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Comment by ipsum2 | Hacker News Reader

Had to skip to basically the end to find out the reason:

tl;dr:

> On March 25, tech staffers and contractors at the VA noticed an unfamiliar name trying to push changes that could impact VA.gov code. It was Sahil Lavingia, a newcomer to the agency listed in the VA’s internal directory as an adviser to the chief of staff, Christopher Syrek.

> Who’s Sahil Lavingia, you might ask? Why, the founder and CEO of Gumroad! It’s not even the central point of the piece, but the fact is, if you’re supporting Gumroad—a tool that, notably, has survived as long as it did because of a high-profile crowdfunding campaign—you’re allowing its CEO the financial freedom to work in the Department of Veterans Affairs, at the behest of DOGE, for free.

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Same. But a nice observation in conclusion

> To me, I think that there is a real opportunity to take away the reins from middlemen who extract value rather than add it by leaning into things we host ourselves. Creators, for too long, have given too much power away to the company that made our lives mildly more convenient. If they’re trying to optimize to the nubs, destroying quality of service in the process, why even bother letting them have a lane in the middle?

I would love to support creators directly, but there are some hard problems that creators need to solve before they begin direct-to-consumer sales:

1. Discoverability

2. Payments

3. Shipping

While it is theoretically possible to handle all of these without a middle-man, the middlemen running the marketplaces have thus far done a much better job than individuals could ever hope to.

Personally I've never discovered anything on Gumroad itself. It's always been from some other source (here on HN, reddit, social media) and then followed a link to Gumroad.

Payments and shipping are precisely the kinds of things that could act as services directly to the creator itself. I thought that was somewhat the point of his conclusion - put these services directly in the hands of the creator.

Otherwise Gumroad is just acting as a payment + shipping wrapper. And if they're replacing what service they had left with AI, what value-add is left exactly?

Man, I never had anything but positive feelings about Gumroad… But this is something I truly cannot support.

Great... we've been complaining about useless AI being forced upon us in the commercial sector and now YC alums are going to implement it in veteran healthcare through a backdoor?

I've been pretty neutral about the whole thing to date, but it's starting to seem like YC's AI blindness is actually explained by true evil capitalist intentions.

Something was off when gumroad's founder kept saying "AI now at junior dev level", "AI now at mid dev level" on twitter

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