HN user
@m52go
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.
That's the point! But yes the 5 year timeframe is somewhat arbitrary and may need to be adjusted.
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.
Shoot sorry, I had closed registration while developing. It's open now!
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.
Matrix is a protocol. Riot is the old name of the flagship apps built on the Matrix protocol by the core team. Element is the new name.
How is Matrix not the solution it claims to be? What's not /actually/ decentralized about it?
Keep in mind software of this kind doesn't just [poof] appear out of nowhere...it's typically built incrementally on meager budgets.
What you seem to want is a peer-to-peer solution, which at this point in time is not something Matrix has built or claims to have built.
Even this site seems to use WordPress and some other frameworks. So unnecessary...just need a simple static page.
Oh and no HTTPS.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What happens when Glenn fails to conform to Substack's standards?
To my knowledge Substack hasn't censored yet, but it's inevitable. Glenn should just start his own site, in my opinion.
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.
https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom
Thanks for clarifying -- I've edited my comment to make that more clear. And thanks for your work on Zulip!
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.
It can make sense. It's also better for longevity of the work.
I'm surprised Jeff is offering his videos for free too though...that seems like a perfect candidate for a paywall to capture some of the value created from the books he's giving away. Of course I don't know the whole story and realize it's a personal choice -- but, in any case, this is exactly why giving a book away for free can be so powerful.
I'm planning to launch a book marketplace that offers books for free if downloaded via P2P while charging a small fee for direct HTTP downloads.
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).
Awesome, thank you for checking it out! Yes, Dashboard reporting needs to be improved greatly. I'll get to that after courses are launched.
For what it's worth, games remain playable after they end...it's just that human scoring isn't available for them anymore.
But now that you mention it, that doesn't make sense. Even if human scoring is over, players should still be sent an email of the best responses from past human evaluation.
Thanks for all the feedback! Looks like I have some work to do.
Thank you!
Yes -- I send the best responses out in an email after some manual sifting, after live scoring for a game has ended.
I wasn't sure if showing the best answers immediately would encourage some people to play again with "help", putting others at a disadvantage.
I really like this line in the article: "Bad writing is bad thinking." So true. Sometimes I just write when I'm confused about something and it helps clarify things.
Since this is HN, I'm going to add a shameless plug.
For 4 years I've run Write Battle, a game for writers (originally anyone writing emails, instant messages, etc...but user base has largely turned out to be marketers) to compete against each other to devise the most concise prose. The best writing wins, as judged by brevity (response length) and readability (Flesch-Kincaid).
Right now, as we speak, I'm turning these games into a set of interactive, gamified, bite-size courses to teach the basics of effective writing without boring reading or lectures. I should have the first set of (free) courses done in about a week [0].
My approach is that while grammar and formal rules are important, practical effect is more important, so the games and courses I've made so far focus more on effectiveness than theory and rules. Turns out writing is more fun that way too!
Thanks! Integrations don't sound perfect, but I guess it would be unrealistic to expect perfection given the nature of the implementations.
Identities that could be somehow owned independent of servers would be a game-changer, I think.
Thank you for your work, and congratulations on 2.0 ;)
Can anyone explain, in simple terms, how interoperability and migration works with ActivityPub (or point to resources that do)?
If I create an account on a Mastodon instance, and want to move it to another instance, do I lose everything?
And how does integration among the various platforms currently out (e.g., Mastodon, Plume, Pixelfed, etc) actually work? Is there some tool to see feeds aggregated from all these implementations? Or does it work differently?
I ask these questions as someone used Mastodon for a bit, has explored a handful of ActivityPub implementations. It all sounds very cool to me, but I still don't quite "get it".
Personally I prefer the approach of Secure Scuttlebutt, but I realize their P2P workings are probably unrealistic and impractical for the vast majority of people.
The Android app for 100 Million Books is meant to abide by these principles...to the point I thought it made sense to call it an "anti-app"!
I see Calm's purpose seems to extend far beyond smartphone apps and consumer technology, but I was hoping more people would create "anti-apps" when I created mine, and it it seems like Calm is doing a better job than me of pushing for such things.
https://100millionbooks.org/blog/news/android-app-err-anti-a...
For some people, the V8 means much more...the sound, the torque, and perhaps most importantly, a stronger platform for tuning and power that a V6 simply cannot offer.
Perhaps people doing PhDs also have different motives and intentions for how to use them.
Correct, books won't die, but copyright (as we know it now) will.
What's needed in this industry is social innovation, not technological innovation.
Technology is already doing all it can.