Ask HN: Not a startup, what do you think of the craft & techniques?

https://rdv.to/

by ptramo • 6 years ago

13 22 6 years ago

rdv.to

cpach• 6 years ago

This should probably be a ”Show HN” :)

ptramo10• 6 years ago

Thanks, not HN-cultured enough when I posted, won't repeat this now-permanent mistake.

sokoloff• 6 years ago

What I think is your headline gave so little information that, though I did click, I almost immediately clicked away because, well, you didn’t guide me in any meaningful way to what “craft and techniques” might be interesting to news.yc readers.

I experienced it as pretty close to click-bait overall.

benjaminsuch• 6 years ago

Have to agree, you need to read and scroll a lot to somehow get an idea what's the site about. I left too pretty quickly.

ptramo10• 6 years ago

Yes, to be honest at this stage I'm not looking for feedback from people who won't invest a bit more time in it than you have as I'm sharing a lot of ideas in little space and they probably take a bit to digest depending on your expertises, but thanks for trying. I guess anything being exposed in that document is fair game, including the soundness of the ideas exposed (however limited their current exposure), their applicability, how to improve visual & textual communication are areas where I would more than welcome feedback.

ptramo10• 6 years ago

Sorry that's how you saw it. I was trying to start a conversation and tried to present my material in the best light achievable in a couple of days of side work with some assistance. It certainly wasn't my intent to capture customers but rather hear from hackers about what I'm trying to lay out and whether it jives with how they think of tech, the web, and how to build things together.

zwaps2• 6 years ago

The scrolling light effect makes my head hurt.

ptramo10• 6 years ago

Thank you for getting back to me and sorry for the bad experience, this sounds terrible! Would you think wrong amount(s), wrong timing, wrong effect(s)? Does you browser prefer dark or light backgrounds (did the background go very dark or very light when you scrolled)? If you care to emulate the other through eg Chrome DevTools, does this affect your opinion?

zwaps2• 6 years ago

It‘s like a strong light shines from behind the background.

exdsq• 6 years ago

I didn't quickly understand what this was showing me so clicked off. I have a short attention span! The title should be more informative, have a shorter landing page, and make it obvious why I should read it :)

ptramo10• 6 years ago

100% somehow labelling is always the last thing I tweak. Thanks, I've been thinking platform and slowly turning to initial "product(s)", so it's good to be reminded of the essentials. That being said if you're waiting for a landing page it's gonna take a while. The point of RDV is that every "rendezvous" is one so I don't really need mine.

deltaveedaddy• 6 years ago

That alpha-blend or whatever happens as you scroll is incredibly obnoxious. I nearly clicked away and ignored this because it's so awful.

The grammar of the page suggests an asocial author with limited social skills, and perhaps a misunderstanding of what the objective of a landing page is for.

""" We only earn real customer money, at any cost. Free or $10/year, later adjusted with you to follow our expenses. """

It boggles my mind that you'd consider writing this, in this manner, to try and attract interest. It sounds clunky, complicated, awkward, mechanical; there's really not enough adjectives to capture this page's problems.

Then you have a picture of code (you've automatically disqualified yourself far before now, but an image of code instead of <code> blocks will always lose my interest, personally)

To summarize, this is horrendous, and you can do better.

The first three seconds of this webpage are losing 99% of your prospects. Not that your page even explains what your product is anyways, but for clarity's sake:

Famous image in the background, that's distracting, is this an art project?

"TAKING THEM SOON" What does that mean? It sounds vaguely threatening, or maybe the author is just illiterate.

Scrolling down beyond that results in a flashbang exploding before my face, so I'd leave.

0/10

ptramo10• 6 years ago

Feedback is insulting to English as a Second Language speaker, calls it a landing page when the first lines explicitly describe it as not (and answer some of your questions), and spent a lot of time pouring unactionable vitriol. I won't grade it as we're not in school. Maybe consider this is me cobbling together my message rather than building a finished product and we'll be on better footing. Thanks anyway!

dang2• 6 years ago

Please don't be a jerk in HN comments, especially when commenting on someone else's work. The damage you do exceeds the help you give.

Don't forget that, in an "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear" way, it's easy to seem like a much larger asshole in internet comments than one seems to oneself. If you don't want to come across this way, you need to apply a corrective transformation to avoid underestimating your impact.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

gwbas1c2• 6 years ago

Three thoughts:

- I'm not really sure what you're proposing? You really need pictures / mockups. Maybe even 15-second animations that show the flows that are in your imagination?

- IMO, the big problem with social networks is how they spread misinformation. I personally believe that the "credibility" problem is more important than trying to build a decentralized Facebook.

- Don't let your imagination run away!

BTW, as someone else mentioned, this really should be a "Show HN."

ptramo10• 6 years ago

BTW, as someone else mentioned, this really should be a "Show HN."

Sorry for missing the etiquette, I'll know better next time.

- IMO, the big problem with social networks is how they spread misinformation. I personally believe that the "credibility" problem is more important than trying to build a decentralized Facebook.

Certainly food for thoughts I've already had but haven't centered on. I do think they're something around cryptographic identities and chains of trust that X509 was trying to achieve for telcos and E-mail that we can beat for the modern web.

Many thanks for the encouraging feedback.

gwbas1c2• 6 years ago

Certainly food for thoughts I've already had but haven't centered on. I do think they're something around cryptographic identities and chains of trust that X509 was trying to achieve for telcos and E-mail that we can beat for the modern web.

Cryptography doesn't solve the problem of misinformation.

Or, technology doesn't solve political problems.

ptramo10• 6 years ago

- I'm not really sure what you're proposing? You really need pictures / mockups. Maybe even 15-second animations that show the flows that are in your imagination?

100%. This is a few days into the making, went from OneNote to a page on my website to its own domain just yesterday. Storyboards are very much next on my mind.

stevage• 6 years ago

I spent a little while reading, but I still have absolutely no idea what this is.

At the end of the day, cryptography applied to rebuilding JWT+JWS for the people, distributed messaging over WebSocket and WebRTC, sharing abstracted Git refs, a few URL tricks & QR codes for link sharing. Make it easy to integrate your platform and to your platform. Think and share components over entire apps, build around local state and synchronization. Use the standard web & GraphQL. To think silo = identity -> code + state & build distributed systems as pools of state machines behind queues,

I'm at least passingly familiar with all those things (except JWS), but I still can't connect the dots. What do Git refs have to do with websockets?

What does "Think and share components over entire apps" even mean?

This reads a little bit like someone got high, had some major epiphanies, and is trying to communicate them with the world with a lot of hand-waving.

Hopefully there's some good ideas under there, they need much more refining and distilling before announcing them in this fashion though.

ptramo10• 6 years ago

I'm at least passingly familiar with all those things (except JWS), but I still can't connect the dots. What do Git refs have to do with websockets?

It is my intimate belief that they compose well to build powerful platforms. If they had a lot to do with each other I'd probably use one or the other.

What does "Think and share components over entire apps" even mean?

I'd suggest finding legos and a friend and learning of ways to compose scenes together. Not trying to infantilize you and sorry if I sound condescending, but I think it's the experience closest to what I'm trying to achieve that many can relate to.

This reads a little bit like someone got high, had some major epiphanies, and is trying to communicate them with the world with a lot of hand-waving.

Thanks? Hopefully my hands can slowly calm down.

Hopefully there's some good ideas under there, they need much more refining and distilling before announcing them in this fashion though.

I don't think "sharing a link on HN" requires much anything, but thanks for sharing your opinion. It helps me to see the elements take place in some context to iterate on them, this is early work.

dang2• 6 years ago

You'd be better off (1) posting this as a Show HN with a title that says what the project is, and (2) adding a first comment to the thread giving the backstory of how you came to work on this, and explaining what's different about it. That tends to seed discussion in a much better direction.

If you do this, email hn@ycombinator.com and we might be able to help out a bit.

ptramo10• 6 years ago

Thanks for your guidance. This is a super early effort and I'm very grateful for the feedback I already received, but I will certainly better follow guidelines next round and appreciate the implicit second shot to get more hackers involved in the conversation.

Ask HN: Not a startup, what do you think of the craft & techniques?

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