[donmcronald]

I always think that by building products that treat the consumer like an enemy to be conquered will eventually result in someone building a better product and stealing the market. It never happens though.

I wonder if some of the tech like Cloudflare Workers will eventually allow someone to build competing products that crush the existing platforms. IMO it’s dangerous (business wise) to get addicted to revenue that comes from treating your users very badly. I think we’ll eventually see companies like Facebook and Reddit get conquered. At least I hope so.

[baby]

How are cloudflare workers relevant? The tech of reddit has always been pretty simple to replicate. I think the code was open sourced at some point? I remember creating a reddit-clone for France a long time ago but bringing users in didn’t work. It was not a tech problem.

[Seattle3503]

This is an important point. It isn't the tech that makes reddit successful, it is the user base.

[donmcronald]

> How are cloudflare workers relevant?

$5 / month gets me the same scaling capabilities as someone paying $50000 / month. I can build stuff with a low cost of operating since most stuff is never going to get massively popular, but if I get lucky and win the popularity lotto I can scale with a credit card instead of an architectural change.

AWS, Azure, etc. are similar, but they get expensive really fast. The traditional cloud platforms have a "hump" in the pricing where you're too small to get discounts, but too big to afford it.

So basically what I'm saying is that as compute / scaling improve to the point where you don't have to sell your soul to venture capitalists to pay for everything, we might see a lot more "fair value" minded entrepreneurs start to succeed.

[rognjen]

> It never happens though.

I think it frequently happens. Reddit built a better Digg for instance. It's just that once the new companies supplant the existing ones they seem to start doing the same things.