If you want to make money from a good product then becoming a social media influencer who talks about your product is the most straightforward way to advertise without having to pay for ads.
This reminds me of the time Citi lost $900 million due to terrible software [0].
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-c...
It also set forth a very straightforward "success" path: make good software that the community praises and tech companies (who probably also use your code) will climb over each other to get you on their team. But I suppose those days are slowly ending as well now that many problems (for all but the biggest tech companies) are being solved. No need for a million dollar mastermind when a 100k mid-level can do the job.
Other people have done a lot to help at their own initiative though. Resellers approach me and market it themselves, customers recommend it on forums, researchers mention it in their published papers, and one customer even wrote a chapter of a book about it - which was key to being eligible for a Wikipedia page.
I'm lucky though because it belongs to a slow moving, well-defined class of products that people in my target industry already understand so when they go looking for a cheaper alternative to the super-priced big names, they find mine. I'm not inventing a new market.
It's not free money though. It's very code-heavy and technical-understanding-heavy and I've spent nearly 20 years actively developing it by now. One man wouldn't be able to just smash one out in a year, and you'd need some reasonably deep domain knowledge.
Also I should add there are a lot of young posters who are, and I won’t sugarcoat it, hopelessly naive at times - certainly saying shit I’d never think about saying when I was their age, so with that we are on a treadmill of constantly seeing, mocking, relearning etc past mistakes.
>there are a lot of young posters who are, and I won’t sugarcoat it, hopelessly naive at times
I don't mind those people. No one really wants to mentor these days, but people LOVE to correct. I'd treat that incoming flaming as an opportunity to learn from people who'd never speak up otherwise (after inevitably discarding 80% of replies that are simply non-constructive insults).
Your post reminded me of that “ten thousand” xkcd about how mathematically not “everyone knows” something that feels like everybody should know. Not even close.
You said “treadmill of mistakes”… well there are a lot of people and eventually they all become one of the “lucky ten thousand”. I wonder if your frustration is watching yet another batch of 10,000 learn those “same mistakes”.
I dunno, it feels like a less cynical interpretation to me.
Marketing a product seems easier than ever with social media, however the ocean is much larger.
Moreover the author could have easily written this post as "it's time to rethink 'thoughtleader blogging' and it would fit just as well. Most people don't write this stuff for their own pleasure, they write it for eyeballs. They write it for their readers. In that sense I suspect building in public works as well as blog posts like this for gaining a following. There's no one fits all answer to this.