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Discussion on: Mozilla's layoffs are bad news for developers

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perpetual_education profile image
perpetual . education • Edited

Oh no!!!

Even the "good" companies need to figure out how make money... damn it.

We use those MDN docs every day / and we share links to them every single day.

It's hard to get judgy about it - when they're the "good people" - so - curious what these other models are. We saw that 'facebook' container thing today... and the VPN thing seems solid.

How do they make money anyway?

theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363424/mo...

Mozilla makes most of its money from companies paying to make their search engine the default in Firefox. This includes deals with Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia, and most notably, Google in the US and most of the rest of the world.

Doesn't seem very fun. : /

In the big picture - this is the same problem everyone is having. There are two camps: make things and actually charge for them - and support them OR make something... hope people like it - and try and sell it - or monetize it with ads from the first camp. Even Dev.to suffers from this. Our content - is their value - and then that attention is monetized vs. the actual service. Everyone is in the "altruistic" stage of "I'm just making a cool thing!" - until they aren't.

The whole an alarming amount of internet is a trash sales system / or a flappy-bird / or just a rage machine designed to keep us unfocused. So, - it's probably a smart move for MDN to stand up and start 'doing something' that makes money - so that they can still exist... instead of just turning into another FAANG company who sucks the blood from our ankles, dismantles our economy, and then gives you free coffee and fruit-snacks to say sorry.

Not sure why they couldn't keep 10 people on the docs team.

If you aren't willing to pay for it - then it shouldn't exist.

At least some people think that w3schools is just fine ! YIkes!

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks
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perpetual_education profile image
perpetual . education

Somewhere we made a joke about how w3schools must make more money... (But it was just a bad joke). If 250 people make ~100k.... then they'd cost 75m of that deal. OR 25,000 of us could just give the docs team $100?