E.g. react-router was ready 5990 commits ago. It is a grift, they keep rewriting it and reengineering the API over and over and over again just to be able to sell more training.
Look at wouter for what is possible if your motivation isn't selling training material. It was written and left alone, it works just as well, it's stable and doesn't change for no reason.
You asked if react-router team sold courses, they sold consulting services. Seems like a conflict of interest to sell consulting on a tool you built while introducing breaking changes (but hey if you need quick help throw us a few dozen grand).
I guess that's fine for you but it's very smarmy IMO.
I think that adds to my point. How does that have so many stars on github? The customers "star" it. Who uses this on a real app? It's alright to slowly accept the bitter truth that grifting scales.
Not really sure that's relevant. Grift implies an intentional value extraction without providing anything. Using your example: I'm confident that the time spent working on remix and courses related to it resulted in far less monetary gain than spinning out courses on React. If you think Remix is misguided or a bad framework etc... that is very different from grifting. A corollary: Is Deno a grift because it shares the same creator as Node and has a paid product attached to it? In my opinion no but you might disagree... I'm mostly opposed to the idea remix in particular exists purely as a grift - love it or hate it there are far easier ways for someone with the influence of Kent to make money.
That was the end goal for this whole thing. I do look at the pricing page (what are you trying to sell constantly?) on anything people put up on the internet and judge from there. You can have the last word and put in a testimonial for Remix, since I won't be budging on this. It's a rabbit hole for both you and me to keep going at this, as I've seen enough of this pattern. Consider me a neural net on this front (end).
I'm not interested in writing a testimonial for Remix, merely commenting on the absurdity of calling a project of this scale as nothing more than a grift to sell educational content. There's no reference to these paid courses anywhere on the landing page, there's no callout for paid courses in the main navigation. The only mention of tutorials at all is buried in the community section which leads to: https://remix.guide/ which seems to be unaffiliated with the Remix team, and has no section advertising paid courses anywhere. You're talking about a framework that has been acquired and subsequently used in production by a global company in Shopify - clearly there is something to the framework beyond being a vehicle for tutorial sales.
Again, I want to be clear: This is NOT an endorsement of Remix. Your line of thinking seems to be conspiratorial and not grounded in reality. You mention repeatedly about pricing and the end goal of funneling noobs toward course purchases... One would assume that in conspiring to sell courses the team behind Remix might actually advertise that they have courses for sale on their website.
I have to be honest as a third party that a. doesn't work with remix, b. doesn't know anyone who works on remix, c. doesn't know you - it seems like you have a personal vendetta.
No personal vendetta. We sit here and punch the mysterious air as to why things are the way they are. I thought maybe we'd punch up at something that is plausibly a culprit. I'll admit it may be punching down, since this is just one dude. But then again, it's one dude who influenced a lot of people ...
We can't just keep sitting here and blaming developers for being
1) New
2) Dumb
3) FOMO
4) Dumb
5) Unqualified
You understand? It's worth looking at what content they are consuming and where the mindshare is being promoted from. It's worth asking who is selling them the idea of these frameworks.
> We can't just keep sitting here and blaming developers for being New / Dumb …
Well, as a cohort, I think the ratio of inept programmers to skilled programmers stays mostly constant regardless of stuff like this. Like, if programming is hard to learn, fewer people will try and learn it. But also the skill bar goes up - so people spend more time as inept developers before they’re skilled. Likewise if programming gets easier to learn, we get a swell of fresh faces eager to become frontend developers. And the ratio stays more or less the same. It’s kinda like a sales funnel, or a hiring funnel. You always have more leads in your funnel than conversions. (And if you don’t, you’re in trouble!)
We live in an anti gatekeeper era. Content is free, but nobody protects you from wasting your time watching edutainment. The downside of that is real - lots of people waste countless hours larping as students. But the upside is real too. It’s easier than ever to learn anything.
>Grift implies an intentional value extraction without providing anything.
Is it without providing anything, or a value extraction greater than what one is providing?
If the former, it makes the definition very each to check, but it almost makes it very easy to avoid grifting by providing even the most minimal value, and leads use to needing a new word for providing some value but extracting more than provided (perhaps intention should be included). If that is the case, might I suggest "jrift"?
