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It's a tradeoff between getting more users and getting more money, which I'm sure he knows. He's chosen to be more towards the "money" end of the scale, which is fair enough.



Incidentally, it's the same tradeoff Apple may have made.

Stare into the abyss etc.


Isn't this a dark pattern though?


No, it's not. It says "pay what you want" and you can literally pay what you want (including nothing).


Well, I think it is.

If I pay nothing, I don't pay.

I don't say "I paid zero." or "I paid nothing" unless someone asks the specific question "How much did you pay for that?"

It's obviously a way to nudge people into paying something.

edit: I made an aside about the use of the word 'donation' by cannabis collectives in the U.S. to denote 'payment' (as a way to operate as non-profits and avoid federal problems) as a reference to similarly weak wording used in a nefarious way, but I thought the relationship to the pattern here was weak, so I removed it.


When I first heard about zero-Ohm resistors I thought it was hilarious.

They do serve a purpose though.


So they should disable writing "0" in the input box and require that you enter "nothing"?


I'm very curious to try it out, and came to comments in hopes of seeing some comments about what it's like. Instead there's a bunch of comments about the pricing situation. So it's definitely affected my chance of giving it a shot.


I'm using it and it's pretty good. I don't really agree with the scheme of 1. Tricking you into paying something. 2. Feeling guilty for entering $0...but the ui is not bad at all imho.




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