Base iPhone is midrange device, not a flagship.

Why do you go there then? If you don’t, they won’t get their $3 out of you and universe is in balance again :-)

if that were not true, they wouldn’t be in business.

Why? They are not loosing anything while developers are gaining time using their website.

They had 66 million dollars revenue in 2021. They have about 20 million registered users (and much more unregistered, and that’s revenue not income, but let’s forget that). Do you really, honestly feel, that SO doesn’t save you $3 worth of time per year?

Because if he’s able to help anyone on SO, he very likely profited many, many times from free access to knowledge there before he got to this point. Given activity of average user he probably gained orders of magnitude more than he given.

I find rambling about money and compensation in such context distasteful.

SO provided platform which, while not perfect is used by millions of people. They aren’t overloaded with ads and dark patterns as many of the clones. If it’s worthless, why people are using it instead self hosted blogs for example?

Well guy complains about compensation for his “work”. I assume he’s ready to shell out a few dollars for when he’ll need it :-)

Would you prefer SO to be paid?

No company bigger than a few tens of people has principles. They have sales KPI, that go up or down depending on marketing campaigns.

If by “responsibly” you mean strip customers of privacy under old story of protecting children then sure.

Why are you manipulating people?

EU version has review process built-in. Anyways it’ll be hard to get more outdated than lightning.

Negative cash flow means they are spending more than they are earning.

It doesn’t mean they don’t have money already.

Nope