I don't like ads, on the internet or TV, and therefore refuse to inflict them on anyone who plays the little game apps that I release, otherwise I'd be a hypocrite.
Well done to Josh for having the humanity for just making a thing that people enjoy, and stopping there.
A lot of commenters here have kind of fetishized money and early retirement.
Although for me is still the best place to consume technical content.
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.
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.
A lot of people don’t like that because it takes away from your true focus: content creation or software development.
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"Wordle, brought to you by Nike" or whoever.
A ton of money and no burden for the users at all.
As a changes, I’d like regionalisation. ‘Favour’ was the word a day or 2 ago. That’s not the spelling where I am.
In return I’d pay up front if requested, a one off or small subscription.
I have dramatically underestimated the amount of revenue one can get from serving ads on a modestly popular game that everyone will have forgotten in a month's time.
And therein lies the contradiction - it has become a daily ritual because it doesn't demand continual "engagement" or trick people into becoming addicted: 2 things that will increase monetizability.
My thoughts are it's commendable for someone to share their delightful creation with the world for free. Something pure, with no dark patterns or gray areas. It is a breath of fresh air, and legitimately makes the world a better place for countless people. Thanks Josh!
Maybe he does not care monetization?
Or there is no obvious path to monetization?
If you start an app phenomena from scratch with no inbuilt monetization mechanism designed from the start I would imagine implementing one would be non-trivial? Or is there an "obvious and simple" method to monetize said work?
He should have a sweet reddit IPO coming his way, soon.
Suckers.
It's sarcasm, actually. A rare event here.
Surely, irony is depicted in the open-source, decentralised crowd, berating someone doing something not for money.
I find that sarcasm or irony are pretty frequent on HN, or maybe it's just me who thinks it is so. ;-)
And yes, I see it here too, and try to reward it, though, alas, you and I are few.
A perfectly sarcastic remark. Rare to see here.
"Take my up vote" (or something like that).
Oh wait... Or are you serious?
a. Replies don't know if I'm being sarcastic or not.
b. I don't know if people who upvoted this comment thought I was being sarcastic or not.
Since I consider the opinion of open source developers being idiots unlikely and silly, I am reading your message in a "consider best possible interpretation" way, which is that it's an ironic joke.
I would imagine that's what most people who've upvoted you thought as well.
Basically, if you resort to sarcasm, your "amusing" dilemmas should have obvious answers or you are misapplying it or using it in the wrong context (unless you are really aiming for just being an odd man out in a particular group, also known as a "troll" :).
This statement makes me sad.
Now you won’t be exactly poor, but it’s not the same thing as having won the lottery since you still need to pay for staff, marketing, etc.
This may be a popular sentiment on hacker news but thankfully it is an unpopular view among the best programmers. If everyone thought like this, there would be no Linux, no GNU. We’d all be reading this in Internet Explorer on Windows
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.
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.
It really comes from the fact that money is often needed for survival, and the human propensity for overdoing everything.
Having a negative net worth makes you desperate for money.
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.
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.
If you're considering the Fed, it too is a lender, and has a zero net asset sheet.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/balance_...
What I am trying to better understand is why there is a preference (morally, legally, societally) for for-profit organizations.
Is it because (most) people are inherently profit-focused, or, that it is just the way things are? Amongst many other possible options.
sustainable ones do not move all of it to expenses or purpose
the answer of why is that the buffer allows them to continue existing. if there is any disruption in money coming in, then they cease to exist.
I understand you are wanting a different discussion that I didn't offer, based on wanting a reason that has nothing to do with moral legal or societal. There are more for profit organizations because it is easier to set one up, it is "permissionless" whereas a non-profit requires approval.
for profit and non profit are bound to the same fundamental constraints and I think that is misunderstood by many. both types of organizations have the capability of having none left over. both types of organizations have the risk of having a disruption in their ability to exist. both types can keep more for themselves. this is not a moral issue.
It says that capital management is non-trivial and full of risk that needs to be proportionally rewarded with profit to justify the outlay.
Even non-profits have to grow revenue, because organizations require resources. But non-profits are hampered by the fact that they can't reward people for taking risks on them. A for profit organization can seek outside capital and reward risk. A non-profit can only seek donations or charge for services.
Ultimately, society benefits a great deal from it.
One can still receive many financial rewards in not-for-profit organizations: a high wage, payments, etc. without those rewards being ‘unlimited’ in scope.
As an experiment, imagine if the FAANGS and the BATs of this world were not for profit organizations; appreciating the role that venture capital played for all of them so maybe the experiment is that they wouldn’t exist!
What I struggle to understand is the relationship between the financial interests of humans (extending between the two extremes of billionaires on one hand and absolute poverty on the other) and organizational design in the west.
In other words, revenue is not profit and wages are still income, so why does the current system benefit capital (owners, investors) to such an extent.
Could we live in an alternate economic reality - maybe one that is ‘fairer’ if more of our for-profit organizations were not for profits. Or is that a fallacy?
The opposite, not for profit, usually means, for loss, which is not sustainable.
An organization designed to be zero net will also die during hiccups and downtimes.
So if you want something to be sustainable, provide stable jobs, provide continues benefits to whatever it serves, "for profit" means it runs on less than it makes, allowing it to survive.
Basically, all the "not for profit" things die, and you don't see them around very long.
https://nccs.urban.org/publication/registered-501c3-private-...
Not-for-profit means that 100% of the revenue is reinvested in the business (“mission”), rather than have a portion returned to owners/shareholders as profit.
Successful not-for-profit companies can have a problem of having more money than they can effectively deploy. This can lead to all sorts of problems: Overpaid staff; Inefficient operations; etc.
In the context of organizations, not-for-profit doesn’t mean they are designed to be not profitable; rather, it means their primary goal is focused on other goals than making the most amount of profit possible.
It’s also a misnomer that not-for-profits can’t make profits, it’s just that those profits are not distributed to the capital (owners, investors) of the organization.
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.
"But, but, someone's going to do it!" isn't even remotely a valid argument against having morals and ethics.
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
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.
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.
the desire to one day retire.
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.
”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/...
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.
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
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.
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.
Actually, what am I saying. Of course it's the only kind of reward most of us imagine.
It's great to have exceptions like the wordle guy -- but the norm is perfectly fine, too.
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.
Thankfully they're well established now. I can't imagine them being invented today.
But I think getting paid for work is quite human, no?
Well, people need to eat.
Maybe we should just let everyone eat and not expect them to first prove themselves worthy of not being left to starve.
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.
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?
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
A $1 smartphone app seems like a reasonable way of preventing these sorts of issues.
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...
Crazy how good your solution is. No, bandwidth is far from free.