That's really great feedback -- I was the dev behind nReduce. I think that makes total sense that removing the hard deadline reduced everyone's motivations.
Joe and I tried to play with a lot of the timing, from first using the notion of 3 month batches, to opening it up for people to join every week (and doing a weekly join session to onboard people), to just opening it up completely.
We didn't see any immediate overall engagement drop after opening it up for people to join anytime and set their own checkin day, but we did notice once people received less than three comments per week on their checkin they dropped off within a few weeks.
Good idea. Anyone want to take the opensource code, launch a new site, and fix the check-in day?
I'm the original dev and I actually am interested in launching it again too (with modifications). Shoot me an email!
I loved it back when it was using a fixed Wednesday deadline and saved bandwidth by linking to private YouTube videos, (rather than hosting nReduce copies).
If you bring it back, make sure you let me know.
Re:Nreduce online incubator shuts down
by mindcrime on Saturday September 28, 2013 @05:45PM
(#6463259)
I might be interested in helping with something like that. Shoot me an email offline if you'd like.
Would it be worth setting up a quick Google Group or something, for interested parties to communicate with each other?
Re:Nreduce online incubator shuts down
by richardjordan on Saturday September 28, 2013 @08:37PM
(#6463642)
I'm interested in that too if there's an attempt to redo this again with some changes. My email is just username at pretty much any email provider.
Everyone used to check in on Wednesdays and many were, week after week. They changed it so you could choose whenever you want, and all the teams in my group disappeared. It went from a vibrant Wednesday to dead every day. It was incredibly sad as everyone lost touch with each other.
While it was slightly annoying that I couldn't choose the day, it was working. Its one of those things where when you have a deadline many people will make it, when its flexible, it suddenly becomes really hard.