Lyra: a platform for deep, meaningful conversations with people you care about

http://www.hellolyra.org

by lyra_comms • 10 years ago

76 103 10 years ago

hellolyra.org

kvakvs• 10 years ago

Click "Visit Lyra"

Scroll.

Click "View some conversations"

A registration form pops up.

There they lost me. Do they have nothing to show to a guest?

llamataboot• 10 years ago

Agreed, I was hoping for at least screenshots of the product.

I'm also interested in what is fostering "meaningful conversations" beyond being able to manage your own groups and not having advertising...

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

It refers to a respect for language and for the user's concentration and attentional resources.

aaron-lebo• 10 years ago

I feel like pages of stock photos is showing some blatant disregard for a guest's time.

boardwaalk• 10 years ago

  A map in a book: no algorithms
  A book and some fruit: no advertising
  A book and some yarn: non-profit

Even more than stock photos, maybe they should be somewhat, at all, related to anything. Yikes.

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

That's just the teaser. Please visit hellolyra.com for the real thing.

kentt2• 10 years ago

I created and account with the username & password bugmenot.

lez• 10 years ago

We need the email to log in.

markbnj• 10 years ago

Agreed as well. I'd love to see a demo of it in action but I am not willing to create an account just to see if I might want to create an account. The idea of a conversation tree is intriguing, but I think the complexity and comprehensibility of it may degrade rapidly as the number of nodes and branches grows. I assume they must have put a lot of thought into tree viewing, searching, and filtering and it's that part I would love to see a demo of.

desireco42• 10 years ago

I can't comment on Lyra as I am looking at the site, but it seems to me, for discussion platform to work, it has to be non-profit. It should figure out how to make things work but also be non-profit in essence.

highway_to_hell5• 10 years ago

We very much agree. It needs to be sustainable too. Medium is going to have to adulterate its focus on language and writing in order to monetise in interesting ways. Lyra doesn't have that problem - it monetises in the age-old way, by charging a small fee. (Team member here)

andrewclunn• 10 years ago

Signed up. Appears to be very new. It seems the legibility is key, where discussions are meant to be longer form and searchable rather than promote easy of reply. Perhaps a conscious effort to make one think a bit harder about how one writes?

highway_to_hell5• 10 years ago

Pretty new but we've been through a couple of iterations of testing, and have a mature stack with a full spec.

We believe the tools you use to communicate influence the way you communicate, and a respect for language and the attention you pay to a conversation will lead to better conversations.

dullroar2• 10 years ago

"Perhaps a conscious effort to make one think a bit harder about how one writes?"

Yes, this. That looks like one of their goals, and I would say it's a welcome addition. The world has enough platforms for short, terse meme wars already.

new2992• 10 years ago

"We will never sell or give away any data concerning you. Not one single bit."

and

"Lyra Communications Ltd, UK reg. 10534260"

are unfortunately not really compatible statements, particularly after the IP Bill passed.

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

We won't sell. We won't give away. We will comply with our requirements under UK law (which is neither selling nor giving away).

wbeckler• 10 years ago

What about the Snooper Charter? The government counts.

new2992• 10 years ago

You can be compelled to give your users data to government agents. You can even be compelled to background encryption algorithms to make this easier.

To say that's not "giving" seems like semantics.

jonathanstrange• 10 years ago

I think it looks like a marvelous idea, but the question is, how do you intend to afford to run this with all this promises of zero advertising, never selling out to investors, and remaining nonprofit forever?

Please don't misunderstand me, Wikipedia is also nonprofit and seems to work quite well, and it's a noble goal. I just happen to also remember my "eternal, irrevocable and always free" name@usa.com email address. They went bankrupt pretty rapidly. (I'm pretty sure that was the domain then, now it seems to be owned by some guide to US states and cities.)

nine_k4• 10 years ago

I don't see why being a non-profit means being also a no-revenue.

Add a paid layer, with premium features. Make premium features a gift option to other accounts, so that it could be a token of appreciation.

Add a paid layer with the only paid feature being a "proud supporter" badge. Surprisingly many people take pride in that when it costs them a $5.

Add a donation button, run donation campaigns. It works for Wikipedia :)

There's no need to avoid being paid.

highway_to_hell5• 10 years ago

Thanks for your comments!

We simply charge £2.99 per year. We won't block any features from unpaid users unless we're running at a loss.

highway_to_hell5• 10 years ago

Thanks! Mr Norrell here from the Lyra team.

A subscription to Lyra costs £2.99 (about $3.70) per year. That's cheaper than a shit coffee. (Member of the team here)

al_chemist• 10 years ago

"Our product - cheaper than a shit coffee"

That's a hell of a marketing slogan.

josepi_2• 10 years ago

I'm curious what you think is so marvelous about it. What sets this apart from, say, Reddit or HN? The idea seems to be displaying "conversations" as a tree. You don't need a new platform to do that.

fusion_cow8• 10 years ago

Hello! Hope you don't mind if I refer you to this page: https://www.hellolyra.com/about?page=how-lyra-works

And this one: https://www.hellolyra.com/about?page=how-lyra-compares

The points which are most blindingly marvellous are a) control over your audiences and your news feed and b) a respect for language and words, which comes across in lots of different places in the interface.

maxpert• 10 years ago

Huh another toy Slack? Why is page so random? Why do I have to register to view conversations. I made a similar toy in Golang few months ago, which does not require registration :D http://raspchat.com/

opportune• 10 years ago

But is it deep and meaningful?

sergiotapia2• 10 years ago

Can't tell if serious or HBO Silicon Valley joke.

fusion_cow8• 10 years ago

That's cool, but it's a one-dimensional chat platform, whereas Lyra is a hierarchical conversation platform with a complex access control system :)

And we have paragraphs. Do you have paragraphs? :p

pnathan• 10 years ago

How is this different than Dreamwidth?

nine_k4• 10 years ago

DW is a replication of tech from 1999 (hey, Mr. Fitzpatrick, thank you!). It shows. DW is also more geared towards discovery and community-building, a somehow different offer.

kentt2• 10 years ago

That is some brutal scroll hijacking

incanus77• 10 years ago

Typo down the page a bit.

The only reason we exist is to enable deep, mearningful conversations.

fusion_cow8• 10 years ago

Thanks! :) Fixing now.

AznHisoka4• 10 years ago

I don't think a lot of meaningful conversations can happen in a 1-to-many format.

They mostly occur in 1-to-1 scenarios.

And if they do occur, they quickly turn to ugly debates, not meaningful conversations.

fusion_cow8• 10 years ago

Hello! Lyra also supports 1 to 1 conversations (private conversations with just one person in the audience). These are just the same as private messages.

Lyra also supports panel discussions (public read, but only a few people are allowed to comment) and blogging (private read AND private write).

AznHisoka4• 10 years ago

Why would I need to use this if I already have email?

cabalamat• 10 years ago

According to the website:

Public conversations can be viewed by anyone

So how do I view them without logging in?

nkoren• 10 years ago

Something weird is going on with the comment thread here. Messages from the Lyra creators are being downvoted with no conceivable justification that I can see; the fusion_cow account appears to have been hell-banned. Looking at the their comment history, I can't see anything to justify this.

Has somebody really got it out for Lyra? What's going on?

cixin3• 10 years ago

I think it possibly because they've created a few new accounts. New accounts on HN can only post so many comments before they start getting marked as [dead] automatically I guess this is to prevent spam.

To be honest, creating multiple new accounts to promote your startup is slightly spammy behavior. Even if they are owned by different employees of that startup.

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

Hello! We didn't mean any of this to happen - one account got rate limited (who knows why) so we made another to answer questions, and then I think HN's spam detection opened its glowing red eyes and nuked that one as well.

cixin3• 10 years ago

Your website says your a non-profit, but you're incorporated as a private limited company.

Just FYI, in the U.K. Non-profits are generally incorporated as companies limited by guarantee. If you are really not seeking profit for shareholders, this would be a better organization type.

fusion_cow8• 10 years ago

Hello! We are actually in the process of being accredited as a not-for-profit organisation. It's a bit more difficult than incorporating a PLC, so it will take a bit of time :)

cixin3• 10 years ago

Again, just FYI, you're not a PLC (which stands for public limited company, and means you can sell shares to the general public) you're incorporated as a private limited company.

sergiotapia2• 10 years ago

You should show a demo page of an example use case before asking users to sign up and give up their personal information.

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

Please see https://www.hellolyra.com/about?page=how-lyra-works :)

detaro• 10 years ago

That's a text describing it, not a demo.

finid3• 10 years ago

Photos also open up a huge potential for nasty behaviour (using offensive images) and abuse (by the theft and publication of private images). Instead, Lyra focusses on designing the best possible system for text communication on the Web. It does one thing and it does it well.

You mean no images? No videos, too?

Even after we've known that a picture (or video) is worth more than a thousand words.

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

Hello!

That's right. Lyra is a service that does one thing and does it well. There are loads of services that handle images really well (Flickr, Imgur etc). Lyra is for word-based conversations.

(We do inline links, so you can easily link to an external image. We MIGHT display thumbnails if there's enough demand.)

jakerockland• 10 years ago

A bit confused on how to get up and running with trying this out--is there a way to invite friends?

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

Yes, please see hellolyra.com/invite!

We'll add it to the menu shortly :)

mrec• 10 years ago

This kind of looks like a mashup of Reddit with G+'s circles. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, although if that graphical tree view in "how-lyra-works" is the real UI it looks painful to navigate once it grows past a half-dozen comments.

As a result, subreddits need to be moderated, which mitigates - but does not always prevent - unpleasant behaviour.

Many subreddits aren't moderated, and many of those work fine regardless. Downvoting is the first line of defence against unpleasantness. (Or the second, with the first being "stay well away from the default subs".) Moderation tends to be more about enforcing house rules over and above basic civility.

On Reddit, you have no privacy. Your entire post history is visible to anyone.

Is that true of private subreddits too? (Genuine question, I've never had anything to do with them.)

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

That's a good description of Lyra! Could you filter your news feed by circles on Google+? I don't remember...

I'm not sure about post history on provate subreddits either.

Deimorz4• 10 years ago

Is that true of private subreddits too? (Genuine question, I've never had anything to do with them.)

Posts in private subreddits are not visible in your history unless the viewer also has access to that private subreddit.

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

OK, thanks for clarifying :)

colorincorrect• 10 years ago

without an algorithm that determines the order of presentation of content, the service risks putting too much strain on the user to filter content. (which basically undermines the whole point of such a service)

alternatively, a thought provoking youtube video doesn't guarantee meaningful comments; and a meaningful comment doesn't guarantee a meaningful discussion

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

For the past several million years, Nature has been working on a brilliant algorithm to determine the presentation of content: the social functions of the human brain.

Lyra reestablishes people, rather than fora or subreddits, as the brokers of importance and validity.

Deimorz4• 10 years ago

There are some really neat ideas here, but a few quick thoughts about things that are pushing me away before I've even seen anything of the "actual site" yet (which I don't seem to be able to do without registering):

* The http://hellolyra.org/ page has that extremely generic "landing page" look, and doesn't actually show any of the unique things you say you're doing. I'd much rather see an example of a tree-based conversation than an unrelated stock photo or some gigantic icons in diamonds. The very start of the text on the page complains about words being replaced by images, but you're doing the same thing.

* All of the buttons inside the landing page content ("DISCOVER", and the three "MORE"s at the bottom) are useless and just scroll the page down slightly. I was expecting to be able to read more about the "no advertising" statement specifically, and just ended up with the page moving a tiny bit.

* https://hellolyra.com doesn't display any content with javascript disabled. A site that's primarily text shouldn't require javascript just to view.

* Your charter says "We will never sell or give away any data concerning you. Not one single bit.", but you're using Google Analytics. Using GA is giving away a lot of user data.

* On the "How Lyra Works" page, the image of a tree-based conversation is definitely not showing a high-quality discussion. If the site emphasizes quality discussions, show one there. And is that the actual way that a discussion displays on the site? If not, replace it with an image of the real interface.

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

Thanks, comments taken on board.

- Will upgrade landing page shortly. I agree about those annoying "more" buttons. They are already gone.

- Correct about Google Analytics. This is an interim measure and will be gone soon.

- Good point re the sample discussion, we are changing this now.

Deimorz4• 10 years ago

Thanks for the quick response and updates.

I want to emphasize that if you're serious about protecting user privacy (and by putting it as the #1 item on your charter, I believe that you want to be), you'll need to be far more careful. You absolutely can't use Google Analytics, even temporarily. You need to remove your usage of Google Fonts as well, and ideally every other third-party service/resource.

This is not an easy thing to do, but truly protecting user privacy is difficult. If you have a small staff, you're going to have to make a choice about whether protecting privacy is worth all the additional effort that will be necessary.

Regardless of your choice, make sure that your public statements (and especially your charter) reflect the reality of the situation. When I see your charter start with "We will never sell or give away any data concerning you. Not one single bit.", but a quick look shows me that you are, in fact, giving away data, that immediately makes me distrust all of your other statements and principles as well. User trust is easy to lose and extremely hard to gain back, do your best not to lose it in the first place.

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

Also, we use JS for rendering - it's a key part of how Lyra works at the moment. We'd like to have a graceful fallback to text, but we need some more engineers first!

1_2__3• 10 years ago

The title alone is so disgustingly marketing-speak as to make me not even want to click on it. How arrogant does a company have to be to think that they're the ones who are going to unlock "deep, meaningful conversations"?

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

Don't judge a book by its cover. ;)

equalarrow2• 10 years ago

First off, this is great timing since I'm removing my facebook account (which I never use anymore).

I still feel like it would be nice to have something like a feed for my close members of my family. I can use IM to send messages to my parents, but a feed wld be nicer maybe.

I've played around with ideas like this in regards to non-profits, not having ads, keeping data private, and going long term. I'm not sure if the authors can post their tech stack, but I'm sorta scratching my head wondering what their stack requirements are and how $4/year will keep this going for a long time.

And while we're at it, how long is the plan? Decades? I only ask because in the way corps operate now, everything is short term. Outside of the megaliths (Google, Apple, FB), how many companies with your data can claim to be multi-generational? I ask this seriously, thx.

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

Hello equalarrow!

Lyra can be exactly this - a feed for close friends and family. Just make a group with them in, and set your Conversations feed to show just that group.

We have extensive experience with AWS (where Lyra runs) and we're confident that we can keep running at the price point we've set.

Because we don't intend to take any investment, our plan is to become sustainable. We don't have an exit strategy and we don't intend to sell. As long as our users are willing to subscribe, so that we can pay our engineers and cover our running costs, then Lyra is here to stay.

equalarrow2• 10 years ago

Sounds good, thanks for the reply. I guess my only other question on this is how portable can/will/is the data if someone wants to leave?

Dirlewanger• 10 years ago

Forget the Facebook-curated echo chamber, now you can choose who exactly is allowed in your echo chamber!

lyra_comms30• 10 years ago

Human society has always had a certain component of echo chamber, and always will. Which makes sense, because we ask the questions we understand how to ask, and we listen to the people whose ideas we get.

Lyra's purpose is to take the control of your echo chamber out of the hands of an ad-revenue-maximisation algorithm, and return it to you.

richard___• 10 years ago

I read the site and have no idea how t works. You should put up screenshots of actual convos

Lyra: a platform for deep, meaningful conversations with people you care about

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