9 ms·
Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month
- aurareturn 2y agoY Combinator company, ladies and gentlemen.
- LilBytes 2y agoThe company in question: https://jsfiddle.net/ https://jsfiddle.net/
- nativeit 2y ago“Collapse Sidebar” is a PRO feature.
- ahstilde 2y agowhat are you saying?
- 93po 2y agoi think there's been some recent events of yc companies being a bit controversial, and as much as im sure a lot of us appreciate HN and that we have YC to thank for that in some capacity, given the site we're on it's noteworthy when yc companies do... strange stuff
- tailspin2019 2y agoThe site in question seems unusable if you visit it on mobile (iPhone/Safari): https://jsfiddle.net https://jsfiddle.net It could at least show a “designed for desktop use only” message or something.
- amarcheschi 2y agoOn android brave is quite ugly too. Perhaps it's intended for desktop use mainly
- littlestymaar 2y agoThe problem with VC-backed startups, is that you eventually run out of other people's money. And then you desperately need to find ways to monetize your product, hence the enshitification.
- arp242 2y agoExcept JSFiddle isn't a VC-backed startup, and basically just two or three people.
- egberts1 2y agoCreate the problem. Sell the solution. Enshitificaytion, at it's finest. (Yes, I shitted a misspelling for a more pronounced enunciation.)
- ivewonyoung 2y ago.
- permo-w 2y agorun ads, ask for donations, include genuinely premium features for a fee? anything other than restricting basic functionality.
- nottorp 2y agoI don't think that can work for a VC-backed company that is pressured to grow until absorbing the entire universe :)
- YetAnotherNick 2y agoWhat's genuinely premium feature? Donations just doesn't work. Even the open source projects used by all of fortune 500 is unable to raise one full time position funding. And tbh anything is better than ads in a site aimed for developers.
- Leynos 2y agoJust consider the free version a demo.
- chii 2y ago> include genuinely premium features for a fee? so, collapsing the sidebar is a genuine premium feature isnt it? It's not restricting the basic functionality, and you dont need to collapse it to have the site do what it needs. And for those who would donate, they get a psychological benefit of paying for a feature!
- mkl 2y agoOr 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.
- undebuggable 2y agoHonestly that's equally frustrating as it is easy to fix. At least on a PC with a web browser.
- chii 2y agoi bet you could charge money for these fixes, and there will be sufficient people willing to pay for it, to make a great side business.
- AlexeyBelov 2y agoPeople would have you believe it's piracy.
- Sytten 2y agoSoftware 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.
- catapart 2y agoMusic 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.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoI'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.
- maccard 2y agoI’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.
- xnx 2y agoThere are so many of these sandbox sites. Has a clear best option emerged?
- tasuki 2y agoYes, many times: 1. A clear best option has emerged. 2. The owners thought they should monetize it. 3. Paid sidebar collapsing. 4. ...a new clear best option has emerged.
- minus7 2y agoNo one's gonna pay just for the sidebar being collapsible. Maybe someone is going to because it was the last straw, but most are just going to be annoyed. Better ask for money only for something with real value (which I'm sure the pro tier also includes).
- iammrpayments 2y agoGood idea, going to implement this in my app right now
- josefritzishere 2y agoEnshittification should be a crime.
- DonHopkins 2y agoExcept now it's a service.
- baq 2y agoYeah, it’s number-go-up-as-a-service for VCs.
- isoprophlex 2y agoIt's been a while since I saw anyone post that Philip K Dick quote, from the book Ubik... it's about time I feel. The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
- mmaunder 2y agoWhen you absolutely could not come up with any plausible rationalization. They sidebarred it.
- jansan 2y agoUse it as an opportunity. I just found out that you can locally install JSBin. I was a bit fed up with jsfiddle being so slow recently, so I will try that one.
- legitster 2y agoYou know people like to complain about things and how everything is worse these days, but this is exactly how shareware operated back in the day.
- Nextgrid 2y agoShareware at the time was generally a one-off purchase though.
- littlestymaar 2y agoWith shareware, if something had been working for years and the developers released a new version when everything became premium, you could have stayed on the previous version. Not with these cloud tools, and that's why enshitification is a thing when it wasn't before.
- relaxing 2y agoAs I recall the shareware authors would describe at length how those features cost development time that you the contributor were funding. The word we had for programs with features removed in this punitive and egregious manner was crippleware.
- HumblyTossed 2y agofirst three levels are free! But if you actually want to beat the game, you have to buy it.
- Gud 2y agoUntil you ran the crack.exe. Even came with nice music :-)
- bananapub 2y agothis is not at all how shareware worked
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- paxys 2y agoIf you are a dev on a JavaScript/CSS development website and can't figure out how to script this yourself, you deserve to pay extra.
- hnthrow90348765 2y agoObviously you just ask your company for a wider monitor so the sidebar takes up less space as a percentage, easy peezy
- nurettin 2y agoIt is $28, not $8.
- micromacrofoot 2y agoThis is absurd, I do agree with this framing... but rather than trash the company in the comments I'm curious about what people think. Would ads be better? If JSFiddle were your project, what would you do to provide yourself a salary? I think we've discovered that the "buy me a coffee" strategy is just that, enough to generate a little bonus income... but is it simply unreasonable to expect that a project on the web that requires ongoing maintenance can generate a reasonable income for most people? How do we get off the enshittification treadmill? is this a corporate owner being too greedy? are we expecting too much? have our lifestyles become unsustainable?
- chii 2y ago> 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 argue yes. People have come to expect their cost to get rounded down (to zero), because the value they derived from the site is also rounded down to zero (in their minds). It's also a fact that it is impossible for a real, cost effective microtransctions platform to exist on the net, unless it's a full walled garden (and this directly contradicts the open web). Both of these facts means the inevitable destiny of external monetization (such as ads, or "enshitification" to force subscription), or exiting/selling out to someone else who would. 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.
- micromacrofoot 2y ago> 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 I were ok with giving JSFiddle a fraction of a dollar every time I visited it, I have no great way of doing it that's not ad-based. I hope we can find something more reliably between enshittification and donation.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- selfhoster 2y agoImaging telling the general public one day they would be pumping their own gas.
- joquarky 2y agoOr bagging their own groceries.
- Buttons840 2y agoSometimes I hear people say that to succeed in our economy you need to offer the best product for the lowest price--or rather, the right balance between the two. But so often in my career and in general, I have seen the most successful companies doing extra work to make their product worse. It's both obvious and subtle how bad this is; if the people who implemented this feature had instead spent their time doing nothing, it would have improved the product. "Competition is fierce, so let's spend time and money making our product worse"--is this the winning strategy from the company at the forefront of technology? Apparently. This is a testament to the health of our free markets.
- chii 2y ago> This is a testament to the health of our free markets. no, it's not. it's a statement that applies to a monopoly. And software is a monopoly - because each piece of software is unique enough, that there's no replacement possible.
- Buttons840 2y agoIf there are monopolies everywhere, and a lack of competition (which is the definition of a monopoly), how does that not reflect on the health of the free market and competition?
- chii 2y agoIt's still a free market, and each new entrant attempts to create their software such that it turns into a monopoly.
- armchairhacker 2y agoThis specific example, https://jsfiddle.net https://jsfiddle.net, is not a monopoly and has many suitable replacements (e.g. https://livecodes.io/ https://livecodes.io/, https://liveweave.com https://liveweave.com). While in some cases (like YouTube vs alternatives) there are clear advantages to the former, in this case I don't even think that holds (I imagine most people only use JsFiddle to interactively build client-side webpages then share them via a link). That people pay for JsFiddle (although do they? Maybe this is another "unprofitable" company) is a testament to...the fact that humans are not rational actors. Even in a "perfect" (competitive and easy to enter) market, a brand's quality can tank and they'll continue to get sales, despite objectively superior alternatives, simply because of brand recognition. I doubt regulation can solve this. Try to imagine a ban on "enshittification". How do you measure it? How do you enforce it? How much does it cost to measure and enforce it? What if a company has "enshittify" because they're losing money? What if that company deliberately entered the market losing money, to gain brand recognition so they could recoup via "enshittification" later? What about small would-be companies that decide not to enter the market because this regulation is too complex and potential consequences (they think may someday apply to them because it's so complex) are too severe? Instead, I believe the best solution is to try to be a smarter consumer yourself, and convince others to if possible; and if you can, start a company where you deliberately try to maintain quality even though it will sometimes directly contradict increasing profit (because humans aren't rational actors, enshittification won't lose you too many customers; and yet, there are companies that seem to avoid it and still make $millions+).
- nwroot 2y agoWhich saas is this from?