Oh sure. 20 years ago I used VMs and that was also a duct tape solution. I'd have hoped for a proper solution by now, but a lighter hack works too

Reproducibility? No.

Not having to regularly rebuild the whole dev environment because I need to work on one particular Python app once a quarter and its build chain reliably breaks other stuff? Priceless.

Digg rather famously did have both followers and "influencers", though not in quite the same sense that those creatures are known today. Arguably its failure to limit the impact of both are what led to the forms we see today.

There's been an awful lot written about all of this over the years, much of it overly simplistic and some of it just straight-up wrong; we all want to believe that we're just plain smarter than the ancients, even when those ancients were us.

If you're interested in (ahem) digging into this, start by searching for things like "Digg voting network".

IOW, a few sharks eat a tremendous number of minnows.

Something I try to remember whenever the urge to "hustle" comes back: taking payoff I got from years of startup work, subtracting taxes and spread across those years... Still put me at just above market rate for those years. But instead of that market rate for 40 hour weeks, it was that rate for 80, 100, 120 hour weeks. I could've been working two bog-standard jobs for normal companies, worked fewer hours, and come out ahead.

Everyone has a reason for gambling. It's rarely ever a good reason. But man, it's easy to lose yourself in rationalizations when you're in its thrall...

Text selection is such a great example precisely because it is incredibly useful to have in many unexpected situations (and a great many more that should be expected), but UI designers as a rule do not think about these situations!

It is so bad that one of the most impressive operating system features to be added in recent years is the ability to select and copy arbitrary text from app UIs, using either accessibility APIs or (more recently) straight-up OCR (because of course accessibility is another thing UI designers forget).

It's not like adding text selection in native apps is even hard; it's just not on the radar, and never has been. The number of old-school apps that added some form of "open log file" to either support instructions or as an actual function in the UI instead of making error messages selectable / copyable is depressing; I've seen programmers spend more time mocking end users for not knowing how to take proper screenshots than it would have taken to implement selectable UIs.

...and by historical accident, this problem is now solved in the vast majority of new applications. A small mercy!