Patreon Raises $90M Series E at $1.2B Valuation - <AUTHOR> https://blog.patreon.com/patreon-series-e-announcement <comment><USER2> Graph showing revenue for my YouTube channel vs Patreon over the years. In other words, my Patrons mean more to me than the YT algo. [https://twitter.com/BenKrasnow/status/1300643248508080129?s=...](https://twitter.com/BenKrasnow/status/1300643248508080129?s=19)

<comment><USER3> Will Patreon become the real YT killer? They already have the best content creators on their platform, what's to stop them building out a similar video hosting setup with search and discovery?

Google might want to nip this in the bud now with a cheeky 2bn $ acquisition...

<comment><USER4> YouTube's real killer feature is its video discovery. Having millions users endlessly streaming content without many connection hitches while showing a dozen recommended videos each time does wonders for authors.

I'd be more worried about YouTube getting their shit together and making a Patreon killer than Patreon building video hosting.

<comment><USER5> doesn't youtube feature a patreon-like feature already, where you can sponsor the creators?

<comment><USER6> If they do, I have never seen it, and I watch a lot of YouTube.

<comment><USER7> It's called "channel memberships" \- if you look at [1] you'll see a 'join' button to the left of the 'subscribe' button (or at least, I do in the UK)

I can't imagine it'll replace Patreon though, as a lot of creators see Patreon as giving them back control from Google's inscrutable, capricious treatment.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcXhhVwCT6_WqjkEniejRJQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcXhhVwCT6_WqjkEniejRJQ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Someone posted a widely-downvoted comment of "They are another facebook. They will turn cancerous very soon, if they haven't already"; while I certainly don't think Patreon is another Facebook, it's at least worth considering what their sky-high valuation means. With this round of funding, they've officially passed "unicorn status," and that's kind of a double-edged sword.

The problem, at risk of stating the obvious, is that investors are hoping for big returns, and that means big revenue -- and that means changing the definition of "success" on Patreon. To hit a few hundred million in revenue a year and earn their valuation, they're going to need to start competing with not just YouTube and Twitch, but major music labels and indie-friendly TV/film studios. They're going to need to recruit the new Taylor Swift, the new Lady Gaga. Hell, they may need to recruit the _current_ Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.

The most successful campaigns they have now are bringing in tens of thousands a month, but those are wild outliers. The vast majority of their creators are making side money, not a living; bringing in just $1000 a month puts you in the top 5%. (It's hard to be sure, but I think there's a good chance it puts you in the top 1%, given that there's about 178K campaigns total and there are folks in the top 1000, according to Graphtreon, barely making over $1K a month.) And... that vast majority of folks won't be Patreon's focus in future years. It can't be. (One can argue it isn't now.)

I don't think Patreon will "turn cancerous," per se -- but the Patreon of 2022 may not look that much like the Patreon of early 2020, which some would argue didn't look as much like the Patreon of 2018 as ideal.

<comment><USER9> I use Patreon (albeit in a pledge capacity) sparingly. Many years ago they dropped Naomi Wu[1][2][3]. This situation was particularly scary: she was making a decent chunk of her living through Patreon pledges, but because of the limited size of her audience, and marginalized position she had no recourse.

While I agree that they're not _currently_ cancerous I do think they illustrate part of the broader problem with modern society: over-dependence on central infrastructure-like sources that are private and can change on a whim. It's great that people can make a living on Patreon, but this should be tempered by the inherent risk of being on a platform you don't control.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg](https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg) [2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wu) [3]: [https://www.patreon.com/posts/18216256](https://www.patreon.com/posts/18216256)

<comment><USER10> She doxxed a Vice editor when she felt they failed to maintain a privacy agreement.

<comment><USER11> > She doxxed a Vice editor when she felt they failed to maintain a privacy > agreement.

Why is it that you choose to use "failed to maintain a privacy agreement" to describe the Vice editors publishing her personal information without consent, while using the much more loaded term "doxxed" when she did the same to them?

Do you understand the difference in likely consequences for each party here?

Is there any rational argument that can be made to exonerate the totally shitty behaviour of Vice and it's writers/editors in choosing to invade her privacy after having agreed not to?

<comment><USER12> Vice shouldn't be exonerated but do we live in an "eye for an eye" rule of law?

(According to Wikipedia) she published Vice's editor-in-chief's home address. I assume she did that to "explain" how she felt threatened physically by ensuring that the editor in chief feels physically threatened as well?

She could have acted differently. She could have taken legal means; perhaps asking for help to her patrons. Supporters can support in many ways and not only with money.

Can somebody who knows more about the details explain why her behaviour should have been tolerated by Patreon?

<comment><USER13> Obviously her doxxing was a poor choice. However, she didn't have much legal recourse. She lives in China, and viewed herself as being at risk of retaliation from the CCP due to some of the personal details Vice choose to release. (Despite knowing (from her) the danger it would put her in.) Many (most?) people feel that the doxxing was her only means of retaliation given the circumstances.

Both actions are bad. But if I have to pick one to be "more" bad, I'd pick Vice's.

Those two points are probably what's at the root of the calls against Patreon here.

We don't live under eye-for-eye law. (Maybe China has some laws like that?) But people often view things in that light socially.

<comment><USER14> She was interrogated by the police not so long after. She posted that she was going with them when event happened, I recall. But afterwards the Twitter history was scrubbed... Unknown if it had any relation to the Vice case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Many of the most successful Patreon profiles use the platform _only_ as a way to provide a paid addition to their free podcast feed. You start supporting them, grab the private RSS feed and add it to your podcast app, then never visit Patreon again.

You turn off Patreon emails and push notifications because the episodes just show up in your podcatcher like any other podcast. Patreon isn't offering _anything_ in the relationship beyond recurring monthly payment processing. RSS + your parasocial friendship with the podcast hosts are what builds the relationship.

I'd love it if a podcast-focused company stepped in to fill the same role. They could provide the same custom features that ATP and Dithering/Stratechery have added recently to their paid feeds. The UX of having "Free" and "Paid" feeds for the same podcast really sucks.

<comment><USER16> Another thing Patreon offers is a central place to support many creators (of various types) with a single profile. I mostly support youtubers, some web comic makers, and some podcasts. Ans already having the profile makes it very low friction to support new creators (if only I had money for that). So it's a bit hard to see podcast creators trying out a new platform - network effects at play and all.

<comment><USER17> This. My niche is web serials with some "youtubers" thrown in, but despite having considered individual donations of old I never actually did it until I git access to a platform where I can readily and relatively safely provide support for multiple creators easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Insane.

Their is no exit. The whole point of Patreon is an efficient way to suck up pennies.

It is a great service but their taking of VC funding was even dumber than when Gumroad did it.

<comment><USER19> Sahil built a fantastic personal brand, and now that he's VC-free and profitable, he always forgets to mention that it was done on a back of dozens of employees, through $8m of other people's money. In that sense, taking on VC was anything but dumb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> They link to Jack's video in the post

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4PnSJDIJMg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4PnSJDIJMg)

But since COVID he's been posting on his channel a lot more frequently and – knowing his dayjob – the production value and time he spends on these things is really impressive

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbd- QOxzNKQifQfSuaH5I0A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbd-QOxzNKQifQfSuaH5I0A)

Now, he's been making videos for a long time, and obviously knows his way around producing great content, but still highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER21> I scrapped Patreon earlier [0] this year to find out how big the platform actually is and what's the composition of its users. I was very surprised to see that it's a truly mom & pop platform with very few whales.

[0] [https://twitter.com/synopsi/status/1233827705222615040?s=20](https://twitter.com/synopsi/status/1233827705222615040?s=20)

<comment><USER22> Interesting! But I was a little confused by how you use the word "whale". I thought it was a person who _spends_ a lot of money, so in this case a patron who contributes a lot of money or to many campaigns.

<comment><USER21> Sorry for the confusion. I meant a person that brings a lot of subscribers to the platform ergo generating them the revenue

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't understand why they need to raise money. Don't people constantly give them a cut of money? And most of the code is written already? How many maintenance programmers and customer support people do they need? Or is the money just so that a few people can get richer now somehow.

<comment><USER24> One possibility is the Owen Benjamin lawsuit, the suggestion being that patreon would have to pay for arbitration (under their previous TOS) for every complainant.

Not sure how meaningful that really is though...

<comment><USER25> Bit of a sunk cost I'm afraid. They f'd up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Patreon's UI is atrocious! At least for the things I use it for. If all it was was a way to give people a donation and nothing else then it wouldn't matter but many people use it as a way to distribute digital media for $$$

But, there is no catalog of media. All you can do is go through old blog posts. The UI of the blog posts is a single page app that you pick "more" at the bottom of every 10 posts. It crashes often and you have re-start back at post 1 when it does and paginate your way back to where you started. Fixing the pagination would be nice but fixing the entire UI around actually helping people distribute their media would be even better.

In fact many people don't even put their media on Patreon given how bad the UI is and are forced to find 3rd party solutions

Also, Patreon is horrible at discovery. For the most part you have to find out about people to become a patron of offsite. Some of that is the people on Patreon not knowing what they are doing but arguably Patreon needs a better way to browse people and concretely know what they'll get access to. Not just "you'll get access to special videos" but rather tell me exactly which videos, how many, how long are they, what is each individual video about, etc....

Even for artists Patreon could generate a series of thumbnails, small enough that just the thumbnails are not enough but large enough that you can tell what art you'll get access to.

Given how bad the UX is it's slightly infuriating they're the most popular of such sites. I guess that just means there is plenty of room for someone to steal their market.

Further, Patreon has lots of people scamming for $$$, reselling other people's art. There are Patreon accounts for blogs of pirate videos like someone runs a blogspot blog of torrents and has a Pateron to support their activity. Or someone uploads videos they don't own to a video site and has a Patreon to support their "cataloging".

<comment><USER3> Perhaps that UX is a part of its allure, it feels like you're in an exclusive club and you better check in every week to get the latest content.

<comment><USER27> Rubbish. For any given "new patron" relationship, most content is _past_ content. I wrote up how horrible the experience is in a comment on a past thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23691168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23691168)

As far as I can tell, Patreon's most compelling attribute is a clever name. If some other company nailed the discovery and "new connection" experience, they'd own the niche. There's a small network effect but I doubt it's terribly compelling since creators can easily exist on multiple networks.

<comment><USER15> The name _is_ really good.

<comment><USER28> In the late 90's or so I was thinking of "AET" for Artist and Entertainer Tribute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Seems they are growing well. They already have pretty good name recognition. It doesn't seem like a high resource business, unlike video hosting, and they already have a good monetization strategy (they basically take 2.9% of donations). Given that they are pretty close to a billion dollars a year, that would be close to $29 million/year.

Given all this, what is the purpose of raising more money at this time. They already have good name recognition, and should be turning a profit by now.

Sometimes, too much funding can end up being a curse, where the business loses focus on their core competency and tries to branch out too much.

EDIT:

Thanks to the commenters below, It looks like they take somewhere between 5 - 12% of donations. That is on top of the 2.9% processing fee. So it looks like they they could easily bring in between $50-100 million/year with the $1 Billion/year in donations that they are pretty close to bringing in(depending on the mix of plans people sign up for). This further reinforces the point that they have a pretty good monetization strategy.

<comment><USER30> But $29M/year I isn't that much. Especially as they're located in San Francisco and have about 200 employees (pretty sure not all are there). That gives you $145k per employee. That's roughly enough to cover salaries, assuming no other cost to run the business.

<comment><USER31> My question is WTF are those 200 people doing considering the main product of the company is an automated process and the code has already been written & tested over the previous years?

<comment><USER30> Running business requires people. Accounting, support, marketing, hr, security, procurement teams, lawyers, fraud teams, etc, etc. To build tech company you require more than just engineers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Given the extraordinary valuations being handed out right now in public markets to companies like Fiverr ($4.4b), Square ($74b), Etsy ($16b), Shopify ($136b), and so on, Patreon should just go public. Investors apparently can't get enough. Even persistently disregarded Overstock recently went up 2,000% in just five months, hitting their highest levels in 18 years of being public. Patreon can just say: cloud! remote! ecommerce! payments! and they'll get a sweet $10 billion dotcom bubble-style valuation. Wait a few days after the IPO, announce a stock split, and drop some more shares on the public's head, your stock will double. Tell them the follow-on is to expand your remoteness and cloudiness.

For the first time in two decades it often makes a lot more sense to be publicly traded for funding purposes than private. The public market hasn't been this ravenous for money losing tech'ish stocks since 1999-2000. If you're Patreon, it has to be a serious consideration to take advantage of the unhinged mania in the air. (Obviously with the understanding that Patreon may have other reasons for remaining private; although that can't last forever though, and when you're on a series E it's getting that time).

<comment><USER33> How does an average joe take advantage of this situation?

<comment><USER32> Own those stocks before they go up a lot, sell before they go down a lot. Not being snarky at all, that's actually the ideal way to take advantage of it; it's very difficult to time properly, and difficult to know which stocks will ultimately hyper-perform and which will not. For example, Upwork (UPWK) isn't participating comparatively much at all, while Overstock goes up ~3,900% bottom to top, and Fiverr goes up ~500% (disclosure: I don't own any of those stocks). Who expected Overstock to go from $3 to $120? It's wild speculative behavior by investors, a feeding frenzy pouring out of the boom in Shopify's stock (along with the relevant aspects of the pandemic, including online ordering). In general the best bet for an average investor interested in taking advantage of the insanity, is to not try to perfectly time a top or bottom - if you catch a wave, accept good enough and get out, instead of reaching for the final pennies on the table and riding it back down.

Generating large returns has been easy for a while now. You have to retain the self-discipline to remind yourself that getting 40% in a day is ridiculous (as with Zoom today), that in normal times that is two or three years of good returns. It's about consciously restricting your own reach for greed. Average investors that get lucky in bubbles also tend to get crushed by them as well.

As an example, back in March I posted my thoughts on buying during the crash and I was buying Square in the $30s at that time. I'm out now. If Square goes on up to $200 or $300 per share, I simply don't care. My returns were easy, ridiculous and good enough, I sleep extremely well having exited with the gains I generated. They're mine now, I captured that return, locked it in, and that's the single most important thing. It's a far better thing to secure already massive gains than to reach for more, being greedy, and risk all of it if the mania turns south (which it will at some point, nobody knows when though and trying to pinpoint that is most often a fool's errand). Always have the discipline to walk away if you hit a homerun. The crazy returns (ie anything far beyond reasonable, very outsized) generated at this time are mostly not skill, they're luck; spotting a position to enter can be skill from years of mental training, however getting 500% on eg Fiverr in five months is mostly dumb luck (to be clear, it's the particularly outsized return that is the dumb luck part of that); cash that luck in, as it will inevitably turn against you.

There are some very straight-forward moves an average investor can make to shield theirself as well, requiring no particular skill. For example if you generate a large return quickly in this market, remove the initial principle, maybe a reasonable chunk of profit as well, and let the rest ride if you have a strong desire to continue to participate. Mentally accept that portion as money that may very well go to zero, to emotionally steel yourself for a bad outcome if the market crashes at some point; that's your speculative money in this gambler's market, having safeguarded the other portion. If you care to, you can even constantly peel your principle back out of these stocks as they climb, rather than aiming for a particular high point to sell in bulk (and trading fees are widely now zero, which can add-up in that context depending on the position size). Losing a big chunk of your principle investment generally stings a lot more than losing a big chunk of some easy outsized gains, always keep that in mind. It is most often easy come / easy go in markets like this one, and the only way to avoid the easy go part of that is to exit the gains at some point.

You might see a lot of people saying the market can't go down because interest rates are so low / zero. Interest rates have been between very low and zero for a decade now, and they'll probably be low for a long time into the future. The market can return to its former multiples from eg 2014-2015 (when rates were also de facto zero), while rates are at zero. Don't let yourself fall for that premise, as though this market's extreme upward trajectory is guaranteed. A crash just back to the multiples we had in 2014-2015 would hammer this market, taking it down by 30-40% (and the more bubbly stocks would particularly get smashed).

<comment><USER33> Isn't this basically daytrading? What is your stop loss/risk management strategy?

<comment><USER32> I'm not an advocate for day trading, I'm primarily a value investor. What I'm advocating for here is some very basic risk management, risk limiting, for an average investor swimming in a bubble (with some existing gains). If you're an average investor just now looking to enter the market, my advice would be to only do that via on-going buying of an index fund or equivalent, something you plan to continue in good times and bad for example.

That's not to say there are no buys remaining in this market that will yet produce huge returns, rather, I personally wouldn't provide advice on specific stocks on the premise of seeking large returns here (ie which stocks will be the next SQ or SHOP; what's going up 500% in the next six months). Square under $40 was an easy buy, it had a large margin of safety in its valuation; at $166, six months later, I consider it dangerous and wouldn't advise anyone to buy it as a new position (that's what 300%+ in six months will do).

When the parent asked how an average investor should take advantage of the situation, I took that to mean: how should an average investor that is already in this market manage the context (rather than it meaning to enter the market for the first time here and now). I'm looking at this market from a particular angle: I'd say an average investor, already in the market, should take advantage of the situation by looking to exit some or all of their gains (take advantage of the market to exit value; which is what eg Tesla is doing when diluting now, or SV companies are doing rushing to the IPO exits); that's merely my opinion though.

I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about.

Say you bought Square (SQ) between $40 and $80 during/after the March plunge (or even if you caught it in June and are already up 50-60%). Not an abnormal scenario, as many people will be sitting on large gains from the past five or six months.

So one of two scenarios related to what I've said (simplified a bit for brevity):

1) You're sitting on a large gain now, maybe 100%-300% in a mere five to six months. Take your principle off the table only, optionally with a bit of profit as well, and let the rest ride if you want to continue to participate in this market mania to see how far it can go. Or sell it all, if you're fully comfortable with your gains, and bag the full profit here. Either scenario is quite reasonable depending on the person doing the investing. It will heavily depend on your personality type, it's important to understand yourself, your impulses, your weaknesses & strengths, how you react to things. Some people might want to leave more of the profit in the market, some might feel better pulling it all. What I'd suggest at this point for an average investor, given this scenario, is removing the principle at a minimum.

That's not day trading. I'm not suggesting jumping in and out of SQ, trading it constantly trying to profit on small swings. The scenario is that you established a specific position, eg at $40, $80 or $100, and now you're looking at how to either exit or otherwise reduce risk in a reasonable manner. In my view, most of what is left to take advantage of here, is the selling opportunity being presented.

2) You noticed your position was up a lot in a short amount of time, eg it went from $40 to $60, or $60 to $100. Rather than debating when exactly to sell all or a big chunk of it, you sell gradually as it climbs, until either you're entirely out of it or you've extracted your principle (then decide on strategy for the profit remaining). It's of course nothing more than averaging across sales, some people feel more comfortable doing that than selling all at once, especially if they think a stock might keep moving higher yet and they want to try to capture some of that remaining upside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> so they pay out $1B and charge 8% for middle plan which is $80M revenue a year?

i don't see how that works in public markets...though to give them credit they should probably try to go public sooner rather than later to take advantage of the froth...

also 8% on top of payment processing fees seems like a lot, though I guess creators just account for that in deciding what fees to charge...

<comment><USER35> Not having to deal with chargebacks and the upkeep of such a website to receive donations is enough for creators to pay the 5/8/12% [0]. It also helps that Patreon has been around for a while, so users see them as safe both in terms of security for their CC info, and for being easy to cancel a subscription whenever they want.

0: [https://www.patreon.com/product/pricing](https://www.patreon.com/product/pricing)

<comment><USER36> As a patron, there is also very little friction in adding an extra creator to the set you are supporting, which turning it around is a huge value-add for creators: fans are more likely to add them to their Patreon account than to create a login for a pay wall or regularly click a "donate now!" button.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's good to see Patreon doing well. For me it didn't really work out that well, with 300 USD / mo being the height of support for openfaas. Github Sponsors is doing better - but one thing Patreon taught me was to send regular updates to sponsors, and that seems to work reasonably well with retention. Link on GitHub if anyone wants to see how I run it [http://github.com/alexellis/](http://github.com/alexellis/)

</comment><comment><USER38> I currently earn $941/month on Patreon and I am grateful to my patrons. However if you are reading this and you support me, I would kindly ask you to do the chore of switching over to GitHub Sponsors. They take 0% of the donation, as opposed to 10%, and although I would prefer to use a not-for- profit service, the fact that Microsoft is already well-established financially and Patreon is on a collision course with Capitalism, the GitHub Sponsors money feels more secure.

In my opinion it was deeply unethical to start Patreon as a startup instead of a non-profit. How can you justify it? For-profit means the goal all along was to skim some portion off the top rather than to make a livelihood enabling content creators to make ends meet on their own.

<comment><USER39> WordPress.com with one of the paid plans is good for the same reason. It's backed by a real company that's been around a long time in tech terms. Their membership thing works similarly to Patreon in that a person manages their subscriptions in a central location instead of going through different proprietary payment flows, but the money goes to your Stripe account.

It would be nice if they also made the subscription in Stripe so it's portable, but Automattic has been around long enough to trust with handling it. On the customer/supporter side, I think knowing they aren't at the whim of the blog owner for cancellation is a perk.

<comment><USER19> WordPress raised on a 3 Billion valuation last year. They are very much on a unicorn track.

<comment><USER39> I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is this cause of that YT lawsuit think they are going through. I feel like both this and that happening at once is not an accident

</comment><comment><USER41> Patreon has its issues, but it's empowered so many creators. I just hope the VC cycle doesn't kill the golden goose.

</comment><comment><USER42> Just to clear it up, it's 1.2B pre money.

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't really get Patreon.

Youtube is a better discovery funnel/tunnel.

Even PayPal offers better payment fees (especially for micropayments).

The only thing I see Patreon offering is a fairly coherent system for managing and communicating with one's "patrons". That's not worth nothing, especially to people without existing website infrastructure already. But it's not worth a lot to people who have that in place.

<comment><USER44> YouTube is a capricious and uknowable black box controlled by an ever changing algorithm that can decide on a whim that your content is not worth paying you for and which will grant advertising revenue to any any corparation whose work you are covering/transforming under fair use. It can destroy your livelihood in the blink of an eye and you likely will not have any human oversight unless you manage to raise a major fuss on social media.

PayPal offers nothing, afaik, to manage your community or tiered rewards and certainly has no ability to show how much a given creator is receiving. It was clearly never designed for recurring payments and when I've used it for those it seems like it was only grudgingly implemented.

None of these other systems have a good experience for the person, like myself, who donates to a large number different people. On Patreon I can easily view and manage all my contributions in one place. Becoming a patron for a new creator is seamless.

Despite my love for the platform though, them doing investment rounds seems bizarre to me. They've got a good thing going, and I'm not sure that dramatically increasing profitability requirements is a good thing.

<comment><USER43> Very fair points. I hadn't really considered it from the "patron" side of things (I'm a patron but only to 2 people).

I mentioned YT as a discovery mechanism, I wasn't implying anything about it as a revenue mechanism. I probably haven't thought it carefully enough, given that I don't really need the discovery mechanism to support my own work.

PayPal's micropayment service is MUCH better than Patreon's. (or anyone else's as far as I can tell). I make most of my income via PayPal, and the majority of the payments are US$1. PayPal's micropayment fee structure saves me 22c per $1 transaction. That's a huge impact for me (possibly as much as US$2k per month). The only way I could feasibly move away from PayPal is to somehow force/convince most of the people who support my software development work to pay more than US$12 (the point at which regular fee structures start to be better). That would mean convincing roughly 4500 people ("patrons" :) to switch payment platforms too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I just realized one of the founders is the guy of Pomplamoose.

I think the only downside of this is that they will reduce the music creation.

<comment><USER46> Well, as I understand it, Pomplamoose is mostly run by Nataly, not Jack (who's the CEO of Patreon).

<comment><USER17> Seems to be wider than that e.g. I know Ben Rose & others have handled production of many of the songs, arrangement is done live in the studio.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> So excited about this. And really proud to be working with the Patreon team through Avo

[https://www.avo.app/customers/patreon-case- study](https://www.avo.app/customers/patreon-case-study)

</comment><comment><USER48> Wow, they got the dude from Pomplamoose to make this video, that's awesome.

On a serious note, I would LOVE for Patreon to offer a video platform (add a peertube node or something? no idea how it works), maybe I can even stop using YouTube.

<comment><USER49> Not sure if this is a joke or not, just in case it's not:

Jack Conte of Pomplamoose is one of the co-founders of Patreon - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patreon#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patreon#History)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I dont really use it, what does it add? I assumed it was just another payments platform. Like fansonly, I figure they're easily replaced.

</comment><comment><USER51> Seems overvalued, considering how Youtube's "join" button is a better deal for everyone.

<comment><USER17> See very first comment here, the "join" button certainly isn't "a better deal" for creators, you need a much larger user base to get good revenue.

Not to mention… patreon isn't limited to youtubers? Webcomics or serials authors can be on patreon, what would they do on YouTube? Likewise podcasts, the average podcast listener has no reason or incentive to go sub to a YouTube channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> How many letters do companies usually get to before they go public or stop taking investment?

</comment><comment><USER53> Isn't Patreon at risk of bankruptcy due to previusly poorly written T&C's?

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQgOPYdGi9Y](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQgOPYdGi9Y)

<comment><USER54> I think the "risk" is dramatically overstated.

Patreon is facing the possibility of going through the arbitration process with 72 people, who are seeking it on the basis that by banning a creator, Patreon is interfering with a business relationship between viewer and creator.

The theory that Patreon will go bankrupt is based on the assumption that these 72 instances of arbitration will go through and the costs of arbitration will be enough to bankrupt the company.

<comment><USER53> It was in Patreon's own T&C's that _required_ users to go through the arbitration process. I believe the 72 are just from the followers of Owen Benjamin who are suing. There could potentially be many more from other followers of users that Patreon kicked off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> They are another facebook. They will turn cancerous very soon, if they haven't already.

<comment><USER56> The two questions to me are (a) what content will they ban and (b) how badly do they want to increase their cut of pledges?

For (a), they've already banned a lot of adult content (thus the rise of OnlyFans, until they follow suit), and they'll probably ban more if they get enough attention from either media, angry card processors, or both.

For (b), they've already narrowly avoided fucking this up once back in 2017 ([https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee- structure](https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure)). They increased fees in 2019 ([https://support.patreon.com/hc/en- us/articles/360024952552-P...](https://support.patreon.com/hc/en- us/articles/360024952552-Patreon-Creator-Plans)) but at least grandfathered in past users, preventing their existing userbase from being too much of a flight risk.

<comment><USER57> > For (a), they've already banned a lot of adult content (thus the rise of > OnlyFans, until they follow suit)

How would OnlyFans follow suit on that? Isn't their entire thing adult content?

<comment><USER35> They'll be fine since the credit card processor pushback is unlikely since they seem to use ccbill which is generally OK with adult content: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24294801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24294801)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> they are brok AF. someone needs to pay for the litigations they found themselves in by censoring their own creators before they go under. lol. only dumb mofos pour they money into this black hole.

<comment><USER59> They are a private business and are allowed to refuse doing service with anyone for any reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> So many big tech cos are rely on the regulated nature of payments to dominate their market. The more regulation, the more the need for an intermediary to act as the tyrannical banker. This makes the case for crypto more obvious.

<comment><USER61> No, it makes the case that crypto is so hard to use that people would rather use Patreon.

<comment><USER62> Once upon a time (still in this century!) it was so hard to have voice conversations via the internet, people were willing to pay substantial amounts of money to the phone company to reach someone on a different state.

<comment><USER59> Right, and to solve ease of use crypto problems we essentially made new banks (i.e. Coinbase). And we are back to step 1 of people not wanting middlemen taking cuts. But hey, keep dreaming crypto is somehow going to solve problems differently the last hundred+ years of the physical financial world, because as far as I can see, the end results are going to be the same short of implanting chips directly into people.

<comment><USER62> > And we are back to step 1 of people not wanting middlemen taking cuts.

Working on it: [https://hub20.io/architecture/#a-balanced- approach](https://hub20.io/architecture/#a-balanced-approach)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Just become a patron of them geez

</comment><comment><USER64> Patreon's tendency for police content that doesn't agree with their politics and values is unacceptable.

I hope they fail so a neutral provider can take their place. I know of [https://www.subscribestar.com/](https://www.subscribestar.com/) \- are there others?

<comment><USER65> Patreon's tendency to police content that doesn't agree with their _morals_ is commendable.

They are _a_ platform, not a monopoly.

I hope they succeed, and I personally hope that companies that have morals that I think are worse than theirs fail.

They help people discover content, too.

I think a "moral-neutral provider" is a terrible idea, because it provides a platform to people with deplorable morals.

EDIT: Judging a company by their actions is a valid thing to do. It's remarkable to me that this is controversial.

<comment><USER66> And by deplorable morals, you mean people that don't share your morals? So, like, most of the world I imagine?

Morality is an opinion. And in my view, your electric company shutting off your power because they don't like who you are would be positively dystopian.

Let's say Patreon took a strong moral stance that you absolutely disagreed with. Would you still think it commendable?

<comment><USER65> Yes, morality is an opinion. "Nazis are bad." That is indeed my opinion. If I found out that Amazon was working with Nazis, I would try to pressure Amazon to stop.

What would you do? No, honestly. What would you do?

Do you think Amazon should freely and proudly work with Nazis, "because of neutrality"?

"So, like, most of the world I imagine?" No, I think there's a pretty low bar of morality that most of the world does in fact agree upon. I'm not asking for much more than that. Others might, and I might hope they lose out in the long run.

To answer your questions:

"Deciding to punch or not to punch old ladies is an important decision. I think it's commendable that Patreon is making a moral decision." Yes, it's implied that I commend Patreon because they are making the moral decision I agree with, not just that they have made a moral decision.

"How to stop old ladies from getting punched" is a political discussion. "In general, people shouldn't punch old ladies" is a moral position. "We will not work with people who advocate punching old ladies" is a moral decision I would agree with. "We will exclusively work with people who advocate punching all old ladies" is a moral decision I would disagree with.

Judging a company by their actions is a valid thing to do. It's remarkable to me that this is up for debate.

And I would judge that power company as being morally wrong, unless I agreed with them that the person they shut off was repugnant. Should PG&E provide power to the California Nazi Party? Maybe not.

If you want to make fun of me, perhaps you would enjoy this song:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e1aGEb2R90](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e1aGEb2R90)

Yes, some people make boycott decisions that I think are bad. Some boycotts are good, though.

<comment><USER67> > Yes, morality is an opinion.

Quite frankly: no, unless you subscribe to the sort of philosophy that that believes there is such thing as morality. It's an attractive philosophy, but nobody I've met has ever actually behaved that way.

If I punched your face and gave you a bloody nose, you would almost certainly not act like I simply have an alternative opinion about where my knuckles belong.

Edit: I think we might have a difference in how we're using language. An opinion, as I'm using the term, is a belief that we don't strongly believe that other people ought to believe as well.

<comment><USER65> What?

"Morality: principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior."

You have never met someone who believes you can make a distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior?

Please state clearly what you do mean, or the exact objections you have with what I'm saying.

I don't "simply have an alternative opinion." I view your actions as wrong.

I'm sorry, but you're framing this as a debate where I have a bizarre opinion, and I don't understand your claims or objections.

There are valid reasons to boycott companies. Do you disagree with that?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: AngularJS vs Backbone.js - <AUTHOR> http://www.pearstopears.com/#!/comparison/15

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, I just built this app to compare javascript frameworks where people can vote on different ideas. Let me know what you think and any ideas you have!

I thought it would be good to have clarity on what many people think on how the frameworks compare rather than just having blogposts with individual opinions. This can aggregate what peoples' thoughts are and the arguments with the most votes are shown at the top.

</comment><comment><USER2> Note: this was written in Angular</comment>


Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly? - <AUTHOR> https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why-did-moving-the-mouse-cursor-cause-windows-95-to-run-more-quickly <comment><USER3> This wasn't just restricted to COM port based I/O either. Back then I had a Logitech bus mouse. The mouse was connected directly to an ISA card, and didn't use the COM ports as most mice did back then. (I needed the extra COM port/IRQ for my modems.)

I too witnessed the 'windows is running slow when installing' bug. I often would use the mouse cursor to 'mark' the position of the loading bar (we really are spoiled for speed these days). That way when I would walk-away from an install I could see if the progress meter moved while I was away. More often then not the progress bar would still be where it was when I had left. By moving the mouse activity would return and the installation would continue.

I always assumed it was the graphics that were not being updated. A small bug with the install would keep running but the lack of input interrupts caused the display to get 'stuck'. (That would explain the sudden 'jump' in progress bar movement as soon as I wiggled the mouse.)

<comment><USER4> Get off my lawn!

But what newbies will bever know the heck of: dip switch settings for IRQ for modems.

Thats what literally got me ___into_ __computers...

In order to dial up BBSs and play tthe Pit and dl warez.

—-

Ive told this story before, but in about 1992? Or so - i got grounded for a month because i had been calling in long distance to a bbs in san jose to play the pit - and racked up a long distance bill of $926 - my dad was livid.

He yelled at me and said "why are you wasting all this time with computers! Its never going to do anything for you!"

Years later after i became successful with yee olde computerz! He apologized to me and said "im sorry i yelled at you for that time you cost me all that money in long distance charges."

<comment><USER5> > But what newbies will bever know the heck of: dip switch settings for IRQ > for modems.

And dip switches to set hard drives to primary/secondary. Get that wrong and your machine didn't boot.

<comment><USER6> And making sure ATM0(?) was sent so that the modem was quiet...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A somewhat similar effect is alive and well on Android: background processes run measurably faster while user holds/moves their finger across the screen, and couple of seconds thereafter.

Mechanism is a bit different though: SufraceFlinger process that is responsible for acquiring touchscreen input, temporarily boosts CPU and GPU frequencies to make sure screen animations are nice and fluid.

<comment><USER8> A previous employer of mine explicitly requested this behaviour in their app. The app showed a map, and could align map north with compass north; to save battery, it would drop to an incredibly low frame rate (1fps?) about one second after your finger left the screen. It achieves the power goal, and has a high rating in the App Store, so I learned something about user requirements and being humble from this experience.

<comment><USER9> Question (I don't know how Android works) -- how is there even a "frame rate" for a map that isn't moving? Shouldn't it not be doing anything at all when nobody is touching anything?

<comment><USER10> > could align map north with compass north

Maybe the map turns as you turn so as to maintain compass north.

<comment><USER8> Just to confirm: yes, that is exactly what I meant.

<comment><USER9> Oh I see, it was supposed to align in real time, I missed that. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Further, when installing, it would hang at some point without any sign of a prompt but would instantly continue if the mouse were moved. You could easily test this - turn your mouse upside-down during install and wait (to avoid any incidental mouse motion due to desk vibration etc).

Told my IT friend who was loading my machine and he said "you're confused; I've installed hundreds of times and never seen that". So I turned his mouse upside down and waited. Voila! It hung.

<comment><USER12> I recall quite a few times having to send a message to the message queue in code I'd written for this reason. I forget why though - someone can probably remind me, if I didn't send a message it would just stop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here I was thinking this was some sort of urban myth caused by superstitions in an age with less abundance of easily accessible tech information.

Guess I owe my dad an apology now.

<comment><USER14> Me too. What a humbling slap-in-the-face, no? Sometimes when an idea sounds silly, _and_ comes from a less technical person, one might disregard it even though it's easily testable/provable.

<comment><USER15> I love these kind of issues, here are two classics:

\- Open Office won't print on Tuesdays: [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161/comments/28)

\- Can't send email more than 500 miles: [http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles](http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles)

<comment><USER16> One thing about the famous "500 miles" post that I realized doesn't make sense:

\----

An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a lightly- loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays.

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

$ units 1311 units, 63 prefixes

You have: 3 millilightseconds You want: miles * 558.84719 / 0.0017893979

\----

But surely for Sendmail to register a "connect" with a remote SMTP server would require at least one (or many?) round trips to the remote server, so one-way speed of light time doesn't seem like it would really be relevant. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER17> Possibly the introduction wherein the author says:

"The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining."

If memory serves he goes into further detail about the alterations and some common objections to the story in his FAQ:

[https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail- faq.html](https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From a comment: Try opening a large file with Notepad on a contemporary machine. The window must not be full screen. When loaded, mark all text using the mouse (the keyboard works as well, it just needs more manual skill). While still holding the button down (and marking) move the mouse down, so the text gets marked and scrolled. Now compare the scroll speed while holding the mouse still versus wiggling it. Depending on your machine the speed up can be several times faster.

It's not just Notepad :-) I do this often, when I have to mark a lot of things.

<comment><USER19> It's not clear that this is caused by the same effect. A commenter suggests that this behaviour is actually due to how mouse acceleration affects scrolling speed which I am more inclined to believe.

<comment><USER20> Yeah there is no way this has anything to do with the same behavior. What's likely happening is there's a delay in auto-scroll, and by generating new mouse events your triggering manual scrolls at a higher rate (or in addition to?) than auto-scroll.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When I used to hang out at Radio Shack in the mall to play on a TRS-80's after school, they would draw a pair of asterisks in the corner of the screen and occasionally flash one of them on and off, as they loaded from cassette tape.

One of the older kids who hung out there would tell us newer kids that we could speed up loading by repeatedly pressing the up arrow key on the keyboard.

Of course us new kids didn't realize that the loading speed was completely determined by the cassette tape speed, which the keyboard couldn't possibly affect.

But at least it gave us something to do while waiting, and the older kids something to laugh at.

<comment><USER22> Reminds me back in the day using a file sharing/community program called Caraccho (for Mac) - similar to Hotline. Often people would queue up on someone's server (running of their desktop computer) to download a file since the server admin could set how many concurrent downloads from all users were allowed. Folks would send messages to people saying that if they hit Command-Q it makes the client run in "quick mode" which will speed up their download. Of course some folks would fall for this and you'd see their name drop off the server, moving everyone up 1 spot in the queue. Super effective for users that had not setup an avatar indicating they were new to the system and would fall for anything once.

<comment><USER23> Reminds me of the runescape cheat of alt+f4

<comment><USER24> I'm confident that the Alt+f4 cheat-code was around before Runescape ;) It was inevitably told to every new member at our LAN parties in the late 90s - <USER2> few who knew were often assigned admin duty to diagnose network/PC problems (which were frequent).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's this bit of code:

        while(GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0)
        {
            TranslateMessage(&msg);
            DispatchMessage(&msg);
        }

The mouse isr would cause a loop like this to execute at some point, processing all the messages on the queue. Win95 had preemption, but it ran at 100hz. Moving the mouse caused additional queue processing on top of the time sliced preemption.

<comment><USER26> At that time, it was more like the 75mhz range.

<comment><USER27> Note he said 100hz not mhz. Essentially 100 times per second the message queue would process but if you moved the mouse it would process faster.

<comment> the-dude And the BSDs and Linux also have the HZ parameter for scheduling and for a long time the default has been as low as 100 Hz.

Not sure what the current status quo is.

<comment><USER20> Linux's default varies per architecture & platform. For a long, long time on ARM it still defaulted to 100hz. I think it's more like 250hz or 500hz now? You'll also see x86 desktop-focused build set it to 1000hz.

But scheduling happens far more often than this tick rate, too, so it's only preemption for busy threads and controls the timing windows for things like DVFS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Ah, the operant conditioning of software.

To this day, when waiting for some long or compute-intensive operation, I tend to instinctively move the mouse around. I guess this may be why.

Ironically, even though I grew up on Windows, I don't remember any actual case of "moving the mouse speeds thing up" on this OS - I only remember the infamous Linux cases (mouse move regenerates entropy, unblocking processes that got stuck when generating a random number call). But there must have been something, and I must have experienced it early enough in my childhood.

<comment><USER21> While running emacs over a modem to arpanet or dialup, I got into the habit of regularly typing ^A ^E to pace my cursor back and forth across the current line, to keep the connection and emacs warm.

(Like a caged leopard or mad scientist pacing back and forth.)

I could feel how responsive the connection and emacs were over time by the delay between typing and seeing the cursor move. Both the network and emacs contributed to the feeling:

There was the overall "weather" of the network: sometimes sunny and fast, sometimes sprinkled with light delays, and sometimes stormy congestion. Then there were occasional incidents that came and went, like network hiccoughs and emacs paging and grinding. And then there was the overall load of the system, which gave you the baseline delay (which gave it a very tactile day -vs- night feeling, since you got more of the machine to yourself during the night when it felt snappy, but it felt sluggish during the day).

It really felt like either the network, emacs, or both would fall asleep if you didn't keep them warm and lavish them with attention.

A VAX 11/780 running Gosling Emacs over a dialup had a very different feel than a PDP-10 running ITS Emacs over the arpanet. The busy VAX was bursty and had a lot of bumpy paging -- you had to keep your buffers warm or they would all get paged out and it would take a long time to wake back up, but there was no network delay from the direct dialup. While the PDP-10 ran smoothly like a well lubricated steam locomotive, sometimes slowing down when busy, but hovering around same speed instead of bursting, and the delay was mostly the feel of arpanet congestion and imps dozing off.

(Or so I imagined. I had a lot of time to sit and think while waiting for the cursor to move again, and the mind wanders and wonders what's happening...)

TOPS-20 had a wonderful ^T keyboard interrupt that you could type to instantly show the system load and time. (But of course you couldn't use that in emacs, which puts the tty into raw mode.)

Somebody at the university implemented ^T to 4.2 BSD on the cs department's busy VAX 11/780, by modifying the tty driver. But initially, there was no limit to how often you could type it, and calculating the current system load wasn't a trivial operation.

So on a fast terminal, if you held down and auto-repeated ^T, it would bring the entire system to its knees, and you could watch the load go up and up and up as you caused it to! Very satisfying indeed.

Eventually they put in a one-per-second limit on ^T.

<comment><USER28> > _While running Emacs over a modem, I got into the habit of regularly typing > ^A ^E to pace my cursor back and forth across the current line, to keep > connection warm._

Huh. I got into that habit _recently_ , because over the past year, I've been frequently working on the go, by SSH-ing to my home desktop and using Emacs terminal frame (emacsclient -t)[0]. I do regular "weather checks" with ^A and ^E - because the hardware has its weather, SSH has its weather, and the link I'm on has its own weather too (particularly when using an LTE hotspot, though I've noticed even when being in the same LAN, the response time is not always consistent).

What's old is new again :).

\--

[0] - With terminal emulators supporting 256 colors, it looks very similar to the GUI Emacs. This mode of working is really quite good, and lets me use my underpowered sidearm 2-in-1 tablet/netbook to do things that would ordinarily require powerful hardware.

<comment><USER29> My ISP drops SSH connections (actually any TCP connections) that have been idle for too long. I have worked around that by adding

      Host *
      ServerAliveInterval <suitable number>

to my SSH client config. Works wonders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sorry, but I'd just like to point out that top answer (about async I/O in Win95) is wrong and sounds like someone repeating something he (mis)heard once.

I actually wrote apps in the Win95 days, and I can say that async (i.e. overlapped) I/O, which seems to be what he's talking about in the rest of the answer about IO completions, basically does not exist at all on the Win9x series; it was an NT-exclusive feature. There were some bits and pieces that seemed to work somewhat from what I remember, but to quote my trusty old WIN32.HLP regarding the ReadFile function:

"Windows 95

For asynchronous read operations, hFile can be a communications resource, mailslot, or named pipe handle opened with the FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED flag by CreateFile, or a socket handle returned by the socket or accept functions. _Windows 95 does not support asynchronous read operations on disk files._ "

...so his example about file copying and installers is invalidated. The correct answer(s) are of course lower down on the page and in the comments, where everyone talking about "pumping the message loop" gets it right.

The second anecdote about scrolling behaviour also hits vaguely beside the point; it has nothing to do with multitasking, is only tangentially related to "pumping the message loop", and can be explained very simply: moving the mouse causes a WM_MOUSEMOVE message to be sent to the window, containing the new coordinates of the cursor. The edit control that Notepad is composed of handles this message when in selection mode by checking if the position is outside of the control, and scrolls appropriately by a single amount if so. If you continue moving the mouse outside the control with a selection highlighted, the generation of WM_MOUSEMOVE continues, and thus the scrolling too. Stop moving the mouse, and the scrolling stops. There is nothing else to it. Other controls/windows (e.g. browsers) may handle this select-scroll behaviour differently; some will start a timer that continues to issue scroll messages as long as you hold down the button, and some even fancier ones will vary the rate of the timer depending on how far from the control's edge the current position is (so you can adjust the auto-scrolling speed easily.)

Only the third answer is when we start getting closer to an accurate explanation, the fourth answer about WM_TIMER is quite off-the-mark, and then the rest of them vary in accuracy between "close, but not quite" and "no, just no."

(Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons I don't use SE/SO.)

</comment><comment><USER31> I remember when I was a kid that I used this "hack" to speed up installations.

If I moved the mouse the HDD would spin furiously but once the mouse stopped it would resume trickling the writes/reads again.

<comment><USER32> "large applications that could take an hour to install could be reduced to 15 minutes with suitable mouse input."

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So in today's world... why do so many PCs emit a slight sound when moving the mouse. I know that there are high frequencies involved and periphery is one of the worst perpetrators of electromagnetic interference, but I still find that strange. And what exactly is emitting the sound here?

<comment><USER34> Generally it's cheap/poorly designed audio amplifier circuits. Even though modern PC audio is mostly digital, the final stage (getting sound out the speaker) is still analog. If the motherboard designer isn't careful about how they place/isolate/ground the analog audio circuitry, it can pick up some of the PC's stray high frequency noise which gets worse the more you turn up the volume since now the noise gets amplified too.

A work around if you have a motherboard that is particularly bad about this is to use the digital audio output (S/PDIF via an optical or RCA jack) to connect an external amplifier or you could stream it via software. This tends to only be an option if the machine is stationary and not terribly realistic for people with a laptop on the go.

<comment><USER19> They claim the PC is emitting the sound, not their speakers. So they are likely describing coil whine, not interference.

<comment><USER34> You're assuming a precision in their post that I wasn't (i.e. that it's actually coming from the PCB, rather than 'the collection of parts called a PC sitting in front of me'... which would include the speakers for most people)

<comment><USER35> > You're assuming a precision in their post that I wasn't (i.e. that it's > actually coming from the PCB, rather than 'the collection of parts called a > PC sitting in front of me'... which would include the speakers for most > people)

For what it's worth, this _is_ hacker news. I concede not everyone is tech savvy but I tend to respond to comments as if they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Making a huge selection with mouse in LibreOffice spreadsheets even today goes faster if you move the mouse while dragging one endpoint of the selection over the spreadsheet borders which causes the sheet to scroll. Likely the very same cause: there's a timer or other repeating tick to scroll content at a reasonable speed but the sheet is also scrolled when input events wake up the same loop.

<comment><USER37> I remember this with any selection in windows on at least 3.1/95/98/SE.

This happened if you kept the mouse just inside the window and moved it about 10-20px up and down in/out pf the window in the direction of the selection.

It was a way for me to scroll faster than with the wheel or cursors on web pages if you selected some text and then kept the selection on the end of the screen and moved the mouse wildly in the edge of the screen.

As I was younger then, there was probably a better solution to do this but I was not aware of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> We had a milling machine that ran from Win95, and we had to discipline ourselves not to move the mouse when it was milling a complex shape. Otherwise the machine would stutter and give us a nasty finish on the machined part.

</comment><comment><USER39> I remember writing documentation circa 2002 for a development environment that required Visual Studio 6.0 and as part of the install notes I wrote something along the lines of -

"During installation constantly move the mouse in a circular motion over the installation window. This speeds up installation roughly 2-3x"

Good times :)

</comment><comment><USER40> In some applications with scrolling work areas, I'd end up trying to move it in pixel perfect straight lines when dragging stuff past the visible work area, so as to speed up the refresh _and_ keep the mouse in the part of the border where you get maximum scrolling speed.

I always assumed that Windows95 was just scared of mice, so if you shook one at it, it would either run faster in fear, leaving a trail of random disc sectors, or suddenly hide under its special blue blanket and refuse to come out again.

</comment><comment><USER41> I have a terrifically annoying bug that shows up somewhere between X and GTK and all Gecko-based browsers. While I'm scrolling down in a web page with the mouse wheel, within a few seconds the page will stop moving. The mouse will still move around, but it will stop changing its cursor based on hovered elements, and further mouse actions will do nothing. It will unjam itself something like 30 seconds later if I wait, or immediately if I press any key. Then all the queued mouse events will rush through at once, so if the key I hit was Ctrl, the page's contents zoom out and I have to reset it. If I hit Shift, it walks back through the history and I lose my place. So I was hitting Alt for a while, besides shopping for a distro.

I couldn't debug it normally, or even get a clue about which package needs to be downgraded, because I can't pop over to the terminal without unjamming it. So I'd need another machine with which to SSH in, and those are all unusable ATM (well, I probably just needed to suck it up and install SSH on the phone). But ${somehow} I found out that triggering a redraw with ${something} also unjams it, so I set the clock in the XFCE panel (also GTK, FWIW) to display seconds as well. Now it still jams but always for less than a second.

<comment><USER41> > ${somehow}, ${something}

Sorry, something resurfaced-- I think I remember now that I switched on seconds for the sake of finding out more precisely how long a jam would last. Immediately it became obvious that they didn't last long anymore, and that the reason it used to be "30-ish seconds" was whenever the _minutes_ finally changed, it broke loose just the same way.

<comment><USER41> Hmm, it goes away if I use Fluxbox instead of XFCE. Neat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wow, I remember doing this as a kid and thinking to myself that I was being stupid because surely wiggling the mouse would make the computer have to process more input and actually slow down whatever I was impatiently waiting for. I still did it though, because I _felt_ like it made things go faster. Turns out that intuition was right. Funny how we can learn to do things that actually work even when our conscious mind doesn't believe they do.

</comment><comment><USER43> This reminds me of using NUM LOCK to see if your CPU was responding to the A20 interrupt.

<comment><USER24> And this reminds me of when I accidentally figured out playing MOD sound files in DOS 6 with a new and especially beautiful STM/MOD player at the time would sound considerably better from my 486's PC speaker if I pressed the pause/break key to literally lock up the system. Apparently the player would buffer enough of the song that even though everything froze up, the sound would continue playing. I couldn't afford a dedicated Soundblaster/Gravis sound card but I still pined to hear all the amazing music coming out from the demo scene. The quality of course wasn't comparable to a dedicated soundcard but it was still a huge improvement over the typical beeps/bloops of the built-in PC speaker.

<comment> core-questions Ooh, which MOD player? I was partial to Cubic Player, and before that VP (Visual Player), which was the first place I ever saw an oscilloscope.

4 channels realtime audio + 5 osc's on a 286 out the PC speaker. Phenomenal. Sounded like shit until I got a Sound Blaster, though....

<comment><USER44> Galaxy 2.12 (glx212.zip) is my favorite for pre-386 machines. It'll do remarkable things with a covox or even pc speaker, and realtime FFT (not faux bouncing bars, either!) to boot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Sometimes the software itself may even just be designed that way too. [https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Hidden-Tax- Moves](https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Hidden-Tax-Moves)

</comment><comment><USER46> From the answer on Stack Exchange:

> The effect was quite pronounced; large applications that could take an hour > to install could be reduced to 15 minutes with suitable mouse input.

</comment><comment><USER47> In 1986, some computer graphics researchers in California (namely Conrad Huang, Ken Arnold, and Greg Couch at U. of California, San Francisco, Computer Graphics Lab) wrote a multi-player TTY game called hunt.

The game of hunt is clocked by the arrival of events. So that is to say, the arrival of packets from the game clients into the server drives the game forward. The more furiously people play and the more players there are, the more rapid is the movement of automatic objects, like shots traversing through the maze.

I last played this in 1995. I had a WYSE 50 terminal hooked up to a Linux box and played with a friend. One of us was on the console, one on the terminal.

I remember I had to patch something socket-related in the source code to get it working.

</comment><comment><USER48> Entertaining, but probably unrelated: there was a systems paper from the late '90s or early 2000s (SOSP?) where the authors used an extremely low priority process recording timestamps to instrument system behavior. Basically, because the process wouldn't run if anything else was runnable, it wouldn't generate its periodic timestamps. As a result, they could easily see relatively low- level details about system CPU behavior.

One thing they discovered was that Windows 95 would enter a tight CPU polling loop if you held the mouse button down. So, don't do that.

[Edit: dammit, I cannot find the paper. Sorry. It was really interesting.]

</comment><comment><USER49> I definitely remember seeing scrolling-is-faster-if-you-wiggle-the-mouse on Linux too, back in the day, and being surprised that a bug (? misfeature?) like that would show up on such different stacks.

<comment><USER34> Back in the day it wasn't a bug, but rather more of a cheat to make your system feel faster than it really was: if the system actually gave the UI a fair share of CPU cycles, the system would feel incredibly sluggish. Conversely, if it gave the UI the lions share of CPU, nothing would ever get done in the background. So it compromised and gave the UI preferential treatment when the user was active (i.e. when there was recent mouse/keyboard activity), and a more fair allocation when they weren't so other things could get done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I used to open the CD drive when the entire computer would freeze up. I wonder if its the same thing.

<comment><USER51> Same here! I can't remember if I did the moving mouse thing, but I definitely opened the CD drive to unfreeze the computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I had something that may have been related. In VLC with my old monitor (1920x1080) watching a film it would often flicker painfully. I found moving the mouse continually would make it smooth. A bit of python...

      import ctypes, time

      def move(x, y):
          ctypes.windll.user32.SetCursorPos(x, y)

      for x in range(10000000):
          move(0, 0)
          time.sleep(0.01)
          move(1, 1)

... and all was well.

(When I upgraded to a 4K monitor things got worse and the cursor fiddle doesn't help).

<comment><USER53>
        for x in range(10000000):

Why not just use `while True:` ?

<comment><USER52> I... really don't know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> One thing that also worked was to open and close the CD-ROM tray. It felt like HDD was waiting for something that open-close action on the CD-ROM drive would trigger some reaction.

</comment><comment><USER55> Its like rage shake for mouse! If you are angry and shake your mouse in rage it moves things faster. I imagine this would be a very satisfying thing to be able to do.

</comment><comment><USER56> Given all the me too's. How about this one, same basic problem in the mid 2000's with linux. We were running a few servers with a normal desktop distro. I got the bright idea that since no one was actually on the console we could save some ram/CPU by changing the default runlevel and not starting X/etc. Took about 2 days before someone complained we were running about 20% slower than normal.

I think in the end the solution was to just fire off a X/xdm pair as I wasted a few days looking at scheduling/numa/shared interrupts/etc trying to get a good solid solution that didn't require starting X. We ran it like that for a couple years until eventually someone tried it again (after a bunch of software/hardware upgrades) and the perf didn't fall off.

</comment><comment><USER57> _Try opening a large file with Notepad on a contemporary machine. The window must not be full screen. When loaded, mark all text using the mouse (the keyboard works as well, it just needs more manual skill). While still holding the button down (and marking) move the mouse down, so the text gets marked and scrolled. Now compare the scroll speed while holding the mouse still versus wiggling it. Depending on your machine the speed up can be several times faster._

I always thought that this scroll behavior is known and special in that it helps precise scrolling. I know winapi and why this happens, but never viewed it as a wild bug. Can't recall now, but I think Mac and Linux behave the same way. Can someone confirm that?

</comment><comment><USER58> Reminds me of [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=32233](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=32233)

<comment><USER59> Raymond Chen's blog is always a great source of interesting information.

But I remember the times when that blog didn't look like a webdesign internship project in progress. And there were interesting comments…

<comment><USER60> So much history was lost when microsoft migrated the blogs and deleted the comments...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Wow, I always moved the cursor over the progress bar as I believed it made the installation go faster, but I never had actual proof. I guess I wasn't the only one.

</comment><comment><USER62> I remember that with Windows 98SE, when it got stuck most of the times you can make it come back to life again by opening/closing the CD tray a lot of times...

</comment><comment><USER63> Had that in an app i was working on ages ago.

We were doing some processing on a database and updating the progress bar every record. We processed the UI messages at that point as well so any click on Cancel could get through.

As customer databases grew, the processing began to exhibit this behaviour.

If I remember well, we fixed it by only updating the progress bar every 1%. It may have been more complicated than that though, I had moved on to another job when the fix was done.

</comment><comment><USER64> This is why I love HN.

I miss this mysterious, charming, golden era of tech.

<comment><USER12> yes its good software doesn't behave strangely any more

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Now the only thing left is to figure out why Dungeon Keeper II crashed roughly 50% of the time at startup. Don't ask about my procurance of said software; we do not speak of such things.

EDIT: And of course, a person who should not be named at the time remarked: "Computers always do the same thing, DKII can't be crashing sometimes and other times not..."

</comment><comment><USER66> Funny. I've seen people doing this back in the windows 95 days but believed that was just a superstition.

</comment><comment><USER67> So should be possible to build a usb turbo button (or foot pedal) which just triggers mouse movement events?

</comment><comment><USER68> I think I remember (1980s/90s) if you were copying a file to/from a remote host (with ftp or something), you could improve the throughput speed by pinging the remote. Maybe ethernet, or maybe ppp/slip, I'm not sure.

</comment><comment><USER69> What olden times are the article and the comments speaking of? Scrolling is _still_ faster when selecting while wiggling the mouse, at least on Windows 7 with Firefox, for me. Just tried it right now to make sure.

</comment><comment><USER70> Would it actually run more quickly or just feel like it was running faster? I thought moving the mouse gave more frequent feedback but I didn't think it reduced the time it took to install an application.

</comment><comment><USER71> i used to have an obsessive habit of right-clicking the desktop and selecting refresh. took me ages to exorcise that out of me when i switched to a linux. i remember not liking that it didn't have that option.

</comment><comment><USER72> There was a KB article where an old very of Microsoft Query (?) ran slowly. The second solution said to move the mouse around whilst the query ran.

Funniest article I've ever seen in the Microsoft KB! But it worked.

<comment><USER30> This one? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011228](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011228)

Unfortunately KB articles seem to be decaying at an alarming rate; only the archive has luckily saved this one from vanishing forever: [http://web.archive.org/web/20140105042459/http://support.mic...](http://web.archive.org/web/20140105042459/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> This still happens in a way in current OS's...

When marking text to copy and making it scroll, moving the mouse left and right will speed up the scrolling sometimes.

Try it in a long Word doc or in Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER65> And when you click in Excel while it is stuck computing, does it prioritise the cell you are clicking on, or could it be that it actually does compute more quickly then?

</comment><comment><USER74> While we are at it, can anyone tell me why selecting large text in a scrollable window works faster when you move the mouse?

</comment><comment><USER75> I had an ailing Windows 95 Laptop that in its later years stopped functioning entirely unless I wiggled the mouse.

This all makes a lot of sense now.

</comment><comment><USER76> Rather than being interrupt driven (CPU interrupts), it was event driven.

</comment><comment><USER77> Can flushing buffers be considered a cache invalidation problem?

</comment><comment><USER78> To understand if all the OS it is freeze

</comment><comment><USER79> Best game ad I have seen for a while

</comment><comment><USER80> noice, did not know that! Maybe I should give Win95 a go, as macOS is going pretty down.

</comment><comment><USER81> I can't stop laughing!

</comment><comment><USER82> In order to show the properly random and non-deterministic behavior (e.g. random BSODs) that Windows users have come to expect, MS Windows needs to continuously gather high-quality entropy from its surrounding environment. That's why it stops when you're not wiggling the mouse; it's just waiting for you to provide the additional entropy it needs.

<comment><USER83> No, it's actually a little-known feature that allows Win95 to temporarily upclock the CPU during peak loads, using the power generated by vigorous mouse movements.</comment></comment>


'Artificial Intelligence' Has Become Meaningless - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/what-is-artificial-intelligence/518547/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> yes and the term "learning", which can mean the trivial operation of iteratively multiplying an array of doubles by another (as in adjusting weights)</comment>


NFL Abuses Trademark to Shut Down New York Jets Parody Store - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/same-old-nfl-league-abuses-trademark-shut-down-new-york-jets-parody-store <comment><AUTHOR> Shopify comes off as complicit by the sounds of this article. Do they really take down sites without actual proof of specific infringement? Is this common on their platform?</comment>


Illicit iPhone App Store Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/20/18232140/apple-tutuapp-piracy-ios-apps-developer-enterprise-program-misuse <comment><USER2> This is a little worrisome and I think it's a bit irresponsible of The Verge to be publishing something like this without being clearer about what potential issues and vulnerabilities something like this could expose. They're making it sound like such a great thing without even attempting to talk through what possible attack vectors this exposes and what this could do to someone's device. "so long as you're willing to hand the keys to your security and privacy to an unknown, likely China-based entity" doesn't cover it well enough, in my opinion. They need to give examples. This only highlights the disconnect in technology of people who know "how to use devices" but not how those devices work.

<comment><USER3> I disagree, and almost take exactly the opposite stance. I think it _is_ a great thing, there are many apps on these app stores which are useful that apple would never allow. It is good to have alternative options.

I look at the wording of the title of this Verge article (and a few others that come out lately) and see it as another example of media spreading fear through unnecessarily alarming titles.

In reality, the risks are no different from manually installing an APK on Android, which noone has kicked up a fuss about.

<comment><USER2> That's not true at all. You're giving a random developer with whom you have no pre-established relationship, and allowing them to install an enterprise-level certificate on your device. You're giving them the ability to do all kinds of things with your device, either intentionally or unintentionally, that you'd never have if you were side loading the app yourself. There's a reason that sideloading apps typically isn't a single-tap.

In other words, there are no useful apps on these stores because you have no idea of really knowing what their use is. Considering that they're already coming from nefarious sources, there's no reason to believe they're not a trojan horse for something worse.

<comment><USER3> Again, these are all things that a sideloaded APK on Android could do, without requiring an enterprise certificate, and requiring fewer steps.

I consider the phone to be firmly mine when I pay almost $1,000+ for it, and I want to be able to install whatever applications I want, not what Apple says I can have.

You've applied the term "nefarious sources" to a third party app store, to which I disagree. Do you take the same approach with your laptop? Can you download an exe or app from third party websites without having to go through a manufacturer approval process? I

<comment><USER2> Yes, this is all something you could do with a sideloaded APK. What I'm complaining about is the lax job that the Verge has done in explaining the implications of installing these certs and/or sideloading an APK. While it's not an insurmountable task, most people who sideload APKs on Android know the risks involved and need some level of proficiency in order to get to the end goal. I'm not opposed to people doing that but I am concerned that they might do that because they've been told they can get "free apps" or "apps that aren't on the App Store" without understanding any of the implications of what's happening when they go down that road.

Your phone _is_ yours. Absolutely. No question. In the age of big data, security breaches, and identity theft, though, we shouldn't expect or want to make technology so stupidly easy that people unwittingly give up their privacy and security simply because they didn't know any better. And I know the old adage about "inventing a better idiot" but that's not what I'm concerned about here. I'm concerned about responsible disclosure of the information here. The downside is a few more inconvenient steps for people who would legitimately need to sideload or use a certificate like this while the upside is the ability for a non-savvy user to trust the technology in their hands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jon-wood "It's not clear what permissions you're granting". If they're installing enterprise certs then you're granting all the permissions, plus I'm sure a few no app in the store is going to be granted by Apple.

<comment><USER4> I think what they meant is that it's not clear to the average non technical user. It's clear to the average HN reader.

For 20+ years, in GUI design, it's been proven that if you present users with a challenge/warning prompt they will do _whatever_ is necessary to click "yes/ok/i understand/install this thing" to accomplish what they think is their goal.

It would be worth having a deeply buried toggle within the iOS UI that you can change, if you're an actual developer. Otherwise installing an enterprise certificate on iOS should have larger, scarier, more time consuming and more difficult to bypass warnings.

<comment><USER2> >they will do whatever is necessary to accomplish what they think is their goal.

This is exactly my concern. As someone who had to deal with people jailbreaking their phones without any knowledge of what they were doing, this is exactly what I think the issue is. The difference is that, in this case, there's credible evidence to suggest that this is a data-mining operation in disguise and people will unknowingly allow it to get "free apps".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an iOS developer, we get crash reports from the buggy ad libraries injected by these app stores all the time. Googling the injected library names actually come up with surprisingly few results (mostly from the pirate community itself like /r/sideloaded) so I don't know how many developers are aware of this

<comment><USER6> Are you building an app X that crashes because of a library installed by app Y?

I imagine that installing via Enterprise Certs doesn't remove the sandboxing around Y...

Can you please elaborate on what's actually happening?

<comment><USER7> A lot of sideloaded apps are normal app store apps with "tweaks" applied to them: think Snapchat that lets you keep images, or YouTube with no ads. Sometimes, these resigned apps have malware or ad libraries built into them.

<comment><USER6> Oh I think I understand the parent better now: he is the author of app X, and someone releases X' which is X with bogus libs/ads/etc with the Enterprise Cert.

The user of X' reports bugs to him/her as if it was legit X running, so he gets reports that don't really come from his/her app.

<comment><USER7> Yes! Except usually the bug reporting is automatic, and nobody bothers to disable this behavior when modifying the apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> All of this could be prevented if Apple allowed sideloading unappoved, but non-security threatening apps. Like when the Steam gaming app that posed zero security threats, that I very much want to use, got banned by Apple for posing a competitive threat!

<comment><USER9> You can if you sign it with your own, free, certificate. It will just expire quickly if free and require constant updating but surely that's an acceptable price to pay.

<comment><USER8> Can you please elaborate on this. Can a developer distribute iOS apps signed with their own certificate, that iOS will seamlessly allow to install and run?

<comment><USER7> Yes, but it requires work (namely UDID registration, and there are limits to this).

<comment><USER8> That's not sideloading, is it? It is just developer workflow to enable testing with a wider audience without actually submitting to the app store.

By sideloading, I mean the ability to install and run a binary downloaded off the internet. Mac OS allows this, but does put a prompt out. Android allows this as well. No certs, no UDID etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Where is the problem? If users install enterprise certificates despite the shown warnings, they want to take the risk.

<comment><USER7> These are the warnings you get: [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204460](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204460). I don't think this adequately describes the potential risk.

<comment><USER10> OK, the warning could perhaps be better designed.

But I still don't see the huge problem:

"Trusted" has a very strong meaning when used for any computing device. So this is already a really, really strong warning sign (safeguard 1). Next, you explicitly have to go to the settings to manually trust the certificate (safeguard 2). This gives you a lot of time (i.e. you don't accidentally "click/touch OK") to inform yourself intensively of the consequences of the decision (safeguard 3). Even after that according to this link (no screenshot is shown), you explicitly have to confirm your decision again (safeguard 4). Now according to this link, you have to install the apps from the now-trusted developer _manually_ (safeguard 5).

So I see at least 5 levels of safeguards that Apple introduced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Illicit? What law or statute was broken? Breaking Apple's TOS still is, afaik, not illicit or illegal. Has this changed recently? Has someone been prosecuted under the CFAA or other law for breaking a company's TOS? Last I heard, it still wasn't illicit and the issue has not been heard by the Supremes: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/ninth-circuit- doubles-...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/ninth-circuit-doubles-down- violating-websites-terms-service-not-crime)

Talk about inaccurate, bad reporting...

<comment><USER12> From the description, it seems it certainly is an (illicit app) store.

Also, 'illicit' doesn't necessarily mean "unlawful". [https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/illicit#synonyms](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/illicit#synonyms) also mentions "not permitted", and Apple doesn't permit you to use an enterprise certificate in this way.

<comment><USER11> By that definition, Apple's own store is illicit because I don't permit any apps from it. Except that Apple does permit these stores to exist so by that exact definition they are not illicit. Either way, it doesn't make sense, it's confusing, and it's shitty, inaccurate writing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wait, so you _shouldn 't_ have rights to a device you paid for?

Yeah, you're not going to sell me on this line of bullshit. The amount of money you pay for an apple is a fucking purchase. So why do they maintain control of it? Eh?

</comment><comment><USER14> They call this illicit but actually, this to me seems to be a valid use of the technology. The only reason Apple has to prevent this is to maintain the walled garden.

<comment><USER15> Seriously, the "only reason"?

<comment><USER16> Once someone has bought an iPhone from Apple, it's no longer Apple's phone. _Apple no longer owns it._ If the owner of the phone (who is, again, _not_ Apple) wishes to trust only Apple-approved software, that is 100% his choice. But if he wishes to install software that Apple _doesn 't_ approve of, _that 's also a 100% legitimate choice_.

Sorry for all the emphasis, but this stuff is _important_. Once a manufacturer has sold a product, it no longer has any claim to it — none. It belongs to the purchaser, who is the sole owner.

<comment><USER15> OK but what does this have to do with the original point? There are plenty of reasons why Apple might want to prevent pirated app stores from being used on their devices: legal, ethical and sure, financial. But "keeping people in their walled garden" isn't the _only_ reason, is it?

<comment><USER17> When I jailbroke my iPhone 3G back in the day, Cydia was chalk full of amazing, useful applications that extended the capabilities of my phone. I was actually able to run Pandora in the background while using other apps. At that time, background apps would not continue playing music, and probably could not do much else either. I had dashboards and quick launchers at the time when Apple didn't allow those things. I didn't pirate a single piece of software. It did let me use free software and apps that were not in the App store.

It's well known that there were some sketchy apps in there. But how was that any different from having a Linux or Windows desktop where in you can install whatever you want? I believe that the financial motivation (the walled garden) is the biggest one, but maybe not the only one.

<comment><USER2> While it's definitely the biggest incentive, there's also a customer-focus piece. I used to do third-party repairs for these devices and I can't tell you the number of people that would get mad at me and/or Apple because they jailbroke their phone and then did something to brick it. They had someone else jailbreak it for them, so they had no understanding of what had actually been done, and then they attempted to run updates that broke them. When people expect support, it makes sense to me that Apple would want to prevent those types of situations from occurring when they're the ones that have to deal with people who don't know or understand what they've done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Terrifying that you could download apps that aren't in the official store. Why, it's almost like having an Android

<comment><USER19> It's not great that you have to ruin security and install an enterprise cert to do this, but that's just the inevitable result of excessively locked down systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> With Apple, if the adversary is a nation state that is willing to fight to affect it's bottom line, Apple just falls in line, like an obedient lap dog. Cases in point: China iCloud & Saudi app that tracks women - in both cases Apple did what the respective governments demanded, while making a show of force in America over the FBI's request to unlock an actual terrorist's phone.

In this case, things can get interesting if these companies have Chinese government backing. WeChat went through a similar fight with Apple, where Apple was trying to shove it's app store guidelines as justification for denying extensions on WeChat, but as usual, Apple curled up in the corner the moment there Chinese government got involved.</comment>