I may be way off base, but the cynic in me sees your post as related to the recent changes you made with Mixergy.

I really liked Mixergy. I turned lots of people onto it. When you decided (almost out of the blue) to turn it into a strictly money making venture for yourself I felt burned. I thought you were following in the footsteps of Charlie Rose's interviews, Paul Graham's essays, or one of the dozens of great Podcasts that exist. Something fairly altruistic that may generate money for you, but not as its primary goal.

It turns out you were really just building an audience so eventually you could upsell us into into some kind of self-help guru educational pay site. Not that there's anything wrong with a site like that, but it's not the kind of site I would ever use, and certainly not something I would ever actively promote.

I think there were a dozen ways you could have made significant money off Mixergy that wouldn't have felt like bait-n-switch. Instead you took the easiest and lamest possible option. I don't visit Mixergy any longer and I don't promote it anymore.

For your sake I hope you're really successful with the path you're taking. For mine I hope someone moves in to take the role I thought you were filling: The Charlie Rose of the startup world -- not the Tony Robins.

I think the simplest thing to do about it is to not give a hoot. The karma point system is so obviously broken that hand-wringing about its deficiencies is largely a waste of time. Case in point - the person who was lucky enough to post the google announcement regarding China got 1000+ points. Let's say a particularly insightful comment is worth 40 points. That means being first on something everyone is likely to know about within half an hour is worth 25 (count em) very insightful comments. If you take the hit of posting an unpopular opinion, you can make it up in spades by posting an old pg essay.

Patches welcome.

Been waiting years to say that.

They say that so when you tell them it's dumb, they can claim it's because they didn't spend any time on it.

It's like how kids always brag how little they studied for a test, even before they take it. It's an excuse for failure.

This is a pretty common reaction you get whenever you first try to monetize anything on the net. People feel entitled to whatever you do at no cost to yourself. They always say "you could make money in other ways" but never suggest any specifically or show any evidence they would actually gain traction.

If you like what the guy does enough to shell out some $, fine. If you don't, also fine. But the guy has a right to try to make money from his work. It's not a "bait and switch" to add in a business model.

It's also sad when just charging for stuff is seen as "easy and lame".

FWIW, I was an early Homebrew user and even contributed a few recipes, but I moved back to MacPorts because (and no offense to mxcl, but it's kind of unavoidable) the author seems to do things with little understanding of the underlying system or justification.

Taking ownership of /user/local is completely utterly pointless and just plain bad advice. Copy-and-pasting optimization code from the Gentoo wiki is pointless. Binaries and libs are stripped without must justification, which will (did for me anyway) cause problems when compoing against the libs (eg, easy_install-ing anything against homebrew libs caused problems for me).

There has also been a lot of FUD spread about at the expense of MacPorts which I think is just low class. The anti-Macports complaints basically amount to "I don't understand this, so I'm going to say it's bad".

That said, it's written in ruby, uses github and the homepage is well done, so it will probably be wildly popular.