You’re kidding right? Charging 50 euro for access to basically a Discord, Slack, etc. channel.

The concept of paying to be part of a community is not new, you can find many communities that charge more than 5€/month.

You can find some examples here: https://community.circle.so/c/showcase/

We are using Circle for organising it and it costs us money, additionally, it will also take time to organise and moderate the community.

I also believe that paying for something brings more commitment, so this is why we have decided to introduce a small fee for joining the community.

> I also believe that paying for something brings more commitment, so this is why we have decided to introduce a small fee for joining the community.

Absolutely. People that are willing to pay are more serious and generally more likely to positively contribute. Paying is a way to signal that to oneself, even.

* * *

We want to initially limit only to 30 spots to see how we could manage the community and the online events. We will evaluate if it makes sense to open more spots in the future.

The idea is to create "online coffee chats" where everyone is able to participate.

I have used Circle with other communities and I can say that the experience is much better than using slack or discord.

> I can create a free Discord for this right now and it'll cost me (and the people joining it) exactly 0€

But the reality is that you haven't.

Great, where's your discord link?

It takes a lot of work to manage an online community well. 50 EUR/year is probably lower than the true cost.

Agree, I have been organising local Meetups in the past and I know how much time it takes.

This group is limited to 30 people. It's not a subreddit with tens of thousands of users.

It is 30 people. If someone's an asshole you ban them. It's hardly a fulltime job. The fact that you took their money could actually complicate your ability to ban them if they really get upset.

I have discord servers of gaming friends that have as many people. I've also managed game servers (like Ark servers) with hundreds of strangers. It's not that bad. Bad people venture in sometimes and you just kick them out. Small communities like this mostly self-regulate because they are so small, their reputation actually means something.

The best book clubs I've been in are ones where the members had to pay something to be in it. I think everything should be done to get the people who sign up to actually show up and participate, and part of that equation is usually charging everyone a little bit, especially if the people in the group aren't already friends.

I've seen much the same filtering/curation effect achieved by charging any amount, not just absurdly high amounts.

Those people would also organize and run the club. This is just a site to connect people together. That's the easy part.

There are actual people working to curate the content, manage the community, etc. And as such, they charge an amount for the work they're doing. If you think the price does not meet the value, then you can... just not pay it.

Are people actually curating the content? The website sounds like the members are the ones suggesting books. It is unclear to me what managing needs to be done if the members are pairing up on their own.

Someone has to manage the membership fees, naturally.

Respectfully, is this a joke?

Yes

Excellent!

Happy to help.

This is the business version of, "well actually I could do this in a weekend."

The potential for one decent connection for future jobs/coworkers (referral bonuses!)/cofounders is very high with something like this. 50 euro is fine. If it's too high, the market will signal that. If it isn't, it will fill up.

If we ever get proper privacy legislation, or harsher penalties for companies that get hacked and lose customer data, or anything that blocks widespread data collection and monetization, you'll be paying 50 bucks a year for your favorite chatrooms and messageboards and be happy about the bargain you're getting.

There's no motivation without the surveillance to give away all of this work for free. When you do stuff peer-to-peer, it always costs money if you want it to be sustainable. Like for example, a book club. Either everyone is going to take a turn hosting, or everyone is going to give the host a few bucks/bring snacks/wine/etc. (or you're going to go to some commercial space that sells food and drink, and buy food and drink.)

None of the options are free. Peer-to-peer (as opposed to sponsor/consumer) will never be free. We should support models like this, not act like we somehow deserve better.

Lol no

Why not?

Using the in-person book club example, I'm having a hard time imagining a scenario where 1) nobody pays anything to anyone, 2) the same person hosts every meeting, 3) food and/or drink is provided and not pot luck style.

If you're in an in-person book club you'll be paying money either directly or indirectly. Small sums absolutely, but still something. This seems comparable in cost.

This.

And if you're really lucky, a large corporate enterprise will let you have hosting space for _free_ at _very specific times_. Otherwise, you must find local community resources who usually: 1. Charge a fee 2. Request you do something for them in exchange (run some publicity, sweeping floors, etc.)

> Using the in-person book club example, I'm having a hard time imagining a scenario where 1) nobody pays anything to anyone, 2) the same person hosts every meeting, 3) food and/or drink is provided and not pot luck style.

Sorry, where in the original link are they providing food? I might be more interested in that case. :D

It's wild to me that you can't imagine a non-transactional club. Do you not have groups of friends? Sure, there's some give-and-take in every healthy group, but the idea that it somehow needs to be monetized is absurd.

I'm not talking about monetization, I'm talking about there being a cost no matter what. It can absolutely be "free" but someone's making food or using their space to host or something else.

I think that the problem here is that you do not understand that organising a community takes time and effort.

Creating a slack instance is not building a community.

The "fee" is just a simple way to get commitment from the other side. As you can imagine, this is not a business that will allow me to quit my job.

Au contraire, I understand that organizing a community takes time and effort.

I just don't feel that the rewards I receive from community organizing are monetary, and certainly don't need to be.

Nor do I want to be part of a community whose organizers are only motivated by money and don't even see any other form of motivation as valid. If that's how you see yourself and the community you're organizing, that colors everything you do and it makes you a bad community leader.

There is not monetary model behind the community. If you read again my comment, you will see that the intention is only to maintain the operational costs by everyone together and a fee is way of getting commitment from everyone.

I basically organise the community because I enjoy reading books and sharing opinion with other professionals, that's it.

I hear what you're saying and I genuinely believe that is your intention.

But your execution doesn't match that intention. What you have created is a business. You're talking about "commitment"--that's a business concern. "Sustainability"--also a business concern. I've had plenty of rewarding conversations about engineering books with people who I never saw again, and I've gained a lot of knowledge at book clubs that no longer exist. A lot of that knowledge came from people who only showed up once.

What you lose when you demand commitment and sustainability, i.e. a business model from your book club, is spontaneity and diversity. The kind of guy who commits himself to a book club every week for years is going to miss the life experiences that give context to his work. It's how you end up with solutions that are perfectly engineered to efficiently do the wrong things.

I'm unclear as to why that is hard to imagine.

I live in a city that has many free tech meetups.

One of them involved going through fast.ai. Tech companies were happy to host us for free.

Another was about doing Kaggle competition to practice ML with fellow newbies. Again, tech companies allowed us to use their space after hours, or we'd just to the library and book a room for free.

Vice versa other groups that revolve around learning specific languages or going through specific technical books.

I think you’re a bit short here. I would say:

Ahaahhahahahahhaa wowowowo ahahahha gasp lol. No.

I disagree.

If you gave the service away for free and allowed people to be anonymous, there would be no private data that needed managing. In the 90s, a major proportion of websites on the internet had forums like that, which people set up on a weekend (think phpBB). What the hosting provider charges is small change.

If you do charge, you suddenly have sensitive data to manage, either eating into your profit or creating a liability for you and taking away from people's privacy if you don't do it right. So much so, that it might even generate a loss at 50 bucks per year.

I'm with you that people should be paying for services with money instead of their private data. If you were running a Slack/Discord alternative and wanted to charge for it, I'd support you. Maybe not 50 Euros support you up front, but I'd support you. You only need a few thousand users to make something like 10 Euros a year a lucrative side project, and I'm sure you could get people to pay more if you earned any trust at all first.

Where you lost me is that I don't need your help getting people together to talk about books. Sure, that's worth bringing some snacks, in person, which might add up to 50 Euros over the course of a year, but doing it on the internet with a bunch of unknown randos makes the value go down, not up. And putting a fixed price on it means you get less interesting people: on the one end, it excludes the broke intern who needs the mentoring the most, and on the other end, that senior, experienced, well-thought-out guy who brings a fuckton of knowledge to the table brings more value than the host just by opening his mouth.

Where you really go off the rails is this: "There's no motivation without the surveillance to give away all of this work for free." Yes, there is, actually. I don't know what it is about some people on Hacker News who can't comprehend that there are other motivations besides money. If you're only motivated by money, I don't want to be around you, let alone go to your book club.

Charging money (and seeing who balks) is a good way to filter out people who don’t value their time highly. $5/m for good conversation is a steal.

Really love the design of the website.

Couple nitpicks: In the FAQs: "How is processed the payment?" should probably be "How is the payment processed?".

"Registration closes on Friday, April 28th at 12 midnight PT." at the top of the pricing section. What happens now that the registration is past that date?

All 3 of the FAQs have to deal with pricing. To be honest, I would like to know more about the actual service. How are group scheduled, what platform is used to do the meetings, what if no one joins a group, is there a refund policy, how many members are there, etc...?

At the end of the day, I have paid 10$ for much sillier things, so not a terrible idea. Good luck!

I am also curious about the logistics of the club. It seems to be this: https://circle.so

Yes, we are using Circle as a platform and we are paying 99$ each month. We have only 30 spots available, so it will basically cover the cost of the platform itself (if we get all the spots filled).

If you have organised a community, you know it's not only the cost of the platform, it takes time to coordinate, moderate and basically build a community.

Definitely! I personally welcome more paid communities as a de facto spam/abuse/troll/commitment filter.

I'm interested both as a participant and as... let's call it what a positive mental-health online community looks like post FB/IG/TikTok.

edit/ more actionable feedback: while I am interested, there's a misalignment between "lightweight commitment for me to check this community out" and "pay $50 to peek into something I'm not sure is right _for me_". For example, the cost of many communities is "create an account" and that seems like a high bar for most people in itself.

You can try our service for one month and decide if it's right for you. If you're not satisfied, we offer refunds. You can find more information about this in the FAQ section on the payment page. We want everyone in our community to be happy, as this is a side project aimed at creating a fun experience.

Thanks for your feedback, really appreciated. Definitely, the texts in the website have been the hardest part of the launch.

Clicking on "Welcome Offer 50 €/year Limited only until Friday, 28th April" takes you to a payment page asking for 60 €/year, which is illegal in most of the world.

How would it be illegal to have an outdated price with a big date of validity attached? Or are you pointing out there should be a year?

Not trying to defend anything here, but that simply sounds unlikely and my example would be supermarket flyers with certain offers that are very often still around here, I don't think just because it's digital it must be destroyed the moment the offer ceases to exist in ANY jurisdiction.

The fact that the offer is still prominently displayed falls under "bait advertising". The fact that the offer's time limit is written in smaller text falls under "dark design patterns". All EU member states have adopted or must adopt laws which ban unfair commercial practises https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...

I'd expect there to be similar laws in the UK and in some US states (California, at the very least).

Sounds like a terrible idea - people are starting to hate the subscription economy, I know I do.

I run a fiction book club at work and it is a lot of work, none of which I see this website solving.

Also, it's unclear whether I still have to buy the book or whether the subscription allows me access to an e-version of whatever is being read.

Couldn't we start a HN Bookclub? we could start with some light reading about software design. Possibly A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout.

Can we pair it with monthly or quarterly hackathons that implement some facet described in the book?

I'd participate - I find it much more engaging to read and discuss with others.

Go for it. Pick 12 books and create a schedule for the year. Every month just create an Ask HN post for the discussion.

Just curious, what are the problems or work when running your book club that this website is not solving?

The biggest problems:

a) Selecting a book, we want something at least one or two members have already read to make sure there's a good recommendation. Going by reviews has not worked well, it's better if someone brings the selection to the group because they have some personal stake.

b) Coordinating the schedule - you want to give people enough time to read the book but two months out the calendar is still volatile so often I have people drop out last minute due to meetings being schedule over, frustrating for everyone and apparently people don't want to tell their manager bookclub trumps work meeting.

c) Recruiting new members, we usually have a steady core group but want to beef up our roster to where we don't end up with awkward 2 people meetings.

Some of these issues don't apply with technical/business book meetings since it can be done chapter-by-chapter. We've done that as well and it's easier but usually after two or three chapters people drop off or lose interest in specific ones.

You could argue that your website isn't concerned with some of the above (e.g. people preselect books, then others show up automatically) but Goodreads and others already do the same for free.

I want something like this to exist so I have signed up!

It looks promising...however I have to agree with the issues that Zwieback raises. I only found the scheduled online events after I signed up, neither of which I can make. You need to address the 3 issues raised. I'll added a calendar event in 2 months, so you have that long to convince me :)

Good luck!

Thank you for your valuable feedback. Our community is just starting, and we welcome any suggestions for new ideas or preferred time slots.

We are currently exploring the possibility of scheduling events in the morning or afternoon, as well as finding times that accommodate participants in both NAM and EMEA regions.

May we know your preferred time for the online events?

9pm London.

every book in the image on the front page isn't an engineering book

Would've absolutely done it if it included actually getting the book.

Thought about this idea, but there is not a simple way to organise this logistic worldwide.

It's worth trying to work out. People love exchanging money for goods and services. The more you can do for them aside from actually reading the book for them, the better. When other people take care of things, one can relax and enjoy oneself.

Even if you can only do it for 50% of members because of whatever logistical problem, it's worth it. Although it seems it'd be simple enough to email publishers and offer to buy X number of copies of an ebook in the context of a book club.

That's actually a great suggestion. I will dig deeper to see if there are ways to do that.

It's real simple: Give new members an Amazon gift card to purchase the book. You buy the gift card, then send the code. Or, buy a gift card to their local bookstore so they can walk in and buy a physical copy, or they can use the funds to place an online order and have the book shipped through the store.

The best way to get a book club off the ground is to make sure everyone has the book in hand before the discussion starts. "First book on us" is a great way to build momentum, and it lets people know that you're serious about the project.

> It's real simple: Give new members an Amazon gift card to purchase the book. You buy the gift card, then send the code. Or, buy a gift card to their local bookstore so they can walk in and buy a physical copy, or they can use the funds to place an online order and have the book shipped through the store.

I wouldn't do any of this. If I can't put my info in online and a few days later, the book shows up at my house, I definitely will not do it.

> The best way to get a book club off the ground is to make sure everyone has the book in hand before the discussion starts.

Worth noting that none of what you just described actually assures this. Giving someone currency to buy a book isn't the same as buying them the book. I already have the ability to buy a book.

Good luck! I think it could work, especially if you can "preseed" it with the right people. A bit like any social experience really. I floated a similar idea many years ago and most of my contacts said it sounded boring and wouldn't sign up, but.. I want to be proven wrong by someone! :-D

Building communities is not easy. I have already experience organising local meetups and it takes time until people understand the value of being part of it. I do not have rush of growing the number of members, the idea is to start it simple and see how it goes.

People complaining about the price might be interested to know LeadDev also hosts a monthly book club. They interview the author of the book and you can submit questions via their Slack.

https://leaddev.com/series/bookmarked

https://leaddev.com/bookmarked

When I open this website it tries to connect to Phantom or MetaMask. Why is that?

That should be something in your end, maybe chrome extension or whatever, my website is a simple NextJS deployed in Vercel.

There's a typo on the front page:

> The goal is to create a group of professional with similar interests and share the passion of reading engineering books together.

It should read "group of professionals"

Thanks for the feedback, fixed :)

Feedback - consider removing the 50 euro option from the pricing page because the offer seems to have expired a week and a half ago. I clicked on the 50 button then saw 60 on the pricing page, had to hit back and try to figure out why. It's causing a lot of friction.

No mention of civil, chemical, mechanical engineering.

Is this for software engineers or actual engineers? You may want to specify.

Fee seems high, but if it works it works. Allowing free access just lets in all the spammers, the looky loos, and just too many people to form great relationships.

Agree, this is why I simply offer a refund option, but not directly opening for everyone. Maybe, I can create a video to show what you will get inside the community, so it will allow people to get a sneak preview.

The way I've always thought of stuff like this is to offer a free tier and a paid tier. Free tier gets access to most of the stuff and paid access gets you the premium things. You can also do a cheaper tier and premium tier if you're concerned about operational costs.

I think this model works for SAAS companies, I don't think it can be implemented in a community, because the value is coming with the interactions and connections between people in the long term.

These books like irritatingly philosophical. What is there to discuss about "The Leader who had no Title"?

The first book that we are going to read is "A Philosophy of Software Design", it's a book by John Ousterhout.

I was interested but just wouldn't spend that much, would rather try organising something myself.

Do you mean organising yourself a community or just reading a book?

Free MVP:

1. Go on ASK HN about a book you want to make a club for.

2. Create a Discord link.

The books in the picture are all management books.

As an engineer, I wouldn’t join such thing even for free. But good luck

why?

It’s a personal take, I believe in nowadays tech you can pretty much access anything, anywhere, anytime, and that’s before the whole chatgpt/LLM/generative AI/etc. where you can have a fully customizable assistant at your fingertips at any field. I also believe such communities will eventually be a source of distraction (aka drama) once they get large enough, because we are humans and these types of dynamics are bound to happen. To some, maybe it’s a source of motivation or inspiration as they need that extrinsic motivations.

I believe that the desire for human connection is more important than simply having access to information. In this conversation, we are engaging with each other as humans, rather than relying on a virtual assistant to listen and offer a different perspective.

This is why there are tons of communities out there. Having an online community is interesting for people that work remotely and want to find ways of connecting with people with the same interests.