This thread really inspired me to never release anything for free for decades.

Why? Dwarf Fortress only exists because it was given away for free for decades, bringing in tens of thousands of dollars in donations, and eventually leading to a fandom popular enough to bring others onboard with the project to produce a GUI and paid steam release version.

If something you build brings in a lot of critique, it is likely something of great value. Because something that doesn't have value won't bring much critique at all.

Tens of thousands dollars of donations over decades is a very small amount of money even outside US.

The premium version of Dwarf Fortress made over $7.2 million in its first month alone.

"first month" is really obscuring the decade or beforehand. That's 20 years of development before the premium version launched

It made an additional $23 million after the first month.

So that's 360K/year over 20 years?

And a lot more from subsequent months, but I don't think it's a problem that this wildly successful videogame made its developers decently rich.

Oh I fully agree. I hope Tarn an Zach make millions more and can keep working of their life's work for many years to come.

Their donation revenue was alright for a pretty significant chunk of that time. For the first decade it was ~$5k/month, which jumped up to ~$10k/month for the second decade before the Steam release.

Toady wasn't exactly raking in the cash, but he didn't need another job.

it was ~10k per month if I remember correctly. They used to post monthly updates

You have to look to the people for whom those decades brought joy, and realize how grandly that outnumbers complaints...

and if you find yourself blessed enough to be in that position does the road, then "reading HN" is a problem that solves itself ;)

They made a couple mil off the steam release. It wouldn't have happened without the massive cult following, which only happened because it was free.

I can’t wait for the equal coal reckoning. What is it 20k direct deaths a year? 2 million early deaths? The Great Barrier Reef 100% dead after this El Niño. A deliberate cover up of the science?

In a top 10 harmful corporation list meta wouldn’t make my cut.

My pet peeves are junk food corporations. Companies like Mac Donald's or Coca Cola have been extremely damaging in terms of public health. And the level of marketing they use to feed people (especially kids) their poison is insane. I know it's pretty unpopular as it can be seen by some as an attack on US culture, but definitely more damaging than Meta in my opinion.

In the UK there are fairly strong rules against advertising junk food to kids.

Of course these are all being subverted on social media because of Meta et al. being uncooperative and pretending they can't identify kids (they know the real age of most accounts even without having to do ID checks).

Fast food and snack companies are the absolute masters of marketing to children. If the United States really cared they'd put a blanket ban on advertising to children like some jurisdictions (Quebec) have done.

Completely agree. Talk about designing for addicted kids

These are allegations of war crimes / criminals it’s not bias to describe them accurately.

Every US president has been a war criminal. Deal with them first. The entire western world is based on crimes against humanity. Punish your own first.

Whataboutism? Also I’m not American

I read this entire article and didn’t sniff AI, plus it had some good insights…?

Feels like a human-authored outline that was run through AI to make it into an article.

I've written this myself, Gemini 4 did a bit of editing:

> What follows is a cleaned-up version of notes I accumulated over the past year. Gemini 4 helped with the editing.

The image is made by an AI image generator on fal.ai. It's better I spare you all my design skills :)

Well it contains a typo, so it made a cock up.

More than that, the AI disclaimer itself is a hallucination:

> Gemini 4 helped with the editing.

There is no Gemini 4, unless the author is writing from the future.

You are correct, my bad. I meant to write Gemma 4. I'll update.

AI image, though.

Does seem a bit like; we’ve never tried roasting people at 1200C, only at 1000C

I don’t think factory worker is quite a covered specialty profession…

I'd love to give this a try, I work at a privacy sensitive company, can I ask in advance is it possible to opt out of:

> We automatically collect certain information when you use DB Pro:

> Device information (IP address, browser type, operating system) > Usage patterns and interaction with our services > Log files and analytics data > Cookies and similar tracking technologies

We'll add an option in the next version to choose if you want to share usage data.

Stay tuned for v2.1.4, coming this week.

Are all your posts downvoted because you sound like AI?

Clearly collateral damage of the post AI area.

Ah extra raw WiFi photons please.

See gov.uk for a good example

For all our faults I am geniunely impressed by gov.uk. its not pretty, its not particularly fast, and its certainly not flashly, but I've never once not been able to find what I needed or have a flow not work.