Actually come to think of it, I've made some open source apps that people asked if they could donate to, because they were so excited by the possibilities my apps created, and by the convenience they now had because of them. I created a Patreon for this but have yet to link to it anywhere because I keep sinking into cynicism from all the ways I haven't been able to make money. But that's not the attitude I had when I created my window managers. Software that focuses on user-happiness can make money through donations. Just, probably not a full-time income.
EDIT: Apparently that's not true, you can make a full time income. Godot makes $10k per month in donations. And a month ago it was $8k. Wow.
My patreon is on my HN profile, but I plan to put it in the readme of a new open source window manager I've been working on when I announce it. I figured out a way to emphasize ease of use and user experience so much more than I was able to with Mjolnir or Phoenix. It's really exciting and I think it'll make automation a lot more accessible for a lot more macOS users.
To add to the list of programmers making money- Evan You, creator of VueJS, makes around $11,000 on Patreon. The creator of the CSS library Bulma makes several hundred dollars, and the Quasar Framework makes a couple thousand.
When you say “make money”, there is a problem. Maximal efficiency does not necessarily correlate with making money. Are bloated and obnoxious ads making money? Depends on who you ask. And on what metrics we are using to determine actual value added.
One could make the argument that ads are as much of a waste of energy as mining on a proof-of-work blockchain. There is an implicit subsidy and externality in both cases.
> Software was never about making users happy, it was about tricking users, manipulating them into giving you either their money or their time
Calm down a bit with your generalities. If you sell the software (or the platform it runs on), there is no manipulation or trickery involved. It's only the "vast majority" if you look at freeware/ad-based.
You're right. I deleted that part of my comment. It was more ranty than I prefer to be. And I had things like Google and Facebook in mind, and 99% of the free games on the App Store or web.
One example in the article is code.gov, the video is impressive, the loading time on the Android Go device abysmal. And this has nothing to do with earning money. It is just bad software.
I'd argue that's well designed software which is focused (albeit not exclusively) on user happiness.
Apple leaves a lot on the table when determining what to monetize and what trade-offs to make to avoid making users uncomfortable or infringing on their privacy.
Is that benevolence? No, but it doesn't have to be.
Did you actually perform experiments to substantiate your claim? As in: Do you have numbers that clearly show that there is a net benefit when you make the user experience as bad as it is today?
This is specifically applicable to content distribution. For products with paying customers the exact opposite is true. That’s not to say every company that makes a product will be good at it, but good UX absolutely does drive profits.
