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Comment by whatsmyusername | Hacker News Reader

I'm perfectly fine with the $100 I pay to Apple a year the same way I was perfectly find paying :tenbux: to Lowtax to access the somethingawful boards years ago. A fee, even a nominal one, filters 90% of the bullshit.

I've implemented this elsewhere as well. Charging a measly $5 for an event (and not being chuffed if you don't collect it from one or two people) is a great way to filter out the wishy washy, the stingy, and most of the people who will waste your time without providing any value.

There is a stark difference between someone willing to put >$0 (even $.25) into a group project vs not. And I don't really do business with the second anymore.

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>filters 90% of the bullshit.

Why would Apple want to filter out people from integrating with sign in with Apple? I can see they want to filter out junk from the App Store, because junk on the App Store (like junk on Something Awful) reduces the signal to noise ratio. But I don't think there exists a signal to noise ratio when it comes to sign in with Apple. A user wants to join a website, and that website either supports sign in with Apple or it doesn't; there's no noise to wade through.

I believe their sign in API comes with a ‘is this user a bot’ confidence value. They probably want real interests joining first, so they can train their models better.

I grew up lower middle class in a poor country and could never access Something Awful because the fee was literally a week's worth of groceries.

shrug COL adjustments between countries is a different problem.

shrug "why would you want to access our website if you dont have $5 anyway"

You're being facetious but much of the time that's the logic.

Flip it around, "Why would I spend resources on you if the chance that you're going to generate a return on those resources is minimal?"

The communities I'm part of now go out of their way to be inclusive. People who can afford it are strongly encouraged to pay more to subsidize people who can't. People who pay more don't get any special privileges either. Those are the sorts of communities I want to be in, not some fee gating bullshit.

A community is not a business. In fact it's hard for me to conceive of two conceptual entities further away from each other.

A business is interested in profit. Apple is no different. If you're not paying in, they're directly incentivized to make your experience suck as much as they can without crossing legal lines, to get you to do so.

I'm not saying I want to be in the fee-gating communities, I agree with you on that point. I'm just saying expecting a multi-billion dollar corporation to be interested in fostering that same sense of community is ridiculous.

We're talking about Something Awful in this thread, not Apple.

You're right that a community is not a business. That's ultimately the fundamental rot in capitalism.

Because you (Apple) are supposedly in the business of making the best experience for the people buying your devices, and your cool privacy-friendly authentication provider being available on less websites makes their experience worse?

Sign-in with Apple does not make sense as a product with the goal of direct profit, (and the majority of its developer target market already pays, because they only implement it because it's an requirement for them building their apps), so this logic doesn't work so well.

I'm more inclined to spend money on a product that goes out of their way to implement Apple Sign In because I know they're catering to me. It's not going to be the only thing that goes into the equation, but if I have a choice between two equals it can tip the balance.

How are you going to buy an iDevice when you can't afford a SomethingAwful subscription?

I'm not quite sure what you are trying to say, but I think you're either confusing who is paying here (if I run a website, I'm paying the apple fees, my users are the ones buying the iDevices) or thinking you can't run a website without an iDevice?

Also, my comment was addressing the direct parent comment, not the entire thread above it.

I agree, but the question is of course about the "float resources" not "boolean resourcesSpent"

An example would be free/paid website, where you constantly are trying to automate and improve the free version with features that used to be paid

You are free to choose how to run your biz of course and the market will decide how valuable your idea is, and judging from your experience it sounds like it makes you money, which is a good thing :)

I don't work for free.

If your response to someone explaining how a fee gate impacted them is just a shrug, then I'm afraid our worldviews are so different that communication between us is impossiblr.

edit, response to a comment below: people can come up with the same ideas independently too. You may have heard of Newton and Leibnitz.

It's also a little ridiculous to believe that every single site or group needs to cater to every demographic.

Absolutely, but it's even more ridiculous to use that argument as a shield against criticism.

Groups by definition are exclusive, otherwise we have one group - everyone

If you are so corrupt you need to plagiarize your “woke” rhetoric, then it is improper to attempt communicating with you.

“If you’re [collection of virtue signaling words] there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.”

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_59519811e4b0f078efd98440

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