Ask HN: Convince me to not to shelve my app (I've decided to)

2 points by asdfbank 31 days ago | 2 comments

For context, I'm an accountant in South Africa.

About a year ago I made an ad-free, free app to let people share plants with others around them for free, because there wasn't one. The goal was to get it stable and keep it online hosted at my home as a hobby (which is virtually free). Side bonus, it was also good at connecting people to share plants in their garden.

A year later and it's turned into quite a crappy hobby. The app is still going but:

- I just realised that it will disappear from apple's store when I let my developer sub lapse (greedy bastards!) - I chose the name poorly and now it's not available in the US after I got a C&D letter for a TM infringement (greedy bastards!) - Nigerian scammers signed up and started harassing some of the easy targets (greedy bastards!) - AI slop clone apps have already popped up, copied down to the screen layout and all (complete with the vomit inducing websites with the rainbow colours and all) (greedy bastards!)

So if I want to keep this hobby going I need to at least: - Pivot from an app to a web front end to get out of the google and apple walled gardens - Rename the entire thing because apparently a US trademark can eventually get it taken down across the whole world.

I feel like the subject of a meme for refusing to accept that the internet is not the same as it was 20 years ago, and thinking that I could carve a piece of it out to make something useful and free and not affected by all the greedy bastards making everything shit these days.

My time will be better spent on my hobbies that don't fight me back and make me this angry at the world.

KomoD 31 days ago |

I'm not going to convince you. If you feel like it's just not fun, I'd say move on to something else you actually enjoy.

I say this because you said it's a hobby. If you have to deal with C&Ds, content moderation, support, copycats, etc... then it starts to feel like a job.

But since you made this post, maybe there's still some part of you that wants to keep going.

baubino 31 days ago |

> I feel like the subject of a meme for refusing to accept that the internet is not the same as it was 20 years ago

With the exception of your last point regarding AI slop copies of your app, these are all things we faced as hobbyist creators 20 years ago too. I get your frustration but it seems a bit unreasonable to expect a lapsed payment to not result in a service terminated. Guarding against bad faith actors has always been a problem on the internet as has the name infringement issue (though haphazardly applied). Perhaps the speed and scale at which these things occur have changed but they aren’t new.

So yes, keep building. This is what comes with the territory.