Comment by reddiric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reddiric | Hacker News Reader

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I'm simply trying to point out that there are decisions you can control and decisions you can't. You can control what your life takes a dependency on, and how tightly coupled you are to particular products and services.

For different types of products and services, you have more or less control and confidence about the future of those products and services. For software that you own and run on your box, that control and confidence is higher. For services on which you are completely dependent on software running on someone else's box for which you have no contract or service level agreement, that confidence and control is lower.

You have control over whether you want to complain and whine when a service you've tightly coupled yourself to makes a change you find objectionable. You don't have control over that change. Understanding which decisions you do and don't have control over is useful.

There's a deep irony in telling people on a site like this not to use the tools that we all put our blood, sweat and tears into every day.

If onboarding wasn't such a big deal and something people needed in order to prove the market exists and there's money to be made, we wouldn't see a good portion of the posts here about it and we wouldn't see so many ShowHNs with people asking for advice on how to make it more clear for their target demographic.

At the end of the day this hurts everyone; dropping users with no where to go and with a fraction of the effort they put into your tool to begin with causes them to question how much they can trust new companies and services. It makes it harder for others to make the case that they are worth using at all, no less long-term.

To turn around and blame users for their so-called ignorance on the matter is ignorant itself. We beg them to sign on with us and then expect them to know that's what they were in for when we kick them to the curb? This problem isn't exclusive to freemium models, either, which is even worse.

Perhaps I'm approaching this from a different perspective which is why I think my comments came across more abrasive than I meant them.

I'm certainly not trying to blame users for ignorance. I personally, however, have a strong aversion to coupling myself to tools and services whose future I have low confidence in. What I was trying to impart to mnicole as a consumer was this aversion. The lesson I'd send to the rest of the development community is that if you structure your tool or service in a way that it is not possible for me to either have a low dependency on you or a high confidence in your future, you fail the sniff test.

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