The website is doing stealthy user-referral tracking. Note the end of the url: https://thegrid.io/#53

Other links on Twitter have the same #<user_id> schema.

From the FAQ:

> How do referrals rewards work? We offer rewards for referring new paid Founding Members. Every Founding Member is provided with a unique referral link that we use to track people who have signed up through referrals.

When you purchase a Grid Founding Membership, well give you a unique referral URL to share with your friends. For every person who purchases a Grid Founding Membership using your referral URL youll receive $32 of the proceeds refunded toward your order, until your Founding Membership has been paid for. That means if you get three friends to purchase, youll get your membership free.

Well spotted, that's a cool trick---it is almost hidden.

Any recommendations for passing referral ids in a fully stealth fashion between domains, e.g., by reading the referrer attribute of the GET request? A django app?

People comping to mysite.com/refID could bypass the referral program and re-visit the base url mysite.com. I'm fine with this, but it's not cool from refID's point of view. The main problem is the person visiting via the referral link might wonder whether the refID really recommends mysite.com wholeheartedly, or out to make a buck.

That's really that problem with every recommendation system that actually offers you something of worth, isn't it? When I wrote the referral system, I wasn't aware of the fact that people might read something into it. I was basically coding away and thinking: "Well now that I used the referral code, I might as well remove it. Nobody needs it anymore."

As people started complaining that their links didn't work - which in fact, they did all along - we decided to leave it in the URL from now on. Such is life ;)

Is this an art project or self-parody? The site is completely broken and unusable in Chrome.

Came here to comment specifically about that. I thought surely this was a joke.

Screenshot: http://d.pr/i/PQcW

Looks fine here. They have videos in the background, so perhaps they are blocked on your end.

The videos aren't the issue (they're loading fine), its that entire site's css seems to fail in Chrome.

Also the font they are serving from AWS throws a failed to load error.

Gif: http://d.pr/i/14DRl

The layout issue was due to interactions with Adblock Plus or other ad-blocking software, and has been fixed. Thanks!

What do you find broken?

I'm on chrome too, and the only outrageous thing I see is the rectangles that line the middle of the page, which don't seem to serve any real purpose...

Overall, I think "make img into useful background for a full-width div" is a useful feature but I won't pay $8/mo for it.

If it meant not having to crop, adjust color & exposure on product photos it would be worth more than $8/month for a lot of ecommerce sites. Drop in raw image files, a price and product description and get a well designed storefront? Sold.

AdBlock for Chrome completely destroys the layout. If I disable it for the page, it looks fine.

Had that same hypothesis, works great in Chrome for me; installed adblock, it explodes.

Fixed now.

Using chrome, and it seems to fit perfectly really.

I think this is also a great idea especially because we use AI for way to less nowadays compared to what we actually should have learned about AI the last 50 years.

I thought the site was a self-referencing example, although comically bad. The price tag made me realize this wasn't just a fun experiment like I wanted it to be...

It seems to work fine in Firefox but it is horribly broken in chrome as you said. They have a form for entering a CC number so my thought is this may in fact be real.

Yeah looks really bad on Chrome for me too. http://imgur.com/YP3AsUj

The layout issue was due to interactions with Adblock Plus or other ad-blocking software. It has now been fixed. Thanks!

Another Sandwhich Video. I'm starting to group all these products featuring Adam Lisagor together, and it's not necessarily a positive association.

To their credit, this video doesn't feature him as prominently as in many other Sandwich videos and mostly just uses his voice and some static images (which I did immediately recognize however).

It also spends most of the time showing the actual product instead of just Adam doing 'funny' things.

Ponzi 2.0? I can't see any reference to domain mapping, migration of the existing websites and heck, links to existing websites on "the grid". UPD: multi language support, hey, I want Hebrew/Arabic dual-language e-commerce shop for SCAD schematics. Can you help?

It says they have a github and says "here's ours" but theres no link, and github doesn't appear anywhere else in the page source.

Looks nice in firefox (doesn't work in chrome)

GitHub appears to be the where the rendered sites are deposited.

A little bit more than that. We both

* Store the normalized content of our users to per-site repos in Jekyll-like Markdown + Front Matter documents

* Store the actual pages our engine designs

This means users have full access to their content on both levels.

Example: https://github.com/the-domains/the-grid

I honestly think that if executed correctly, this will completely replace squarespace, and then possibly wordpress.

Best of luck, looks promising.