mbs348

Thank you for this write up. As someone who has loved actually doing the mod, and using the machine afterword (hardware and espresso novice for the most part), I’ve felt like I am taking crazy pills following along as an open source maintainer in the past. The weaponizing of CC-NC is wild to me, though I think it might be coming a bit from the 3D printing STL sharing community.

It just all makes my heart hurt. It is a great accessible DIY project with amazing results, but just with insane baggage.

It’s been honestly pretty fun to run this at BackerKit. Sad to say it caught my COO, but actually more inspiring seeing my team banding together and fighting back and letting folks know in Slack. Also, a bonus, a really cool lean use of Drift which inspired us to use that tool better.

BackerKit (YC W13) | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | https://www.backerkit.com

BackerKit is the best way for crowdfunding creators to manage their backers, help fulfill their campaign on time, and allow them to focus on what they love doing—making something awesome! We've helped thousands of creators to raise over $115M, supporting them in everything from surveys to shipping.

To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/backerkit

Here are our open roles:

- Senior Developer: https://jobs.lever.co/backerkit/488b7d87-8ead-4ac4-91cb-59a3...

Tech Stack: Ruby (2.5 at the time of writing), Ruby on Rails (5.1), Backbone.js, Postgres, Redis

BackerKit is looking for Developers that love to pair | San Francisco, CA | Onsite

BackerKit is the best way for crowdfunding creators to manage their backers, help fulfill their campaign on time, and allow them to focus on what they love doing—making something awesome! We've helped thousands of creators to raise over $115M, supporting them in everything from surveys to shipping.

To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/backerkit

Here are our open roles:

- Senior Software Developer: https://jobs.lever.co/backerkit/488b7d87-8ead-4ac4-91cb-59a3...

- Director of Engineering: https://jobs.lever.co/backerkit/4c9d58a0-8c18-4b4b-a047-32fe...

Tech Stack: Ruby (2.5 at the time of writing) Ruby on Rails (5.1) Backbone.js Postgres Redis

Feel free to reach out if you're interested: maxwell@backerkit.com

Ha, well if you can’t beat em, you can just outlast em. :)

if our patron list grows, it could be this big! Good things start small.

People putting themselves out there, even if it's not quite there, is still something worth encouraging IMHO.

It's hard to get a single person to care. The Creative Fund now is a group of folks want to see people take the leap and try and put new things into the world.

(can't reply to your latest comment directly)

I legit shared your most recent blog post " Simple, correct, fast: in that order" to our dev #goodreads slack channel on Monday, so go figure.

You would be surprised at some of the messages we get. Actually heartfelt responses of folks saying that getting this first pledge pushed them over the edge to push harder. I'm excited that if we get to a point where the funds might be even $5 or $20 per project, that CAN be a material difference to lots of cool projects. Projects don't need even $1000 goals to be compelling.

Great point. We do outline that we reserve the right not to support certain projects per our guidelines: https://thecreative.fund/participation-guidelines

Also, Kickstarter does a great job keeping the project quality to the point of staying in ultra murky territory, which we are very appreciative.

*47 now

As we mention in the article, a lot of it IS about the token statement, and we have thousands of KS messages at least of grateful folks supporting. Do you value your $1 supporters on Patreon? Do they have a material benefit for you?

If we figured out how to make the fund work for Patreon, how would you feel?

$1 can be an inspiring start that gets folks to promote their project and get up and get going. It is a bit more about the principle, like a high five to get up and get going.

Also part of the experiment is the Patreon. Every $1,000 we may or may not raise means we can up the amount by ~$1, every month. So that means as an individual, you can pledge ~$12/year and say you contributed to every project on Kickstarter that year.

Happy to answer any questions! This was a fun project to start, and we have lots of crazy ideas how we might make this even more fun (ie Patreon people above a certain level automatically get filled out to get rewards, etc etc)

Great program, happy to see it expand to Oakland!

Looks cool, does this only work over local networks?

What we are trying to do is focus a bit more on building a model that is based on how projects have done in the past. Our model learns from each completed project, and helps create better predictions.

I am no Kicktraq expert, but I think their graphs boil down to something like rate of funding today * number of remaining days. I think they published a great blog post to this effect a few years ago.

thanks, we've found that it does take about 5-6 days before there is enough data, but from there they are a good approximation. One cool thing is that since it is a historical model, if some major event happens during your campaign (big media hit, some successful paid adverts etc), the model will adapt accordingly.

Yes, exactly. It is an interesting/cool idea to create an object URI to make this possible!

max from BackerKit here, thanks for the link. guilty as charged. messy but works!

nice to see garry taking care of his users. <3

...or why Pebble is the only cool thing this year.

yes! we actually talked with Eric and the Pebble guys about what worked well for them. I sure wish we had it for Diaspora.

actually it will be a paid service, but it will be free for the duration of the beta. We will make that more clear ASAP.

Currently we support only Kickstarter, because thats what we have first hand knowledge of. Happy to add others when we get a customer who needs it from us.

Actually, I don't think its far from our core mission at all. I'll give people credit that its not entirely obvious, but our core mission has always been "give people ownership over their data". Along the way, we got associated with a set of tools that help us do that, but at our core, that is the problem we wanted to solve all along. We have worked long and hard to trying to crack that nut. After working on the 'bits' side of the problem, we saw again and again that people don't know what it really means to own your data. Even people who claim to know have wildly different definitions, and many self defined advocates of the cause have radically different and sometimes even conflicting notions of what that means.

We started D* because wanted to make a the internet a place we didn't have to worry about all the bullshit that comes with doing stuff we feel comes naturally. While media ran with us being serious business™, we wanted to scratch and itch and make the world a better place. So in the interest of making progress, we are solving something we think is a total blocker to ANY network that is trying to focus on the contrary. If you look at Makr and just see a meme generator, then I guess you are missing the point and the power of what it could be, which is a simple way to let people create things together, which builds off of what came before, but lets them be unique and original at the same time. If that makes sense to you, great!

If it doesn't, your going to have to excuse us because our work here is not finished :)

(Also worth nothing, the features in Makr started INSIDE D, and we got (good) advice to let it blossom and spin it out into its own thing, as lots of people in the d community like D* the way it is. )

koji isn't a founder, but I am. I can understand why you think that way, but to some degree this is about a bigger problem that we lived through, first hand. That is, people don't know what they data is, so why would they use even the most perfect distributed system over something that provided basically the exact same functionality.

Owning the bits is an important problem that will get solved with time, but unless people feel like they are actually creating and making something of value on social networks, then it will be hard for any system to pull it off, even if it gets all the tech right. Turns out the 'social' in social networks is actually the hard part.

This is our stab at it. Sorry if its not for you :)

well, 4 guys for almost two years on about 150k (after taxes and teeshirts)

thanks, we will work on improving our captions!

makr actually came out of D... we started by trying some completely different features, but figured it was best for both to try them as separate things. Lots of people like D the way it is, so we spun it out into it's own thing.