Ask HN: What happened with Zas Editor?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32623360

by jatins • 4 years ago

27 5 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Just a few months back this was on frontpage of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30952084. It looked like a promising new text editor but the website https://www.zeditor.app doesn't exist anymore.

Did anyone purchase it? I am curious if the project got abandoned because it did not get much traction or if it was some sort of scam.

ffhhj2• 4 years ago

Apparently it was a scam:

https://github.com/ZasEditor/Zas-Editor-Issues/issues/65

Nextgrid• 4 years ago

Did they ever ship functioning software or was it a pre-order? If it’s the former it seems like an odd choice for a scam - it’s not trivial to make even a basic code editor from scratch and the market is niche enough that the payoff is relatively tiny (compared to other scams they could pull).

ffhhj2• 4 years ago

They could be targeting investors.

armchairhacker• 4 years ago

I don't think it's an intentional scam. I what actually happened is that the ~2 people who made Zas released the software then a) immediately burned out or b) had family/financial/health issues. So they stopped updating. Then once people started getting angry, they got even more overwhelmed and just dropped off the face of the Earth.

Pretty sure that kind of thing happens with a lot of games and Kickstarters. Think No Man's Sky, but Hello Games just disappears instead going back and actually redeeming the game with free updates.

Still a half-finished product, still unfortunate, still a waste of money, and it's something you should not do if you release a paid half-finished product. But I can't imagine anyone saying "let's spend 12 months making a half-decent IDE, then release it to grift out people who actually buy paid IDEs". There are way better ways, legitimate and illegitimate, to make money.

Ask HN: What happened with Zas Editor?

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