
    Without the early retirement part.
    • coldtea 5y ago
      And often without the money part...
      • multjoy 5y ago
        You can fetishise both and not have either.
        • spkm 5y ago
          Which is my fetish.
          • queuebert 5y ago
            Buckhold
  • melenaboija 5y ago
    Totally agree and I see this trend worsening. Although for me is still the best place to consume technical content.
  • analog31 5y ago
    When I first started following HN, I remarked to my spouse: "On the east coast, you're nobody if you're not rich. On the west coast, you're nobody if you're not trying to get rich."
• Rastonbury 5y ago
  Because we know a creator's sacrifice by not monetizing, money can buy them comfort, security and freedom (less time working, quitting job even). I don't think most people will fault anyone for choosing to monetise their work.
  • tomcam 5y ago
    Completely concur
  • slg 5y ago
    Flappy Bird was reportedly making $50k per day during its short initial peak after going viral. If I was the Wordle dev, I wouldn't go crazy and try to turn Wordle into a full fledged company. However unless the dev is independently wealthy I honestly think it is a little stupid not to do any monetization. There is probably enough potential their to ride a month or two of popularity to lifelong financial security. Why not take that?
    • palijer 5y ago
      Why is it stupid to not do any monetization? Josh built a fun game for his partner, and now a lot more people are enjoying it. As long as it isn't horrendous in hosting costs, I'd say that is already a huge return on the project. Giving some great entertainment to folks is a win already in itself. Using your skills to the benefit of your community (global in this case) is one of the best things you can do. You don't need to profit off it as well to make it an intelligent project. It's not stupid to skip monetization.
      • slg 5y ago
        Because Josh could potentially monetize this project and allow both him and his partner to spend the rest of their lives doing nothing but making these fun projects for each other, working to benefit the global community, or whatever else they would want to do having achieved financial independence. I also don't agree with the idea that any form of monetization is inherently hostile towards players. The game takes up roughly 500px by 800px on a page that is receiving millions of hits a day. You can throw an ad on that page and barely impact the user experience while pulling in 4 or 5 figures per day. There is money to be made there without resorting to adding microtransactions or something actively hostile to users.
• avl999 5y ago
  > What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized? The point is if he doesn't monetize it, someone else who works around the legalize and is less ethical about it will. It is going to very likely get monetized one way or the other, the only question is if the creator (for whom is is obviously a labor of love) is gonna monetize or someone else looking to make a buck.
  • tp69 5y ago
    Just because many people drive above the speed limit, doesn't mean you need to. Just because people dribble shit on twitter, doesn't mean you need to. Just because rich morons stick jade eggs into their vaginas, doesn't mean you need to. Just because there are greedy scumbags in the world, doesn't mean you need to be one too. "But, but, someone's going to do it!" isn't even remotely a valid argument against having morals and ethics.
    • Rastonbury 5y ago
      You can look at it like this: Most people get paid for the work they do, doesn't mean you need to. Sure but there are reasons people work for money, often times out of necessity, but also greed. Is it immoral or unethical to chose to profit from Wordle? I think most would say not
    • Shugarl 5y ago
      How does profiting from something valuable you created somehow makes you a greedy scumbag ? Besides, you're not addressing the main point : Someone is going to "steal" most of his hard labor, and will profit from it.
      • juancb 5y ago
        So if he monetizes it then others won't try to "steal" his hard work?
  • birdyrooster 5y ago
    Consider Dwarf Fortress. It’s currently not monetized (directly) and yet no one can come in and steal the business for themselves because nothing can replace Dwarf Fortress without an incredible investment. Wordle is basic as hell and was never built to be competitive in a market place. I bet the author would have lost to competition so quickly that the profits wouldn’t be as great as a lot of people think.
• adrian_mrd 5y ago
  In the same vein, why does (nearly) every organization ‘have’ to be for-profit? What does that say about our societies that we have embedded the profit motive in (most) organisations? Worth noting that obviously there are many not for profit organizations, just that they are largely clustered in the fields of health, education, social welfare, etc. And also note the difference between (unlimited or at least not capped) profit and earning or being paid a living or even high wage. People often confuse the ability to earn a ‘good’ wage and a very high wage.
  • vmception 5y ago
    money in has to exceed money out no matter what format the organization takes
    • cik 5y ago
      Sounds like someone has never heard of government
      • bongoman37 5y ago
      • ChrisLomont 5y ago
        Govt works exactly the same way. You think they spend more than they take in by ignoring the excess is lent to them by investors - even the govt is taking in more than it spends. If you're considering the Fed, it too is a lender, and has a zero net asset sheet.
        • adolph 5y ago
          Yep, here’s the November 2021 balance sheet—clear as day, assets equal liabilities. https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/balance_sheet_developments_report_202111.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/balance_...
    • 5y ago
• keiferski 5y ago
  I understand the hostility to making everything be monetized, however, workers do need to be paid. This might not be particularly relevant for a smartphone app, as software developers can easily get a job that pays 2x or 3x the average salary. Most "creators", however, are not as lucky as devs. The average creative person has a boring regular job and most can only focus on the work they care about if they charge money for it and/or receive sufficient donations. This is often framed as a criticism of capitalism, or consumerism, or some other modern phenomenon. But for most of history, artisans and craftsmen were paid for their work. The expectation that they would be paid for their work is what established the profession in the first place, allowing for things like workshops and decades-long apprenticeships to exist. This is why things like the Italian Renaissance happened. In fact, I'd say that the majority of the historical artistic and cultural artifacts that we have today were created in this manner and not because the creator just wanted to make stuff that people enjoy. It's only in the last century or two that (influenced by the Romantic movement) that the notion of art = self-expression has taken over the entire concept of culture.
• bee_rider 5y ago
  It is nice that he's willing to give the game away for free, but bandwidth isn't free and it it becoming quite popular. I hope it doesn't get too pricey for him to pay for out of pocket or he has to do something annoying like include ads. A $1 smartphone app seems like a reasonable way of preventing these sorts of issues.
  • elliekelly 5y ago
    But then he’d have to spend the time creating and maintaining an iPhone and Android app. That takes time. As it is now the game is done. It’s an HTML page accessible by anyone with a browser. It requires nothing of him.
  • swiftcoder 5y ago
    > bandwidth isn't free Isn't it? The 100 GB free bandwidth from Github/Netlify would cover north of a million monthly page loads of Wordle (and many times that when you account for browser caching). AWS CloudFront's free tier would cover 10 million page loads/month. Cloudflare pages currently doesn't even have a bandwidth cap on their free offering yet...
    • tapland 5y ago
      Wow. So it's free if he shut down the site last week? Crazy how good your solution is. No, bandwidth is far from free.
      • Moru 5y ago
        Not all providers bill for network usage, you can also pay a flat fee for a fixed upload speed or a soft cap at a certain limit.
      • swiftcoder 5y ago
        He might have had to change hosting providers, and/or stick a new CDN in front, but for tiny (80 KB all told) client-side webapps like this with no database backend it's entirely feasible to host it for free pretty much indefinitely.
• teekert 5y ago
  I mean, you could get rich with some simple tweaks probably, it take some strong convictions to not do it. I would probably not be so strong of mind.
  • gaws 5y ago
    Thank goodness you didn't make the game.
    • skinnymuch 5y ago
      I could use an employee who does work that is their passion. Based on your comment, will you do the work for free? It’s your passion like Wordle guy after all
    • teekert 5y ago
      Yeah, probably, I'd milk you all until I could buy that nice country-side house with enough space never to have to hear my neighbors. It's my dream, I'm not giving it up so others don't have pay for their entertainment. I'm sorry.
• nsonha 5y ago
  > What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized? The assumption that this person is not privileged, and therefore, needs money? I mean if I had made something that could have generate a sustainable income, but chosen not to do so, and go to work to be a slave instead, there gotta be a good reason.
• roenxi 5y ago
  > What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized? If someone does good work then they should be rewarded. In my experience, when I find a game I love I would like a way to pass some money back to the creator.
  • md_ 5y ago
    I agree, but surely money is not the only kind of reward our society can imagine. Actually, what am I saying. Of course it's the only kind of reward most of us imagine.
  • Timwi 5y ago
    I agree. I would like to be rewarded in the knowledge that I've made something good or useful for my fellow humans. Hopefully they can take it further and give something back. Expecting me to monetize it, to exploit my fellow humans for my own gain, is an insult.
• stavros 5y ago
  I agree with you. When I made IMGZ.org, many people here wouldn't believe that I made it for me and don't want it to grow (even though it's "pay for what you use"). I always found it that mindset a bit odd, to be unable to fathom why someone might want to make a cool thing just to make it, and to believe that they must (and should) want to make money off it.
• taubek 5y ago
  I don't play Wordle but I guess that there are some infrastructure costs at least? Like a server on which it runs. So why should the game bring fun and joy to people, and bills and cost to the creator?
  • _moof 5y ago
    It's a fully client-side app with one HTML doc and one JavaScript file, both of which come back with 304s once you've been there once. I'm willing to bet the monthly "infrastructure costs" are less than the cost of a pizza.
    • taubek 5y ago
      I didn't know that. Thanks for the pointer. So it is 7 requests, 122kb in total. It had 2 million users last weekend according to https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/11/wordle-creator-overwhelmed-by-global-success-of-hit-puzzle https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/jan/11/wordle-creator.... So this is about 250GB of traffic. Yes, you are right this is not a lot of traffic once you get served the first time.
      • gabrielsroka 5y ago
        One of those, which is 60KB, comes from googletagmanager.com.
• austenallred 5y ago
  Eh, because one’s time is valuable/expensive and most people would love to have more time doing what they love. It’s cool that he doesn’t want to monetize it, but I would absolutely understand if he did. You don’t have a hit like that often and it could free him up for years (life?) to build more stuff he’s interested in without answering to anyone.
  • lexapro 5y ago
    A lot of (most?) already super rich people monetize everything they can to the max. So I don't believe it's out of a desire to simply quit working. I think it's more about making money for the sake of making money, also known as greed.
    • WJW 5y ago
      For a lot of people it's not even just simple greed but more an easy way to measure them against other people. They are often very ambitious types who take great pride in being "type A personalities" and things like that.
    • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      A lot of them do, but don’t underestimate the number of people who are role-playing as being more wealthy than they are. I’m not talking about people with successful business exits or those who have been in high-paying careers for a few decades who have a side business. It’s the people pleading with you to pay $10/month for their side Substack or trying to charge for mediocre podcasts and such. One of the oldest tricks in the content marketing book is to pretend to be very wealthy and then charge others for access to your knowledge.
• sergiomattei 5y ago
  > What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized? Well, people need to eat.
  • basscomm 5y ago
    A lot of people have 'real jobs' that provide them with the means to eat, have shelter, etc. Those same people may have hobbies that they do on their own time for any number of reasons other than making money to live, and may, in fact, be sufficiently compensated at said 'real job' that they can cover the cost of their hobby, even if it turns out to be a virally-popular word game, without significantly impacting their pocketbook.
    • skinnymuch 5y ago
      How many of these people could survive a catastrophic life event for a long period of time? San example: something happens where some one can’t work for 3 years.
  • Timwi 5y ago
    What happened to us, as a society, that we cannot imagine eating without first exploiting other people? Maybe we should just let everyone eat and not expect them to first prove themselves worthy of not being left to starve.
• kenjackson 5y ago
  This is not new to us a society. I’d argue that what is new is that our standard of living is so high that people who aren’t wealthy and have an easy path to monetization wouldn’t do so. I’m not a historian, so I could be wrong, but it seems like in the past — if you weren’t wealthy and could sell something and make a lot of money then you’d do so. I’m personally glad he isn’t monetizing. But that’s for purely selfish reasons.
  • adolph 5y ago
    As Warhol said: ”You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.” https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2019/january/31/what-andy-warhol-really-thought-about-coca-cola/ https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2019/january/31/...
• indymike 5y ago
  > What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized? It really comes from the fact that money is often needed for survival, and the human propensity for overdoing everything.
  • gorjusborg 5y ago
    It also doesn't hurt that recent generations were convinced to take on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, as teenagers. Having a negative net worth makes you desperate for money.
    • cjbgkagh 5y ago
      Not only that but their parents and grandparents were and still are encouraged to live spendthrift lifestyles so younger generation will inherit less. I get a laugh out of certain ads; stuff your spoilt brat kids, you worked hard, you deserve to reverse mortgage your house and travel the world, buy that motorbike, do that thing.
      • mbg721 5y ago
        The astronomical costs of long-term care eat through any inheritance anyway.
        • cjbgkagh 5y ago
          Yes, there is a pamphlet for that as well. “No longer living life to the fullest, tired of being a burden on those around you, end of life services has a solution. For 5 easy payments of $39.99 a better place awaits you.” In my opinion corporatism has worked with government to drive a wedge between family generations and I worry that the fallout will be quite brutal. I have nightmares of desperate youth deliberately infecting their parents with black market Covid in an effort to speed up and preserve their inheritance.
          • gorjusborg 5y ago
• GuB-42 5y ago
  Because we expect people who do good things to be rewarded. It will incitate people to do more good things. And in our society, it generally means money. With money, you eat better, sleep better, you are able to do more of the things you enjoy and less of the things you don't. Money also allows you to become charitable, for example, if you think homelessness is a problem, with money, you can build a shelter. There a reason charities want money above all else. Now, what are "good things"? In the context of game apps, that's an game that a lot of people enjoy playing. Put everything together and you get monetization, it is a way to turn goodness into rewards.
  • doctorwho42 5y ago
    That works only in theory. I can name a plethora of good things that are not rewarded. - teaching - writing good documentation - picking up trash - putting back your shopping cart - writing useful books (generally only the best of the best of the best get any real rewards) - helping a stranger - maintaining or improving the environment (don't drill baby drill) So though I think the economic philosophy of providing incentive/rewards for good things, it is almost anything but that in practical economics
    • bittercynic 5y ago
      I think all of those things are rewarded, it's just that the rewards are intrinsic. If you do any of those things well, it will be enjoyable for you.
    • falcolas 5y ago
      Don’t forget, especially relevant for thus crowd, writing open source software.
  • cat_adorer 5y ago
    If that is the case, then the best way to monetize things would be to ask for donations; it allows the user to decide whether the person has done good work, rather than forcing them to have a less pleasant experience. Everyone should understand that the person who best understands how they feel is that person.
• kerneloftruth 5y ago
  When were we, as a society, so generous and selfless that we created products without a profit (or other reward) motive? It's great to have exceptions like the wordle guy -- but the norm is perfectly fine, too.
  • Clubber 5y ago
    Jonas Salk should have statues erected of him in every city and every small town. https://www.salk.edu/about/history-of-salk/jonas-salk/ https://www.salk.edu/about/history-of-salk/jonas-salk/
  • falcolas 5y ago
    Vim. Emacs. VS Code. Log4J. Java. Python. iOS. Android OS. Firefox. Chromium. Safari. There’s quite the precedent for free in the software development sphere.
    • skinnymuch 5y ago
      VS Code, iOS, Android OS, Chromium, Safari all had huge backing and there are huge profit based reasons to make all of them. These should not be brought up at all. Vim, Emacs, Java, Python: these are huge things. As a creator or high level contributor, your resume is set. Many of the creators of these and others have specific titles at Google getting paid well. Creating such big projects also allows you to get paid tens of thousands for speaking gigs or similar things. I believe it is the jquery creator who was making $500K+ a year doing speaking gigs. None of these are like Wordle. It isn’t a huge coding achievement that will garner the same financial benefits every thing listed gives. I didn’t follow the log4j thing but I’d expect the creator to have been able to get lucrative consulting and contracting work beyond what would normally be possible.
  • padraic7a 5y ago
    Public lending libraries. Thankfully they're well established now. I can't imagine them being invented today.
• wonderwonder 5y ago
  "What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized?" the desire to one day retire.
  • arpa 5y ago
    ripped from the void, forced to be employed.
  • dr-detroit 5y ago
• mbesto 5y ago
  > What happened to us, as a society, that creates the expectation that a thing should be monetized? People need to put food on the table and provide for their families. How do you expect society to do so if members are just giving away their goods and services?
  • cowbellemoo 5y ago
    What if some of what was given away to others was the food and provisions that families need?
    • mbesto 5y ago
      Then you would have a bartering system like we had 100's of years ago. Here's my 6x beaver pelts for your knife. Do I need to explain to you how inefficient that is?
      • steviesteveo1 5y ago
        Obligatory plug for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years There's no evidence to support Adam Smith's barter economies. It's obviously inefficient so the question is really why you'd think people would do it
      • cat_adorer 5y ago
        No, that's potluck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potluck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potluck), and, given its diversity across cultures and continued presence, it can't be very inefficient.
        • mbesto 5y ago
          Potluck...are you serious? There's nothing efficient or inefficient about the concept of potluck. It's a cultural celebration, not a "I need this to provide sustenance to my being".
      • cowbellemoo 5y ago
• JaimeThompson 5y ago
  We let MBAs and the like get too much power.
  • tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    The rot really set in with Thatcher and Reagan. My grandparents would be horrified at the way we live now. We pay people to make our coffee in the morning, we pay people to cook our evening meal, we pay people to look after our kids, we pay people to look after our ageing relatives, we pay people to change the oil in our car, we pay people to assemble flatpack furniture, we pay to exercise. We have succeeded in commercialising nearly everything. It doesn't do us any good, do you know what correlates strongly with the likelihood of divorce? It's how much you spend on the honeymoon.
• JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Agree, but OP did not say ads.
• adlorger 5y ago
  counterpoint: nothing has happened to us as a society. we have always had pressures to monitize things and do things for money, but of course money isnt everything and there have always been happy generous people who are happy to make things for free. In fact, the proliferation of freely released, happy things in to the world has probably gone up over time.
• VoodooJuJu 5y ago
  Who is us? Which society? Most countries today are composed of a thousand thousand different cultures worshiping a hundred different gods. The only truly common ground bringing people together to/in these countries today is money.