Thanks for the feedback. I'm building one useful feature a time.

No to amazon affiliates.

Consider smile.amazon.com links or affiliates for charities like electronicfro-20 (EFF) though.

Thanks for the suggestion. I will.

> No to amazon affiliates.

Thanks you! This shows character and actual, proper altruistic intentions.

Before reading this, I was not even going to click the link.

Personally, I prefer not to use any project that has no way to make money. Life is expensive and time consuming. Projects require at least a little time and money. If that isn't reimbursed in any way, the rest of life will nearly always take precedent at some point. Affiliate links seem like a good way to solve this. I don't see where the conflict of interest lies.

I want myself and others to contribute because of the desire to contribute. I don't want to bring affiliates into the equation lest it brings the wrong incentives (however glimmering it may be).

There are other ways to make money.

I'm honestly curious how you envision that affiliate links might create the wrong incentives. There are other ways to make money, but the ones I can think of seem much worse. Advertising sucks and clearly has more wrong incentive problems. Donations are less predictable and disconnected from the usefulness of the site. It seems to me that getting a small cut of "hey this book does look useful, I think I'll buy it!" is as well-aligned as it gets. But I'm interested in your thoughts on this!

Ads don't suck. Bad ads suck. I love good ads.

I used to wait for ads to appear on my Garena client back in the days when I played DOTA because they were so cool (and useful).

If I know my audience, I don't have to compromise privacy to show useful ads clean and neat either (watertight curation is applied here as well).

Good ads are relevant.

On amazon affiliates:

The iron rule of nature is: You get what you reward for. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor — Charlie Munger

I don't want to reward the wrong type of behavior.

I don't get your point about affiliate links at all. What better ad is there than a link to a recommended book itself? I'd much rather see you get a small portion of the purchase price of a book you recommended to me than look at your ads, curated or not.

But it's your site! I hope you do find success with the ad strategy, your site seems useful, and I hope it remains worth your time.

This comment puts it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789161.

You have the same incentive to prioritize ads over recommendations. If I trust you to keep ads clearly separated, I also trust you to keep recommendations undiluted.

> You have the same incentive to prioritize ads over recommendations.

No.

> If I trust you to keep ads clearly separated, I also trust you to keep recommendations undiluted.

True. I am the one curator at the moment. I'll open this so that others can curate / recommend. I require that dilution of intention doesn't happen then. DNA is important.

I wonder at what ROI do we consider an investment something more like philanthropy and at what ROI it is more like capitalism?

Philanthropy is great when it's done by independently wealthy people. If that's who the author of this project is, then that's great and I've misjudged this. But that's not usually the case. The majority of mildly useful little unmonetized projects are not made by independently wealthy folks, they are made by (usually younger) folks who are optimistic and whose expenses and responsibilities have not yet accumulated. I don't mean to be a debbie downer - fun little projects are great - I'm just saying that I don't associate something unmonetized with "great! this is altruistic!", I associate it with "bummer, this will probably not be sustained", and when I come across something with a natural and well-aligned monetization scheme, I feel positively about it and am more likely to use it.

>> No to amazon affiliates.

> Thanks you! This shows character and actual, proper altruistic intentions.

I hate ads and every other scheme to extort money from people, but I have no problem with affiliate links and do not understand why would someone have a problem with them. Could you, or someone else who thinks like this explain what problem you have with affiliate links?

Thanks.

It tosses in the incentive to start recommending things based on how valuable the affiliate link would be,diluting the value of the recommendations

As a general rule, I steer away from review sites, and instead I look for professionals using the product. For example I follow some photographers, carpenters, etc, and see what equipment they use for themselves and why they use it. They are not reviewing products, they are using them and posting a list of products for my convenience.

If I decide to buy the same equipment, I see nothing wrong using their affiliate links.

This is where I'd like to get to.

Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17793341.

OT: I checked your profile but couldn't find an email to contact you. It'd be cool if I can ping once a while to get feedback on where the project is heading.

This

I like this. Thanks for sharing.

I hope you will consider one thing, and please don’t mistake it for political correctness. The phrase “from good people” is distasteful and I think we’re all better off not implying such a thing as “bad people”. If the intent is to define a division, it’s important to be specific lest we undermine our egalitarian goals. I know you don’t mean it to be exclusionary, and probably instead aim to evoke positive feelings. But, for me it does the opposite. People accustomed to being excluded are likely to read “from good people” and wonder if that includes them or not.

I agree. I settled on the word good because I wasn't able to find a good word (no pun intended).

I'd use great. Good people is usually used to mean decent people, whereas great people is used to mean impressive people, which may or may not be moral, as in great man theory of history.

Maybe "notable" people?