Interesting, thanks. I actually looked into $1 payments for an adjacent project and the costs are still prohibitive even today. Stripe fees cost something like 30-40% for a $1 payment, and PayPal is only slightly better :/
Yeah, I figure that's the curse of any community gaining traction. I expect to have to turn off comments at some point...if that fails I'll just restrict registrations.
In a worst-case scenario, I think the broader 100 Million Books project would still benefit from me and/or a couple of collaborators posting to it alone.
I will admit the 5 year timeframe is a bit arbitrary and may need to be adjusted.
With that said, the goal is positively not to replicate HN with discussions of cutting-edge technology and science.
Even in those topics, I think there's plenty to cover in those fields as it related to nostalgia, little-known but significant advancements, unsung heroes, etc.
I always wait to watch TV shows and movies until the hype has blown over and people can actually tell me their honest thoughts...often in relation to other shows they've seen.
Time allows for context that simply isn't possible otherwise.
It's become a huge time-saver for me. And I would say the shows I do end up watching tend to be of higher quality, on average!
Let's see. Not everything interesting I come across on the web is a good fit for HN, but when I see something that is, I post it here.
I've found that (at least for me) once a community is strong enough, and my motivation to participate in it is strong enough, it's not hard to participate in it naturally.
Yup, thanks. Actually thanks for mentioning PayPal again...I had discounted them at first because of the 5% fee but didn't realize their lack of a huge flat add-on actually makes them better for smaller payments.
I see this perspective posted a lot, and while I think it's generally true, it's a bit vague.
What do we mean by writing better? If we're referring to an improved ability to articulate thoughts and produce more text, then sure, writing more will help with that. Maybe quality will improve marginally over time.
But if we're talking about actually producing writing of a higher quality, I'm afraid simply writing more can only help so much. Improving the quality of the craft requires readers to provide feedback on the writing itself and/or writers to actively learn how to actually write better. The former is rare, and I'm not sure many writers actively take part in the latter.
"What we've institutionalized is run to failure: we'll just keep doing more of what's failed spectacularly until the entire status quo collapses in a fetid heap of greed, self-interest and gross incompetence."
This is buried toward the end of the article but I think it's a big statement with massive consequences for many practical issues.
The legal entities can move to other jurisdictions, sure, but it doesn't matter because app distribution still occurs primarily through USA-based Google Play and USA-based Apple App Store—both of which can easily geofence apps as they please (or as they're required).
This is one of the reasons I've started to appreciate Matrix a lot more lately.
I've downloaded Manyverse from F-Droid so many times, hoping to finally use it for real...but I never could. I was particularly excited recently when an iOS app was released.
If you have a really close group of techy friends who don't mind hiccups and tinkering and don't mind a strictly non-private social medium, maybe it could work.
However, if you're trying to use it with normies, you might be disappointed. Private messages don't work at all, in my experience. Syncing with a pub server takes a couple of restarts, and there is no indicator in the GUI that any syncing is happening, so the user is left guessing.
I have nothing but respect for Andre Staltz and all the dedication and work that he and others have put into the app (and ecosystem) but, at least for me, it's just not quite there yet.
Open-core, or fully open-source with paid offerings (e.g. Zulip -- see tabbott's comment below [0]).
Let the DIYers host their own instances, but offer support and/or on-premise deployments for a fee. It seems to be what Mattermost, Zulip, and others are doing with some success.
Mattermost also includes use of their mobile notification relay servers in their paid offerings, which is compelling, because otherwise you have to build and distribute your own mobile apps.
[0] edited to include reference to important comment
All great thoughts -- you sound like a generous guy :)
> Those who can't do, teach
I'm with you. I'd change that phrase to "Those who have done, should teach".
Reminds me of an idea I think I read in one of Nassim Taleb's books...that growth of education tends to follow the growth of industry, since industry is where a great portion of tinkering and experimentation is happening.
You and parent comment are both right, but it's interesting because I haven't heard this feedback before.
Part of what makes these games so playable is that they're quick and don't require a whole lot of thought. It's a compromise. The intention is for players to focus more on improving the technical aspects of the writing presented instead of thinking too deeply about the message because more context and more text to edit might add too much friction to the experience (i.e., make the "game" into more of a "task").
I know it might not help a whole lot, but each game has a tiny bit of context to help...the context for the current game (shown right above the game-play box) is "Opening sentence of a research paper by a think tank."
Anyway, I'll think about ways to address this. Thanks for the feedback.
However I will also add that while these games are meant to be more fun than serious...the "courses", on the other hand, will take message, content, audience, etc into account and generally be much more thorough.
anchpop - your response wasn't considered valid because it did not include the term "cybercrime". In hindsight this was a bad decision on my part -- each game has a small set of strings that a response must include to be considered valid (to avoid spam responses from messing up scoring). "Cybercrime" probably shouldn't be one of them (sorry).