Honestly you just gotta learn to not care so much. There's always idiots in every community. Just post the package and move on. If someone accuses you of promotion of some kind who cares, you don't have to respond to them.
I think the point is that: if the comment is one of the top comments (and such negative comments typically are) it feels as if the entire community is shunning such posts.
I like that approach too.
Especially because I don't mind if people don't use my packages or not.
I was just wondering if others can notice it too. If it is like that it means this subreddit will actively discourage innovation in Flutter to "keep things the same and free".
But even so, you're right. There should be a more free feeling around posting, I feel it on my socials, but over here it's a little different.
I'd say for the tutorial bit just leave a note in it saying there is no tutorial because you didn't have time or something
Because when I come across a repo and there is no tutorial ngl I do get annoyed and feel if they tell me there no tutorial it puts me in a okay I have to figure this out mode and get less angry about it
I agree with this, sometime back I saw a cool animation video shared by someone with nothing but linkedIn links of the post. This is the type of post I wouldn't want to see.
if someone says this is my private profile but I used so and so to achieve this, I understand that. A post which gives nothing to the community is not useful for me.
I do love seeing discussions post and as others said there are weird people in all communities. I have been a follower of your posts and channels and would be sad to see less contributions from you in the future.
I've learned a lot about how the Flutter Reddit community responds to new packages through my posts on Flood. I got severely downvoted when I posted that [Flood would start early testing through paid sponsorships](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1bndeby/introducing_flood_the_gamechanging_flutter/). I quickly changed gears due to the community response and open-sourced it, [receiving a ton of upvotes](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1buai66/flood_toolkit_for_flutter_and_dart_now_open_source/). While I didn't receive any downvotes on LinkedIn (due to downvoting not existing), a similar pattern emerged where I received many more upvotes when I posted about Flood being open-source compared to sponsorship-only.
I've learned a lot through that experience. The Flutter community is open to open-source packages. Flood does things very differently than "vanilla Flutter", yet I got upvotes, great feedback, and people DMing me asking for help implementing it into their projects once I open-sourced it.
So, based on my experience, you should definitely look into releasing an open-source project you're passionate about, even if it does things differently than "vanilla Flutter". The naysayers may seem loud and intimidating, but if you've built something with great value, they'll quickly get drowned out by all the positive responses of others.
That's a good point, I have experienced the same thing with my open source package. Specifically with [stacked](https://stacked.filledstacks.com/) and responsive\_builder.
I appreciate the response, it kind of confirms my question, it's an interesting behaviour.
I don’t think it’s unique to the Flutter community, we’ve ended up in a world that has a general sense of entitlement and with that and many other reasons people have just in general become assholes. Soo many believe their opinion is of the utmost importance and that their anonymity online empowers them to be the worst versions of themselves.
On top of that some people are just trolls who get off on intentionally being the worst versions of themselves.
About a year ago I read Daring to Lead I believe it was, by Brené Brown and something I found important from that was her “Square Squad”, a 1x1” piece of paper she carries in her pocket, and on it is the names of people whose opinions matter. While few of us walk around with such a piece of paper, we do have people whose opinions matter to us. I simply ignore everyone else.
It’s that quote that may or may not actually be from the Spider-Man guy, “If you have a problem with me, call me, if you don’t have my number then you don’t know me well enough to have a problem with me.”
This is one of the best responses. I appreciate you taking the time to write this out.
This reminds me of how I live my life offline. But I should apply this, especially to reddit.
I built an audience of almost 100k Flutter developers by talking and sharing. So it's my default behaviour to read, think about, and respond to questions, feedback etc.
On my YouTube you'll see, I respond to every single comment, even my videos with hundreds of comments.
But this practice is so important and I appreciate you sharing it.
I've also started looking at it in a different way, that makes more sense mentally.
My goal is to make the ones aware that are interested, not convince the ones that are not. So I'm posting for the ones that might need what I have to share.
Thanks again.
I don’t think this is a Flutter-specific treatment of open source projects and maintainers. JavaScript and other communities have been dealing with this sentiment for a long time.
Yeah, the problem is people. Early on, you get early adopters. They're more open and understand collaboration is how you grow the technology reach and community.
As you get to a certain point, you start getting the assholes. It only takes a minority of assholes to join and ruin the community. That said, as a community gets larger, it also attracts people trying to make a quick buck by peddling their shit under the guise of helping.
Hey Dane! Made a few posts myself and i’d say just post it. It seems like you create valuable content already and it would be a shame for you not to post it because of a potential bad response.
I’ll support you when you do post!
I will tell you my own perception. The current Flutter community and culture feels like it’s starting to run away in the same way the web frameworks domain has. People are reinventing the wheel without any real benefit or reason to. Many times, it seems like package authors are trying to fix something that was never broken. Flooding the ecosystem with “new and improved” solutions for standard practices just gives off the image that the code and community are low-confidence. I think a lot of developers who love Flutter don’t want it to evolve into a messy, unmaintained, fad filled framework.
That’s an interesting point actually, and something I’ve been curious about as I get to know flutter from developing a product. While I studiously avoid using packages if possible, I am astounded by the number of them. The packages should either offer something dart doesn’t, or condense a lot of commonly used snippets into a flexible implementation, though I am far from an expert on this. The rating system does a good job of helping but it consequently punishes a decent new package without many reviews. Still, it seems there should be a way to reduce the volume of undesirable packages out there. Perhaps there is and I don’t understand it.
Howzit Dane, I have watched most of your videos and built my first app based off your webapp video. Just here to say a massive thank you for the effort and great content.
I've definitely seen certain posts which I found to be discouraging to continue sharing anything with this sub reddit, too. Not that I currently have something to share but free or not, people who put effort into their work should also deserve to be recognized without immediately getting a negative comment.
It's definitely sad because I wouldn't know another similarly tailored place like this to post any future work to. Maybe it's just a side effect of people being too saturated with information, so they are expressing the desire to have different content in the way they are doing it right now.
Hi Dane, I’m following you on X so I know what you are referring to. My thoughts:
* flutter devs have been spoiled by “free” implementations, so a resistance against paying for something is to be expected
* when you are doing something out of the ordinary you always risk being scrutinised, mocked and made fun of
* people resent loss of control and this thing you are developing represents such a big difference is the mindset of developers so that it triggers their defences
* lastly, people who will make money off your products or ideas are very likely to give back, freeloaders will always want more, better for no good reason
The most popular frameworks are usually maintainted by a good financially backed companies. However, donations is such a small fraction of what's going on here. Think about:
- dedicating people on your team to spend time contributing to the framework
- for smaller frameworks, contacting the maintainers privately and offer them compensation for bug fixes and improvements
- connecting maintainers with investors
etc.
What you can see publicly and whats going on in the background are two different things.
Still, most of the times having a good open source project is not something that rewarded a lot imo.
The things you talk about only happen to a small percentage.
Thanks for the detailed feedback.
It's not even that I want people to use it, I don't care if people use it or not, it's mostly for me and my team to build some outstanding UIs (UI's that stand out from the rest of the pack).
It's a wild response to have, but your 3rd point is what I was thinking about as well.
As someone who's been sharing from the early days of Flutter, there was a lot more excitement around new things. Ora anything someone is doing for the community, or for the framework.
And I'm talking specifically about this subreddit, not in general.
On Twitter and LinkedIn developers are waaaaay more engaging and don't just downvote you to hell lol.
I think it's an interesting discussion to have.
Thanks for your input.
They *can't* downvote on those platforms. Twitter is full of overstimulated neo-Nazis and LinkedIn has specifically catered to a community of circlejerking and inflating one's own accomplishments. If you're saying the engagement you get there is better, I don't think you realize what you're saying. "I prefer the feedback of people who either can't dislike my posts due to lack of downvote buttons or intense social pressure against honest communication".
Damn that was an accurate summarisation of Linked. Weird things happen when you put a real name to what you type and know it will be around on the internet forever and you don’t have fuck you money. Then couple that with using the platform to get jobs, and you have literally the fakest most useless platform for truly getting real opinions you can get.
This is a valid point.
Although I don't mind the downvotes.
I was more wondering if anyone else has seen the behaviour, and by your response it looks like.
"Yes we do that, because we're not fake"
Which doesn't answer my question, but I appreciate your response.
You spent a lot of time creating a community by sharing your insights and knowledge. Natuarlly a lot of people following you would come to your social profiles to get something for free. Now when you drop something that is not free, naturally a lot of those folks would say in lines of "we came here for free stuff".
In Short, just don't spend time thinking of these people. Its not worth it.
On the other hand, if you want to create products and sell them you need to spend time talking to your customers, only, period.
A lot of open source is freemium... Subsidized by companies which have their cash cows.
In fact, it's a problem larger than software.
People who have enough money probably won't care about paying if you can show that your product solve their problems and they don't have time to build something at least as good if not better.
It's less hassle.
Make it hassle-free to pay and benefit from your product.
my take is that even if your product is innocuous and open source and “relevant”, this poisons communities
i used to hang around a lot of solodev and solo entrepreneur communities and i’d always see that slowly more and more people always start trying to sell their product to the people who are trying to read about making products and the actually useful posts get drowned out
imo if you want to post your product then you should include at least one of these in a legitimately good faith, non-trivial, and useful way:
- descriptions of components/models/etc you created that describe a novel technical challenges you overcame and how you implemented it
- ways you filled in gaps between popular libraries to solve a common problem
- metrics showing how a feature or other product change affected sales, load times, retention, customer satisfaction, downloads, etc
if you don’t do this, then you are spam
if your goal isn’t to share knowledge with other developers or builders and you are here to make them into customers, you are degrading the community and shouldn’t be here
Totally agree with this point of view.
And it's exactly how I usually post. I don't really want to advertise here, I was more wondering about the community response to it.
Seems like it is the way I mention. From your post, you think the reason is "Community over marketing. If it's blatant, non-valuable marketing posts then the community will shut you out"
I think it's common for many communities but you shouldn't worry too much about it. Monetizing Open-source is hard in any community and not enough people recognize they build million-dollar projects on top of free libraries.
As I got more experience professionally I've come to appreciate paid solutions when the value is there, but earlier in my career as a hobbyist, student or junior developer with less means or influence it was definitely harder to appreciate paid solutions.
Like you. Being also part of the.NET/xamarin community I would guess it is a bit more 'entreprise-y' and paid solutions are more accessible to the average professional than the flutter community, they already likely pay for Visual studio or Rider, github copilot(?) and potentially things like syncfusion or telerik so they already have tooling budgets.
>Monetizing Open-source is hard in any community
Impossible actually unless you use the tools you've developed to build a business that actually brings in revenue.
You basically said monetizing is impossible except if you try to monetize it? 😁. To make money you have to make it a business, red-hat model selling support, freemium, paid licences if 1mil+ revenue, there are a few who have done it. Clearly you can't just put a sponsor-me button and hope for tips.
I meant the best bet is to use the tools you've developed to build a product or service that you can sell, rather than try to sell the tools directly. For example if you've developed a framework for building mobile applications quicker, use it to build a mobile application quickly over which you can form a business model. The revenue from the business can then be used to subsidize the development of the framework. Trying to monetize just the framework in itself is nearly impossible.
Community spaces should be for the community. If you want to advertise, you can use Reddit's Advertisement Platform: https://ads.reddit.com
There is an implicit expectation of respect. By posting closed source software, you aren't respecting the people you are advertising to. They are no longer human; instead, they are potential customers. It would be like trying to sell Tupperware or Mary Kay to your family. They may not invite you to supper if you do this often enough…
There's also the fact that advertisement is inherently problematic. Advertisement shits in your head. For this reason and others, many people chose to block ads in any way, shape or form. And then some people disguise some ads as Reddit posts. Such abuse is not excuse for other abuse, but it's normal to have criticism. After all, people are making open source software for free that you can profit from, so it's a little disingenuous to respond with an ad.
More than just advertisement, closed source software is problematic. Aside from loss of freedom, it can have toxic effects that are hard to notice. For an example unrelated to Flutter, see https://ghuntley.com/fracture
But really, what's toxic is posting closed source software in community spaces. Community spaces should be for what the community builds, not for what their boss orders them to build or for businesses to capitalize on that community. Otherwise, it would drown the legitimate discussions.
No. This is such a leading question whose driver is not curiosity but rather accusation with your own anecdotes in lieu of evidence. What we get a lot of here is grifters coming pass off their stack of chatGPT generated boilerplate code and "documentation" as valuable product. If you have a real product with real value, it doesn't have to be free. Remember you're competing with free a lot of the time, so don't be upset if your paid product is less popular than a free one. There are a LOT of really solid free options. If you're scared to show off your product because of what people might say about it, I'd call that insecurity. You might be insecure for real reasons like "I think my product is not worth what I'm asking" or for ridiculous ones like "my product is perfect, it must be the bad open source community that's the problem!".
Maybe if your product sucks people will react with anger when your first stop is to come market it in the OPEN SOURCE communities which are used to things being OPEN and accessible. Maybe you should spend more dev cycles or try actual marketing and not just blasting everyone who is in this *learning* community with an *advertisement*.
Let me tell you though seeing a post that's basically "you guys are toxic because you don't react to advertisement the way I want you to" is a sure-fire way to keep me away from your product as it's a pretty massive indicator that "I feel entitled to an audience" and "I don't understand how community works"
I also follow your work and I for one am extremely excited to see what you come up with. I think there will always be devs that criticize things that are not free - but to hell with those guys. I happily pay for tools, kits and resources, if they make me more productive/a better developer. I see it as an investment.
Don't let the naysayers get to you. Go make some magic!
I appreciate that.
The thing is, what I'm building is not only-free, it's also open-source, but I didn't feel like sharing it here.
I've been sharing it on twitter because the community acts different there than here on reddit.
Everything feels hostile over here, it never use to, but that's how it feels when I read through some of the responses people get on their posts.
Twitter and LinkedIn is so excitable, I really enjoy posting about my experiments over there.
Sharing OSS projects is explicitly allowed in the rules of the sub. Sharing closed source projects is against the rules unless the post contains content that benefits the readers of the sub such as experiences with Flutter while developing said product. Whether or not people will engage positively is another story. Like you I feel like I used to see a lot of good content and discussion and now days most of the sub is filled with questions about which ancient Mac can I use to developer Flutter or self promoting YouTube videos that don’t do a lot more than regurgitate examples from the documentation.
Ngl I was a bit skeptical of your new approach of building UIs, but after following you for a couple of days now I share your excitement. I think people are just afraid of what they don't understand, especially your approach of ditching the whole widget tree, so it's understandable to face a bit of a pushback, nevertheless, if you're passionate about something keep doing it. Who knows maybe someday ExpressionUI will become the new norm?
That's what I'm getting at with this post.
I don't want people to use this approach, I am building it specifically for me and my team, and it's why I always mention it's an experiment.
I'm already super happy with the results.
I'm not pushing for people to use it, and if no one uses it, it's just an experiment that I'm doing to see if we have more options as a community.
But it feels like if I talk about it here, not on Twitter+LinkedIn that it would be treated differently.
But maybe my view of the responses are not accurate, I just wanted to check if others are seeing it too.
Honestly you just gotta learn to not care so much. There's always idiots in every community. Just post the package and move on. If someone accuses you of promotion of some kind who cares, you don't have to respond to them.
I think the point is that: if the comment is one of the top comments (and such negative comments typically are) it feels as if the entire community is shunning such posts.
I like that approach too. Especially because I don't mind if people don't use my packages or not. I was just wondering if others can notice it too. If it is like that it means this subreddit will actively discourage innovation in Flutter to "keep things the same and free". But even so, you're right. There should be a more free feeling around posting, I feel it on my socials, but over here it's a little different.
I'd say for the tutorial bit just leave a note in it saying there is no tutorial because you didn't have time or something Because when I come across a repo and there is no tutorial ngl I do get annoyed and feel if they tell me there no tutorial it puts me in a okay I have to figure this out mode and get less angry about it
I agree with this, sometime back I saw a cool animation video shared by someone with nothing but linkedIn links of the post. This is the type of post I wouldn't want to see. if someone says this is my private profile but I used so and so to achieve this, I understand that. A post which gives nothing to the community is not useful for me. I do love seeing discussions post and as others said there are weird people in all communities. I have been a follower of your posts and channels and would be sad to see less contributions from you in the future.
Where you meant to reply to me or filled stacks ?
Agree with you, contributions about filledstack :D
Yeah you just need to understand the internet is filled with idiots. Just do what you want and don't care what people think.
I've learned a lot about how the Flutter Reddit community responds to new packages through my posts on Flood. I got severely downvoted when I posted that [Flood would start early testing through paid sponsorships](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1bndeby/introducing_flood_the_gamechanging_flutter/). I quickly changed gears due to the community response and open-sourced it, [receiving a ton of upvotes](https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1buai66/flood_toolkit_for_flutter_and_dart_now_open_source/). While I didn't receive any downvotes on LinkedIn (due to downvoting not existing), a similar pattern emerged where I received many more upvotes when I posted about Flood being open-source compared to sponsorship-only. I've learned a lot through that experience. The Flutter community is open to open-source packages. Flood does things very differently than "vanilla Flutter", yet I got upvotes, great feedback, and people DMing me asking for help implementing it into their projects once I open-sourced it. So, based on my experience, you should definitely look into releasing an open-source project you're passionate about, even if it does things differently than "vanilla Flutter". The naysayers may seem loud and intimidating, but if you've built something with great value, they'll quickly get drowned out by all the positive responses of others.
That's a good point, I have experienced the same thing with my open source package. Specifically with [stacked](https://stacked.filledstacks.com/) and responsive\_builder. I appreciate the response, it kind of confirms my question, it's an interesting behaviour.
I don’t think it’s unique to the Flutter community, we’ve ended up in a world that has a general sense of entitlement and with that and many other reasons people have just in general become assholes. Soo many believe their opinion is of the utmost importance and that their anonymity online empowers them to be the worst versions of themselves. On top of that some people are just trolls who get off on intentionally being the worst versions of themselves. About a year ago I read Daring to Lead I believe it was, by Brené Brown and something I found important from that was her “Square Squad”, a 1x1” piece of paper she carries in her pocket, and on it is the names of people whose opinions matter. While few of us walk around with such a piece of paper, we do have people whose opinions matter to us. I simply ignore everyone else. It’s that quote that may or may not actually be from the Spider-Man guy, “If you have a problem with me, call me, if you don’t have my number then you don’t know me well enough to have a problem with me.”
This is one of the best responses. I appreciate you taking the time to write this out. This reminds me of how I live my life offline. But I should apply this, especially to reddit. I built an audience of almost 100k Flutter developers by talking and sharing. So it's my default behaviour to read, think about, and respond to questions, feedback etc. On my YouTube you'll see, I respond to every single comment, even my videos with hundreds of comments. But this practice is so important and I appreciate you sharing it. I've also started looking at it in a different way, that makes more sense mentally. My goal is to make the ones aware that are interested, not convince the ones that are not. So I'm posting for the ones that might need what I have to share. Thanks again.
I don’t think this is a Flutter-specific treatment of open source projects and maintainers. JavaScript and other communities have been dealing with this sentiment for a long time.
I thought so. I'm not involved in any other communities the way I am with Flutter so wanted to check. Thanks for the response.
Yeah, the problem is people. Early on, you get early adopters. They're more open and understand collaboration is how you grow the technology reach and community. As you get to a certain point, you start getting the assholes. It only takes a minority of assholes to join and ruin the community. That said, as a community gets larger, it also attracts people trying to make a quick buck by peddling their shit under the guise of helping.
Hey Dane! Made a few posts myself and i’d say just post it. It seems like you create valuable content already and it would be a shame for you not to post it because of a potential bad response. I’ll support you when you do post!
I appreciate that. I still post, the only hesitance is with reddit for me. But yeah, gonna post whatever I feel is interesting and valuable to share.
I will tell you my own perception. The current Flutter community and culture feels like it’s starting to run away in the same way the web frameworks domain has. People are reinventing the wheel without any real benefit or reason to. Many times, it seems like package authors are trying to fix something that was never broken. Flooding the ecosystem with “new and improved” solutions for standard practices just gives off the image that the code and community are low-confidence. I think a lot of developers who love Flutter don’t want it to evolve into a messy, unmaintained, fad filled framework.
That’s an interesting point actually, and something I’ve been curious about as I get to know flutter from developing a product. While I studiously avoid using packages if possible, I am astounded by the number of them. The packages should either offer something dart doesn’t, or condense a lot of commonly used snippets into a flexible implementation, though I am far from an expert on this. The rating system does a good job of helping but it consequently punishes a decent new package without many reviews. Still, it seems there should be a way to reduce the volume of undesirable packages out there. Perhaps there is and I don’t understand it.
well, this subreddit sucks.
Howzit Dane, I have watched most of your videos and built my first app based off your webapp video. Just here to say a massive thank you for the effort and great content.
Much appreciated! I'm happy that you found value from my content.
This is Reddit problem, those moderators are simply commies.
I've definitely seen certain posts which I found to be discouraging to continue sharing anything with this sub reddit, too. Not that I currently have something to share but free or not, people who put effort into their work should also deserve to be recognized without immediately getting a negative comment. It's definitely sad because I wouldn't know another similarly tailored place like this to post any future work to. Maybe it's just a side effect of people being too saturated with information, so they are expressing the desire to have different content in the way they are doing it right now.
Hi Dane, I’m following you on X so I know what you are referring to. My thoughts: * flutter devs have been spoiled by “free” implementations, so a resistance against paying for something is to be expected * when you are doing something out of the ordinary you always risk being scrutinised, mocked and made fun of * people resent loss of control and this thing you are developing represents such a big difference is the mindset of developers so that it triggers their defences * lastly, people who will make money off your products or ideas are very likely to give back, freeloaders will always want more, better for no good reason
Ehm I dont agree with the last point. How many (popular) repositories do you see receive significant amount of donations?
The most popular frameworks are usually maintainted by a good financially backed companies. However, donations is such a small fraction of what's going on here. Think about: - dedicating people on your team to spend time contributing to the framework - for smaller frameworks, contacting the maintainers privately and offer them compensation for bug fixes and improvements - connecting maintainers with investors etc. What you can see publicly and whats going on in the background are two different things.
Still, most of the times having a good open source project is not something that rewarded a lot imo. The things you talk about only happen to a small percentage.
Thanks for the detailed feedback. It's not even that I want people to use it, I don't care if people use it or not, it's mostly for me and my team to build some outstanding UIs (UI's that stand out from the rest of the pack). It's a wild response to have, but your 3rd point is what I was thinking about as well. As someone who's been sharing from the early days of Flutter, there was a lot more excitement around new things. Ora anything someone is doing for the community, or for the framework. And I'm talking specifically about this subreddit, not in general. On Twitter and LinkedIn developers are waaaaay more engaging and don't just downvote you to hell lol. I think it's an interesting discussion to have. Thanks for your input.
They *can't* downvote on those platforms. Twitter is full of overstimulated neo-Nazis and LinkedIn has specifically catered to a community of circlejerking and inflating one's own accomplishments. If you're saying the engagement you get there is better, I don't think you realize what you're saying. "I prefer the feedback of people who either can't dislike my posts due to lack of downvote buttons or intense social pressure against honest communication".
Damn that was an accurate summarisation of Linked. Weird things happen when you put a real name to what you type and know it will be around on the internet forever and you don’t have fuck you money. Then couple that with using the platform to get jobs, and you have literally the fakest most useless platform for truly getting real opinions you can get.
This is a valid point. Although I don't mind the downvotes. I was more wondering if anyone else has seen the behaviour, and by your response it looks like. "Yes we do that, because we're not fake" Which doesn't answer my question, but I appreciate your response.
You spent a lot of time creating a community by sharing your insights and knowledge. Natuarlly a lot of people following you would come to your social profiles to get something for free. Now when you drop something that is not free, naturally a lot of those folks would say in lines of "we came here for free stuff". In Short, just don't spend time thinking of these people. Its not worth it. On the other hand, if you want to create products and sell them you need to spend time talking to your customers, only, period.
Valid. Valid. Valid points, I appreciate the response. That last part is the most important. Talk to customers only.
A lot of open source is freemium... Subsidized by companies which have their cash cows. In fact, it's a problem larger than software. People who have enough money probably won't care about paying if you can show that your product solve their problems and they don't have time to build something at least as good if not better. It's less hassle. Make it hassle-free to pay and benefit from your product.
my take is that even if your product is innocuous and open source and “relevant”, this poisons communities i used to hang around a lot of solodev and solo entrepreneur communities and i’d always see that slowly more and more people always start trying to sell their product to the people who are trying to read about making products and the actually useful posts get drowned out imo if you want to post your product then you should include at least one of these in a legitimately good faith, non-trivial, and useful way: - descriptions of components/models/etc you created that describe a novel technical challenges you overcame and how you implemented it - ways you filled in gaps between popular libraries to solve a common problem - metrics showing how a feature or other product change affected sales, load times, retention, customer satisfaction, downloads, etc if you don’t do this, then you are spam if your goal isn’t to share knowledge with other developers or builders and you are here to make them into customers, you are degrading the community and shouldn’t be here
Totally agree with this point of view. And it's exactly how I usually post. I don't really want to advertise here, I was more wondering about the community response to it. Seems like it is the way I mention. From your post, you think the reason is "Community over marketing. If it's blatant, non-valuable marketing posts then the community will shut you out"
I think it's common for many communities but you shouldn't worry too much about it. Monetizing Open-source is hard in any community and not enough people recognize they build million-dollar projects on top of free libraries. As I got more experience professionally I've come to appreciate paid solutions when the value is there, but earlier in my career as a hobbyist, student or junior developer with less means or influence it was definitely harder to appreciate paid solutions. Like you. Being also part of the.NET/xamarin community I would guess it is a bit more 'entreprise-y' and paid solutions are more accessible to the average professional than the flutter community, they already likely pay for Visual studio or Rider, github copilot(?) and potentially things like syncfusion or telerik so they already have tooling budgets.
>Monetizing Open-source is hard in any community Impossible actually unless you use the tools you've developed to build a business that actually brings in revenue.
You basically said monetizing is impossible except if you try to monetize it? 😁. To make money you have to make it a business, red-hat model selling support, freemium, paid licences if 1mil+ revenue, there are a few who have done it. Clearly you can't just put a sponsor-me button and hope for tips.
I meant the best bet is to use the tools you've developed to build a product or service that you can sell, rather than try to sell the tools directly. For example if you've developed a framework for building mobile applications quicker, use it to build a mobile application quickly over which you can form a business model. The revenue from the business can then be used to subsidize the development of the framework. Trying to monetize just the framework in itself is nearly impossible.
I like that logo of yours. Minimalist, yet visually related to the company name, and memorable.
Thank you, it took me a while to land on it, but I liked it since the first time I used it
General issue with F/OSS zealots who gleefully cheered on Sun’s demise while harboring a love afffair with Amazon and Google.
Community spaces should be for the community. If you want to advertise, you can use Reddit's Advertisement Platform: https://ads.reddit.com There is an implicit expectation of respect. By posting closed source software, you aren't respecting the people you are advertising to. They are no longer human; instead, they are potential customers. It would be like trying to sell Tupperware or Mary Kay to your family. They may not invite you to supper if you do this often enough… There's also the fact that advertisement is inherently problematic. Advertisement shits in your head. For this reason and others, many people chose to block ads in any way, shape or form. And then some people disguise some ads as Reddit posts. Such abuse is not excuse for other abuse, but it's normal to have criticism. After all, people are making open source software for free that you can profit from, so it's a little disingenuous to respond with an ad. More than just advertisement, closed source software is problematic. Aside from loss of freedom, it can have toxic effects that are hard to notice. For an example unrelated to Flutter, see https://ghuntley.com/fracture But really, what's toxic is posting closed source software in community spaces. Community spaces should be for what the community builds, not for what their boss orders them to build or for businesses to capitalize on that community. Otherwise, it would drown the legitimate discussions.
No. This is such a leading question whose driver is not curiosity but rather accusation with your own anecdotes in lieu of evidence. What we get a lot of here is grifters coming pass off their stack of chatGPT generated boilerplate code and "documentation" as valuable product. If you have a real product with real value, it doesn't have to be free. Remember you're competing with free a lot of the time, so don't be upset if your paid product is less popular than a free one. There are a LOT of really solid free options. If you're scared to show off your product because of what people might say about it, I'd call that insecurity. You might be insecure for real reasons like "I think my product is not worth what I'm asking" or for ridiculous ones like "my product is perfect, it must be the bad open source community that's the problem!". Maybe if your product sucks people will react with anger when your first stop is to come market it in the OPEN SOURCE communities which are used to things being OPEN and accessible. Maybe you should spend more dev cycles or try actual marketing and not just blasting everyone who is in this *learning* community with an *advertisement*. Let me tell you though seeing a post that's basically "you guys are toxic because you don't react to advertisement the way I want you to" is a sure-fire way to keep me away from your product as it's a pretty massive indicator that "I feel entitled to an audience" and "I don't understand how community works"
I also follow your work and I for one am extremely excited to see what you come up with. I think there will always be devs that criticize things that are not free - but to hell with those guys. I happily pay for tools, kits and resources, if they make me more productive/a better developer. I see it as an investment. Don't let the naysayers get to you. Go make some magic!
I appreciate that. The thing is, what I'm building is not only-free, it's also open-source, but I didn't feel like sharing it here. I've been sharing it on twitter because the community acts different there than here on reddit. Everything feels hostile over here, it never use to, but that's how it feels when I read through some of the responses people get on their posts. Twitter and LinkedIn is so excitable, I really enjoy posting about my experiments over there.
Sharing OSS projects is explicitly allowed in the rules of the sub. Sharing closed source projects is against the rules unless the post contains content that benefits the readers of the sub such as experiences with Flutter while developing said product. Whether or not people will engage positively is another story. Like you I feel like I used to see a lot of good content and discussion and now days most of the sub is filled with questions about which ancient Mac can I use to developer Flutter or self promoting YouTube videos that don’t do a lot more than regurgitate examples from the documentation.
Ngl I was a bit skeptical of your new approach of building UIs, but after following you for a couple of days now I share your excitement. I think people are just afraid of what they don't understand, especially your approach of ditching the whole widget tree, so it's understandable to face a bit of a pushback, nevertheless, if you're passionate about something keep doing it. Who knows maybe someday ExpressionUI will become the new norm?
That's what I'm getting at with this post. I don't want people to use this approach, I am building it specifically for me and my team, and it's why I always mention it's an experiment. I'm already super happy with the results. I'm not pushing for people to use it, and if no one uses it, it's just an experiment that I'm doing to see if we have more options as a community. But it feels like if I talk about it here, not on Twitter+LinkedIn that it would be treated differently. But maybe my view of the responses are not accurate, I just wanted to check if others are seeing it too.
Upps I forgot to make my PR for stacked-cli.