Semiapies

It certainly isn't because large threads are unreadable on my tablet or that the vote controls are so tiny.

Did you watch it for nearly ten years, then make an indignant post ranting about all its flaws because you were tired of ads for the blu-trays or whatever?

I think it’s pretty authoritarian to call out people expressing reasonable opinions as if they are “entitled.”

You've picked a bad time in history to be so badly confused on what "authoritarian" means.

I think this is the crucial thing. If you offer a service with what you might call a "livable" or "comfortable" free tier, it will end up used as heavily as you allow by people who will cost you resources indefinitely, but who are far more likely to switch to another free service than to ever pay you a cent. For instance, as terrible as this blogger claims to have found Feedly, he used it for nearly a decade!

Skip the temptation to try to eke out a little money from the free tier (because you probably won't) and think of it strictly as a trial option. Either give a time-limited free trial of the service or a heavily-limited version of the service that shows how it works, but that absolutely nobody would want to use at that level forever.

(And in that latter case, then you'll still find one or two users who are willing to subsist on your free tier, whether that's a 3-feed RSS reader or whatever. Shrug and reflect that those weirdos aren't costing you much.)

Except not getting the carrot free is the stick to plenty of people.

so I don’t know what you’re complaining about

Given I explicitly said what I was complaining about, you should know.

Sure, if you're paying for it. If not, prepare for all the ways a company is going to try to make the service profitable, starting with ads and come-ons to paid tiers.

Don't want that? Pay, or self-host something. It's absolutely entitled to make an indignant post about why you're changing away from a service you've used for nine years that amounts to the bastards want to make money off me.

(Mind you, the likes of Zope and CherryPy are still out there and under development. You just don't hear about them much.)

Up until about 2010, web dev in Python was converging hard on Django. It took Flask and similar small frameworks to bring back variety, and all of those had to meet the requirement of better than Django in at least some narrow sense, if only in being much lighter, to get any uptake.

ETA: I once sarcastically said we need a technology so that links here are not described by anything that looks like a title due to all the people who get ridiculously outraged by any attempt to attract their attention.

Maybe I was on to something. Too many of you don't read or watch past titles.

Now that HN get far fewer "random university student's silly CAD design project treated as a real, upcoming invention" submissions this last decade or so, they're one of my least-favorite types of submissions to HN.

You didn't ask about relative usage. You asked for a mainstream languages smaller than Python. Lua almost certainly is.

But TL;DR is a way of life.

Do keep up the histrionics and the half-assed insults as you argue here, though. Those antics will absolutely make people take you seriously.