Next being owned by Vercel has a perverse incentice to push for features that are good for Vercel, like fast build times and very specific caching strategies, not for the features that developers actually want.
Vercel and any other company in their space follow the same old playbook:
They play opensource to attract users and build nice stuff developers like (not necessarily what they need) to win market share and developer's mind and heart.
When they are above the competition, thanks to the free contributions of the community, they reveal their true nature and start play greed.
Developers get upset and start ranting on HN.
How many times do I need to see developers playing this movie? It's is the same shit over and over and over again.
If developers invest a lot of time in getting to know the product, chance is they will be more dedicated to it, so that they don't feel they lost so much time. This is another predatory tactic of this company.
Then there's other ethical developers. This is a company with a deeply scummy past, who did everything to throttle competition when they had the upper hand.
They might be trying to change their image lately, still a hotbed of scumbags who learned from the best.
All of their early adopters you burned by declaring them leeches and announcing a "new and exciting" 10x price hike? They're developers. NOBODY IS GOING TO WRITE CODE FOR YOUR BUGGY, UNTRUSTWORTHY PLATFORM.
Because if they establish a reputation of watching what people are building on their platform, then copying it and driving those businesses out of the market, they'll alienate their developer community.
Ideally people (devs) would remember companies like that and avoid them in the future when they decide on which platforms to build their next project or which APIs to trust.
But in reality people (me included) will be annoyed today and forget it tomorrow, when a cool new platform is announced.
They've done this so many times there is a word for it, it's no secret how they treat their developer community. Yet you still keep building apps on their platform.
Instead it's owned by an abrasive difficult to deal with developer who will argue "you're just doing it wrong" with paying customers. Clearly things aren't exactly roses and sunshine here either.
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