I don’t think market saturation was RainMachine’s specific problem, but you’re right in general. Our capitalist dystopia demands infinite growth, and planned obsolescence is part of that.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to, whatever the consumer product in question. I have a few tools that belonged to my grandfather and they still work just fine, partially because there’s no plastic to crack and the bearings all accept either oil or grease.

You’re probably also right that selling user data to advertisers is now a reliable source of recurring revenue, which all the MBA C-suite people want at any cost, even the alienation of their customers. This timeline sucks.

What’s an MRC?

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I chose a RainMachine irrigation controller over other options, because they specifically marketed their cloud-independent firmware design. It was vindicated a couple years ago when they started going defunct and grasped for recurring revenue by billing for proxied remote access, but even then they emphasized that everything else would continue to function without their servers.

The onus is on the consumer to reward cloud-independent designs like this. While it has been sad to see RainMachine’s collapse, my device indeed just keeps working. Hopefully it isn’t ultimately killed by firmware or app security vulnerabilities since it’s now thoroughly unmaintained.

???

I don’t think I’m being particularly rude here, but the reason why I’m engaging is that OP didn’t do anything wrong and I’m glad they made the post.

I dislike paywalls and registrationwalls as much as most people, but the overall lemmyverse isn’t large enough to discourage posters who link to interesting on topic content. That is rude.

At the time I’m submitting this one, this post has 77 comments, including a few with OP engaging in replies. There are several distinct healthy discussions that occurred in this post long before you complained that OP didn’t put in enough effort by violating 404’s copyright because you feel entitled to have a low-effort doomscrolling experience. OP isn’t the one hurting the community here.

It’s nuts to me that you can’t see the nuance in the difference between “please don’t [post]” and “maybe copy [the article text] into the post”.

The “maybe” in there is doing a lot of work converting that into a suggested guideline rather than being a hard rule, and a polite request to follow the guideline is appropriate. But the nuance of “don’t post unless” is distinctly discouraging participation, and not appropriate.

Providing the text or an archive link separately may be polite, but your request goes too far. If somebody shares a paywalled link that is on topic for the community, you have several options. You can ignore it and miss out, and be no worse off. You can find an archive copy yourself, and even share it in a comment to receive fake internet points. You can enjoy the discussion in the comments and maybe find other relevant links there. But you’re suggesting that the community is better off with fewer posts and less participation (“please don’t [post] unless”).

The community rules include

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post

That’s a much nicer way of stating a preference to have OPs do the legwork. Please don’t discourage community participation.

That’s awesome, thanks for sharing!

So you’re saying we need to make plans and soldering parties with all of our new friends. That’s a good plan, actually.

I’ve been thinking for a little while that it might be interesting to build on a pair of glasses with a couple IR LEDs at either edge and a battery pack to light them up. I can’t decide if that would be good to wear to a protest because the glare would likely obscure your entire face to cameras, or if it would be a bad idea because you’d stick out immediately on any surveillance.

I wish I could find the ad impression bot fraud article I think I saw on Lemmy recently, but alas. It’s a scammy house of cards.