I love this strategy until I run into someone else who’s read it. Then it’s just two people wait()ing each other.

That's when turn-taking kicks in. A nice conversation might have multiple sections, and the person doing most of the talking can alternate between sections.

Then you turn to a different strategy, selling yourself, or self promotion.

It’s not as volatile as nostalgia, you can always go there too.

I used to network with BNC! (Touches both, quickly.)

Just be curious about the other person and go from there.

Ah yes, conversational deadlock. The best way to release the lock is to say you need to go to the bathroom. Sometimes it just wasn't meant to be.

That is much smarter than my tactic of yelling "pthread_mutex_unlock" out loud and then running away.

You got me there. Were this a social setting, that yell would have triggered my interest sufficiently to chase after you for an extended conversation. Resistance is futexile.

Agreed, although it does make me wonder whether the number of mistakes chatgpt comments make would truly be greater (or at the least more harmful) than the outstanding number of folk who are confidently wrong in a way only obvious to domain experts. It’s easier to be skeptical of a bot.

Relevant take from the author, some time back:

> On the Mac App Store, there isn't a practical way to charge for updates. You could release entirely new apps, but then upgrading is a pain for users, and you lose your ranking and reviews -- and it's difficult to charge an upgrade fee. You can gate-keep features with In-App-Purchases the way Agenda does, but then you're giving away bug fixes and polish on the app for free forever, and that's probably 80% of your development time. Plus, I would imagine the upgrade rate on that model is pretty low, since most users won't care about fringe features being added.

> If you really want to offer perpetual licenses with paid updates, since you're a desktop app, you can roll your own licensing system and use FastSpring/Paddle/etc. It's a fair model, but it's a lot of work. It may be worth it depending on your audience - e.g. developers tend to care a lot about this stuff.

> Selling this as a subscription is probably the best path if you can stomach the initial ire of users that don't like that model. Depending on your price point, you could consider a 4x-5x multiplier for a lifetime option if you want to try and keep some of them. Yes, you will lose some users that might have paid for a major version, but you'll probably make that up with the recurring revenue from less price-sensitive users.

> Best of luck. I know this can be agonizing and there's no easy answer here.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32827676

> but then you're giving away bug fixes

These damn users, they literally rob the developers, they force them to give away bugfixes for free.

While the right way to go is to release a bunch of half-baked crap and then charge per-patch.

Context is the rest of the sentence:

> and polish on the app for free forever

But even "bug fixes" are sometimes not cleaning up your own issues; for example, macOS updates regularly will break apps. It's like paying someone to lay down a lawn for you and expecting the grass will never need cutting.