The model of Spotify in particular - paid tier alongside a free tier with ads - seems like the simplest sustainable solution I see. Having paid features is the most obvious way to make money, but you want to enable adoption as much as you can. It's the same idea as companies dangling "free trial" in front of you at every turn - in a competitive environment, you want to remove barriers for users to try your product or service. This is essentially the idea of a "loss leader" for a grocery store, or any business really.

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We are continuing an overhaul of our default startup editor in order to provide relevant extension-contributed tips and walkthroughs, intended to make both core VS Code features and extension contributions more approachable to new users.

A Low Bar to Entry, and then What?There is an interesting tension between making something accessible and making it boring. Lowering the barrier of entry is a good thing, but if all you do is low-bar stuff, you end up losing the people again that you managed to attract. There needs to be a path forward beyond the entry level.

A business with a low barrier to entry would be those people in poor countries who “wash” your windscreen at traffic lights. A bucket, a cloth, some water and you are in business. A business with a high barrier to entry might be airlines: planes are expensive, staff with the right skills hard to find, the necessary permits to fly hard to obtain.

Microlibraries are easier to understand, develop and test. They make it easier for new people to get involved and contribute. They reduce the distinction between a “core module” and a “plugin”, and increase the pace of development in D3 features.

This tedium would be unacceptable in an action game, but Windbound is a survival game. In survival games, death is supposed to mean something. Loss of progress represents the stakes; repetition is the barrier of entry.

Everything Lives in GitWith a Jamstack project, anyone should be able to do a git clone, install any needed dependencies with a standard procedure (like npm install), and be ready to run the full project locally. No databases to clone, no complex installs. This reduces contributor friction, and also simplifies staging and testing workflows.

Did you know that you can create a Svelte component and with almost no extra steps distribute- and use it like any classic old Javascript library through a global constructor (let myComponent = new MyComponent())?

This happens because npm makes it ridiculously easy for people to release their half-baked experiments into the wild. The only barrier to entry is the difficulty of finding an unused package name. I’m all in favour of enabling creators, but npm lowers the barriers right to the floor, with predictable results.

What I think we're lacking is proper tooling, or at least the knowledge of it. I don't know what most people use to write Git commits, but concepts like interactive staging, rebasing, squashing, and fixup commits are very daunting with Git on the CLI, unless you know really well what you're doing. We should do a better job at learning people how to use tools like Git Tower (to give just one example) to rewrite Git history, and to produce nice Git commits.

I think this goes against the Keep It Simple mentality and the Low Level Of Shame that we should have when we contribute.

In fact, both this model and torrenting it were out because they make access to data harder

Amazon has got a neat Requestor Pays Feature but as soon as there's a cost - any cost - there's a barrier to entry.