5 ms·

The wanton destruction of a creative-tech era

104 points by gregsadetsky 1y ago

robotnikman 1y ago
>It’s easy to create value when you don’t have values. Damn that hit hard
bruce511 1y ago
In the article I read the passion of a user. Unfortunately users don't pay the bills - customers do. For VC funded startups, the VC is the customer. Thus the company optimizes for customer satisfaction, not user satisfaction. The cognitive dissonance necessary for users to believe they are customers, while at the same time believing the product should be free (or free adjacent) is impressive. Clearly once customers no longer fund the company, the company closes. And the free users will complain. Paying for a product does not guarantee it will survive. But not paying pretty much guarantees that the good times can't last forever. (Rejoice if you see ads, then at least you're being monetized.)
- Veen 1y ago
  Why did they buy it in the first place, then?
  - bruce511 1y ago
    I have no idea why FF bought it. There are lots of reasons why things get aquire, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. That's somewhat irrelevant though. Clearly it couldn't survive forever losing money.
pseudosavant 1y ago
Sad to see Glitch go, but there wasn't a _business_ there. I had a bunch of cool static HTML/JS tools there, but never gave them a penny. It couldn't go on forever. So long and thanks for all the fish! I moved my tools to a repo and Github Pages. Slower iteration speed obviously (~1 minutes from pushing code to showing up on Pages), but it is working well for me. I can edit locally or directly in the repo on github.com (pressing `.` in a repo opens it in a full online VS Code) from anywhere. https://pseudosavant.github.io/ps-web-tools/ https://pseudosavant.github.io/ps-web-tools/
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
pvg 1y ago
Recent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064230
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
monster_truck 1y ago
I'm starting to understand that most earnest users of glitch have no idea the extent to which it enabled and was abused to do shitty things -despite the commendable efforts of everyone there.
- alwa 1y ago
  Since sibling commenters asked—the abuse mainly involved a heckuva lot of phishing, last I heard; for example: https://threatpost.com/spear-phishing-exploits-glitch-steal-credentials/176449/ https://threatpost.com/spear-phishing-exploits-glitch-steal-... https://www.netskope.com/blog/glitch-hosted-phishing-uses-telegram-fake-captchas-to-target-navy-federal-credit-union-customers https://www.netskope.com/blog/glitch-hosted-phishing-uses-te... Apparently the free ephemeral apps were (1) free, (2) easy to make and easy to make many of, and (3) hosted on infrastructure that targets tended to trust.
- metalliqaz 1y ago
  I'm out of the loop... what shitty things?
  - NBJack 1y ago
    I'll do you one better: WTH is/was Glitch? I think I'm so far out of the loop I've reached lagrange point 2.
    - KeychainPirate 1y ago
      It was a low-code "make your own website" platform. The sort of thing that was popular before myspace/facebook/medium style walled gardens took over. Fastly bought it because they were/are desperate to pivot away from CDN, since CDN has negative margins.
    - Macha 1y ago
      Low code tool plus hosting platform, and also the final form of Fog Creek which you may have heard about from Joel on Software blog posts if you read tech blogs 15 years ago
chaosprint 1y ago
this is so sad... I remember lots of very good creative art works are deployed there. but it seems that people including myself are moving towards netlify and cloudflare

104 points by gregsadetsky 1y ago

>It’s easy to create value when you don’t have values. Damn that hit hard

In the article I read the passion of a user. Unfortunately users don't pay the bills - customers do. For VC funded startups, the VC is the customer. Thus the company optimizes for customer satisfaction, not user satisfaction. The cognitive dissonance necessary for users to believe they are customers, while at the same time believing the product should be free (or free adjacent) is impressive. Clearly once customers no longer fund the company, the company closes. And the free users will complain. Paying for a product does not guarantee it will survive. But not paying pretty much guarantees that the good times can't last forever. (Rejoice if you see ads, then at least you're being monetized.)

Veen 1y ago
Why did they buy it in the first place, then?
- bruce511 1y ago
  I have no idea why FF bought it. There are lots of reasons why things get aquire, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. That's somewhat irrelevant though. Clearly it couldn't survive forever losing money.

pseudosavant 1y ago

Sad to see Glitch go, but there wasn't a _business_ there. I had a bunch of cool static HTML/JS tools there, but never gave them a penny. It couldn't go on forever. So long and thanks for all the fish! I moved my tools to a repo and Github Pages. Slower iteration speed obviously (~1 minutes from pushing code to showing up on Pages), but it is working well for me. I can edit locally or directly in the repo on github.com (pressing `.` in a repo opens it in a full online VS Code) from anywhere. https://pseudosavant.github.io/ps-web-tools/ https://pseudosavant.github.io/ps-web-tools/

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

pvg 1y ago

Recent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064230

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

monster_truck 1y ago

I'm starting to understand that most earnest users of glitch have no idea the extent to which it enabled and was abused to do shitty things -despite the commendable efforts of everyone there.

alwa 1y ago
Since sibling commenters asked—the abuse mainly involved a heckuva lot of phishing, last I heard; for example: https://threatpost.com/spear-phishing-exploits-glitch-steal-credentials/176449/ https://threatpost.com/spear-phishing-exploits-glitch-steal-... https://www.netskope.com/blog/glitch-hosted-phishing-uses-telegram-fake-captchas-to-target-navy-federal-credit-union-customers https://www.netskope.com/blog/glitch-hosted-phishing-uses-te... Apparently the free ephemeral apps were (1) free, (2) easy to make and easy to make many of, and (3) hosted on infrastructure that targets tended to trust.
metalliqaz 1y ago
I'm out of the loop... what shitty things?
- NBJack 1y ago
  I'll do you one better: WTH is/was Glitch? I think I'm so far out of the loop I've reached lagrange point 2.
  - KeychainPirate 1y ago
    It was a low-code "make your own website" platform. The sort of thing that was popular before myspace/facebook/medium style walled gardens took over. Fastly bought it because they were/are desperate to pivot away from CDN, since CDN has negative margins.
  - Macha 1y ago
    Low code tool plus hosting platform, and also the final form of Fog Creek which you may have heard about from Joel on Software blog posts if you read tech blogs 15 years ago

chaosprint 1y ago

this is so sad... I remember lots of very good creative art works are deployed there. but it seems that people including myself are moving towards netlify and cloudflare