In a worst-case scenario, I think the broader 100 Million Books project would still benefit from me and/or a couple of collaborators posting to it alone.
With that said, the goal is positively not to replicate HN with discussions of cutting-edge technology and science.
Even in those topics, I think there's plenty to cover in those fields as it related to nostalgia, little-known but significant advancements, unsung heroes, etc.
Time allows for context that simply isn't possible otherwise.
It's become a huge time-saver for me. And I would say the shows I do end up watching tend to be of higher quality, on average!
I've found that (at least for me) once a community is strong enough, and my motivation to participate in it is strong enough, it's not hard to participate in it naturally.
I would like to experiment with micropayments for a service I run. I know most (all?) people have failed at this so far...but I still have hope, at least in my particular case.Anyway I wonder if anyone here has suggestions for the smoothest, most friction-free payment method for paying 1 USD up to 20 USD on the open web (no mobile app, browser extension, etc).Amazon Pay seems like a good bet to...
Gosh sorry I remember seeing that post, but for some reason I thought it was more of a concept without anything shipped yet. I should do a better job of reading.
Exciting!!
Keep in mind software of this kind doesn't just [poof] appear out of nowhere...it's typically built incrementally on meager budgets.
What you seem to want is a peer-to-peer solution, which at this point in time is not something Matrix has built or claims to have built.
Oh and no HTTPS.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To my knowledge Substack hasn't censored yet, but it's inevitable. Glenn should just start his own site, in my opinion.
What do we mean by writing better? If we're referring to an improved ability to articulate thoughts and produce more text, then sure, writing more will help with that. Maybe quality will improve marginally over time.
But if we're talking about actually producing writing of a higher quality, I'm afraid simply writing more can only help so much. Improving the quality of the craft requires readers to provide feedback on the writing itself and/or writers to actively learn how to actually write better. The former is rare, and I'm not sure many writers actively take part in the latter.
This is buried toward the end of the article but I think it's a big statement with massive consequences for many practical issues.
With all that said, I do dream of a PINE64 E Ink device (or something that's open and hackable).
This is one of the reasons I've started to appreciate Matrix a lot more lately.
https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom
If you have a really close group of techy friends who don't mind hiccups and tinkering and don't mind a strictly non-private social medium, maybe it could work.
However, if you're trying to use it with normies, you might be disappointed. Private messages don't work at all, in my experience. Syncing with a pub server takes a couple of restarts, and there is no indicator in the GUI that any syncing is happening, so the user is left guessing.
I have nothing but respect for Andre Staltz and all the dedication and work that he and others have put into the app (and ecosystem) but, at least for me, it's just not quite there yet.
Let the DIYers host their own instances, but offer support and/or on-premise deployments for a fee. It seems to be what Mattermost, Zulip, and others are doing with some success.
Mattermost also includes use of their mobile notification relay servers in their paid offerings, which is compelling, because otherwise you have to build and distribute your own mobile apps.
[0] edited to include reference to important comment
> Those who can't do, teach
I'm with you. I'd change that phrase to "Those who have done, should teach".
Reminds me of an idea I think I read in one of Nassim Taleb's books...that growth of education tends to follow the growth of industry, since industry is where a great portion of tinkering and experimentation is happening.
I'm surprised Jeff is offering his videos for free too though...that seems like a perfect candidate for a paywall to capture some of the value created from the books he's giving away. Of course I don't know the whole story and realize it's a personal choice -- but, in any case, this is exactly why giving a book away for free can be so powerful.
I'm planning to launch a book marketplace that offers books for free if downloaded via P2P while charging a small fee for direct HTTP downloads.
Part of what makes these games so playable is that they're quick and don't require a whole lot of thought. It's a compromise. The intention is for players to focus more on improving the technical aspects of the writing presented instead of thinking too deeply about the message because more context and more text to edit might add too much friction to the experience (i.e., make the "game" into more of a "task").
I know it might not help a whole lot, but each game has a tiny bit of context to help...the context for the current game (shown right above the game-play box) is "Opening sentence of a research paper by a think tank."
Anyway, I'll think about ways to address this. Thanks for the feedback.
However I will also add that while these games are meant to be more fun than serious...the "courses", on the other hand, will take message, content, audience, etc into account and generally be much more thorough.
anchpop - your response wasn't considered valid because it did not include the term "cybercrime". In hindsight this was a bad decision on my part -- each game has a small set of strings that a response must include to be considered valid (to avoid spam responses from messing up scoring). "Cybercrime" probably shouldn't be one of them (sorry).
But now that you mention it, that doesn't make sense. Even if human scoring is over, players should still be sent an email of the best responses from past human evaluation.
Thanks for all the feedback! Looks like I have some work to do.
Yes -- I send the best responses out in an email after some manual sifting, after live scoring for a game has ended.
I wasn't sure if showing the best answers immediately would encourage some people to play again with "help", putting others at a disadvantage.
Since this is HN, I'm going to add a shameless plug.
For 4 years I've run Write Battle, a game for writers (originally anyone writing emails, instant messages, etc...but user base has largely turned out to be marketers) to compete against each other to devise the most concise prose. The best writing wins, as judged by brevity (response length) and readability (Flesch-Kincaid).
Right now, as we speak, I'm turning these games into a set of interactive, gamified, bite-size courses to teach the basics of effective writing without boring reading or lectures. I should have the first set of (free) courses done in about a week [0].
My approach is that while grammar and formal rules are important, practical effect is more important, so the games and courses I've made so far focus more on effectiveness than theory and rules. Turns out writing is more fun that way too!
Identities that could be somehow owned independent of servers would be a game-changer, I think.
Thank you for your work, and congratulations on 2.0 ;)
If I create an account on a Mastodon instance, and want to move it to another instance, do I lose everything?
And how does integration among the various platforms currently out (e.g., Mastodon, Plume, Pixelfed, etc) actually work? Is there some tool to see feeds aggregated from all these implementations? Or does it work differently?
I ask these questions as someone used Mastodon for a bit, has explored a handful of ActivityPub implementations. It all sounds very cool to me, but I still don't quite "get it".
Personally I prefer the approach of Secure Scuttlebutt, but I realize their P2P workings are probably unrealistic and impractical for the vast majority of people.