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That was a rough read, not really sure I understood the authors point. It was kind of all over the place, bad because AI, bad because not really open-source, bad because doge...

Only thing I really left with was the author doesn't like the word gum. Seems like a hit piece on Sahil? Pretty sure the open-source part of Gumroad has been in the works for a while.

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Right. Somewhat burred the lede. My take was that the value that services like Gumroad can bring is precisely the value-add they provide over what a create could do themselves. So if the CEO has chosen to essentially automate the entire business by replacing staff with AI, then what value-add is left exactly?

Better then to watch out for middlemen that "extract value rather than add it" and empower creators to host things themselves. Thought that was a nice observation.

Ironically, I always thought that was somewhat the point of Gumroad (short of self-hosting). Are they on to enshittification Stage II?

I like that you were able to succinctly summarize the issues raised here in one sentence and then not understand them in the next sentence

It is like “the author wrote about Athos, Porthos, and Aramis… what I got from this is the book is about hats?”

Porthos was well known for wearing magnificent hats, though.

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