I agree that commercial incentives are not there, you must always ship earlier than competition rather than waiting for a few months or years to have a more stable product.
However it probably can hurt a brand reputation in the long run if you have a quality level below customer expectation.
Customers are so used to things not working at times though that the bar is not that high.
So the quality we see would seem on average in line with expectations.
Especially if things work most of the time and just fail to live up to expectations some of the time.
I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. I mean, isn’t capitalism supposed to drive innovation?
It seems to me that OP places a high level of usefulness or value of software at lower levels of abstraction, and I don’t disagree—it’s akin to how any manufacturing business is tremendously more valuable than the variety of consumer-facing products that can be made from it—but the cost of entry into such a business domain, and actually succeeding to make a profit, is often high.
The top five global companies by market cap, i.e. the "most valuable" by market metric, are Apple, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco, Alphabet, and Amazon.
From that I conclude that higher abstraction and making consumer-facing products through vertical integration (Apple) is more valuable than straightforward manufacturing. As is the old scheme of owning land with a valuable resource under it. And starting your company's name with the letter A.
OK, but then that’s not really what I wanted to say (and perhaps I really should have avoided the word “value”). Sure, those companies are the most valuable at the moment in terms of profits, but they are subject to the whims of customer tastes, which do tend to change every 10 years or so, and so they could eventually fall. A company that is in the business of manufacturing computer hardware, however, is far less affected by changes in consumer tastes because they could just make any computer according to the form factor of the decade, and could last much longer than the companies that use its outputs as raw materials or components.
So then if a company’s products or services lasts over generations, isn’t that actually more useful than another company’s products which people only throw away after some time? If the longevity of production of a product or service is not proof of the universality of a need, what is?
That's why you need to build something that is at least an order of magnitude better, so people can't ignore you.
Otherwise, yes, this was my experience too: in our noisy world dominated by huge corporations, indie hackers stand little chance to get their message out and pick some interest.
That's a bit different than saying that Fascism "has no grounding in economic theory nor in fostering discussions on how to allocate scarce resources".
Both Marxism and Fascism *can* provide valid discussions about economics and how to "allocate scarce resources".
So your argument that we can dismiss Fascism because it has no relation to economy is simply wrong.
This should be a platform. The main problem is how to convince users to come and vote on projects. If you figure that out - you'll be a millionaire :)
One way might be through cryptocurrencies - users crowd-source the idea with money, then one or more developers submit MVP's, then users vote on those and the winner gets all the collected money, while users get the product they want. Sort of like improved Kickstarter.
Thanks, yeah while building it I had the same thought - I bet other people would like to have an easy way to run a time-limited "vote for what you want" event like this.
Your suggestion reminds me of the design companies where a bunch of designers submit work and then the top ones get paid. Am I understanding you right?
My main idea is that freelance sites are sort of broken: you pick a worker, he works on things for a while and then you see if he screwed up or not.
You can't really trust his profile. Reviews are also often inconclusive.
It would be better if you could submit a small milestone, let multiple people work on it and pick the best result. Then continue working with that developer.
And then this can be expanded into a platform where not only a single person can be an employer, but people can combine their funds to crowdsource various tasks. Good example would be open-source projects.
Oh, that's really good, starting with a small milestone that's a low risk commitment to both parties. Thanks for explaining. Do you mind if I add that to the site as a project idea so people can vote on it?
I've seeded it with 4 months of data (stored statically in json files for simplicity for now), and have a script to add data for additional days, but the plan is to migrate over to a db (curious to try supabase) so that users can save / like individual entries.
SQLite might be a good choice for a project like this.
So all your sources for all categories are automated? My main worry was if you have to hunt for content manually - that might not be sustainable.
This would also be great for Telegram. You could easily forward daily content into a channel. Or even create a bot that allows people to subscribe only to some categories.
Seems like there's not that much demand for what you would like to see.
Crappy, barely working, software now is better then 1 year delayed perfect one.