crunchyave

I think someday in the future I'd be willing to pay for an ad-free social media platform. I wouldn't do this for facebook though, they just aren't trustworthy as a company.

Whether or not Facebook is paid or free or not, it would still be a place populated by a list of friends/family you either barely know or don't see IRL, spouting unsolicited opinions or posting uninteresting baby pictures, etc. And I think ads would probably still sneak in, via fake accounts that just spam and share products. Maybe some of the noise would be cut down via people quitting the platform, but the worst offenders are addicted to facebook, so I think they'd stay.

I quit facebook probably two years ago and there's really not one thing about it I miss, so I certainly wouldn't pay for it.

VCV Rack directly conforms to the visual patterns and usage patterns of Eurorack hardware, so I'd guess that is the main reason that it's so popular relative to those other options. PD is also a bit harder to get going with out of the box, even with packages like Automatonism, impressive though they are.

Reaktor 6 had a similar thing happen, lots of people who hadn't used it before were brought into that ecosystem by their "blocks", which also kinda emulate Eurorack.

Ehh, I don't really think that's a good comparison. Pure Data is a visual programming environment/toolkit that gives you a set of low level building blocks from which you can build whatever you want. You can extend it by taking advantage of open source libraries that other people have made, or even code your own in C.

VCVrack is open source, but as an end user you're not dealing with the low-level stuff out in the open the same way you would in PD. It's a completed object rather than a set of legos.

Having said that, You're right about the GUI. The PD GUI is... primitive, to say the least.