I think in the past year I’ve been way too harsh on the Scratch Team.

There’s obvious serious issues at the company that are either not specific departments faults (eg it’s not the development departments fault they haven’t been adding features) or are either no one’s fault.

the development team used to have 18 permanent engineers. Now they have 3. I assume this is mainly from the layoffs not too long ago, which could’ve just been to cut costs. When Scratch Team member @wheelsonfire were asked about the layoffs, he said that the company had disagreements with leadership, leading to 4 executive directors in 5 years. This isn’t any of the departments fault.

The Scratch Team made a 6 million loss in 2023. They spent basically the same as 2022 (300K loss), but got way less revenue (over 5 million less!) they are very obviously underfunded.

So I think I and others need to cut some slack for the team. Since if this year and best they also make big losses, I’m struggling to see how Scratch can even survive and exist.

comments

I think this is related to why the Forums and Wiki are being slow lately

(or maybe not.)

According to chatGPT (take this with a grain of salt) MIT made 4 billion last year. So ig I could see how they survive (this doesn’t include donations to scratch either).

Scratch spun off from MIT years ago, it's now an independent non-profit

Why does MIT allow them to continue using the mit.edu base domain then?

Late reply, but they’ve been using it for so long, why not?

The issue Is that Scratch is a website for all ages, so it has a lot of kids there. And anyone with a younger sibling knows how annoying kids are.

They did good with the same demographic for years though… In my opinion it started to really get worse after the studio thing. That was the last big thing they’ve done. I really hope Scratch can get back on their feet and start making new stuff.

(Side note: How is it already 3 years since Scratch lab came out and the studio update happened?!?)

I have no idea why the studio update happened

Maybe someone didn't understand a request from another member of the ST idk it's a big mystery

What studio update?

They switched the studios from 2.0 to 3.0

How on earth is that issue I talked about

Yeah I feel the same way. There’s a lot going on internally that we don’t know about. I just wish they would talk about it more and be more transparent, it would make people stop complaining.