I don’t want to come off as me like, being a doomsayer, I think this has good intentions, and I’m probably just outraging. The Scratch Team needs to pay the bills, and the bills are huge with the size of the platform.
But the road is is paved, and between implementing a semi-subscription-model(which, to be fair is more of a donation + perks, I don’t have any problems with the concept of it) and the recent AI sidebar demo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGwu-7jTeaY), I’m kinda concerned.
I really really don’t want the one true safe space on the internet, the only place that still feels normal, the only place where children can exist and that’s fine, to follow the path down to all the classic venture capitalism tropes because this is kinda giving me flashbacks.
i think the membership is mostly aimed at parents/educators. the fact that it has basically no perks is a plus in my books. scratch is aiming to stay generally free, but the scratch foundation needs to be able to exist sustainably to keep everyone employed and to keep scratch around.
i have strong opinions on the ai stuff but i’ll hold most them for when it’s actually launched. i think the tech is very cool (i worked with it to experiment with some AI moderation things this summer), but i’m not sure an AI assistant in the editor would ever be useful. that said, a goal for the AI is to have it search for projects, and anything that makes scratch more searchable is good if you ask me.
I really don’t like the AI assistant concept personally, I kinda think it goes against the motive of creativity. But my god yes, better searchability. Scratch has been in need of a good search for ages, finding good or recent projects among 20 random projects from 10 years ago
totally agree. re: search, the best part is the search is going to ‘understand’ scratch projects, which is super cool
I agree, I like the membership thing in concept. Although I’m quite worried about the fact that it needs to exist.