For FOSS, on the other hand, licenses are a well-established thing. And developers have free reign to pick a license for their code and they very commonly pick MIT...totally on their own volition. Which strips them of all privileges. It's like writing a book and explicitly setting it into the public domain. If that's what you want to do, that's great, but very commonly I don't think it's what developers actually want to do.
In the world of copyright, the long-standing legal default is for the author to own their work for a certain amount of time, whether or not the copyright is explicitly claimed. Because making public domain the legal default would be utterly insane.
I guess what I'm saying here is my beef isn't with entities that choose to be jerks—that's annoying and always gonna happen to some extent—it's more with the all-too-common decision to use the MIT License. And when I see people complain about it...I understand the sentiment but I also can't help but think that the folks complaining had it coming and it was totally avoidable.
If someone wants attribution or something then they should use a license that requires that thing.
Gotcha, yeah this business model probably isn't final. I'll probably tweak a few things as I talk to users and figure things out.
> 3.
There's a "Show Required" button in the bottom-left of the gameplay screen (i.e., the screen with the timer) that shows the original text with the required terms underlined. Do you see that button?
> 4.
That's weird, because I only use Linux and mostly test in Firefox. If you happen to see any console errors or other clues, feel free to post them.
> 5.
Totally agree. I might establish a forum to make this more feasible, not sure yet.
> 6.
I can understand that notion from the consumer side, but as a maker, I've never had any luck with small voluntary payments. For this particular venture, a major component of the value-add is uncapped access to real human feedback, and this cannot be scaled. Because of that, I can't justify charging anything lower.
To come at it from another angle, I think $100 (or even $300) to learn a life skill that can drastically improve your personal and professional life is a great deal. Especially since the cost of many professional writing courses can be several times higher, in spite of being (in my opinion) much less effective.
If you're hesitant to spend the money, that's fair...consider joining the email list to stay in the loop. Or spend the money, and I'll just give it back to you if you have any regrets :D
> 7.
Interesting, haven't thought about such a thing. Maybe I'll consider it!
> From "Play" to the actual game is 6 clicks. I'd much prefer 2 or fewer.
I see what you're saying but...I'm not sure what's ideal. Fewer clicks with more info density, or more clicks with less info density. People have short attention spans. And a fewer-click-approach would probably not be mobile-friendly.
> Might be even more fun or game-like to work with text on the sentence level. Certainly much faster for a user to complete, and you have more options for assessment as well.
I try to vary it. Some games are longer and some are shorter...there are different lessons to be picked up from each.
> I'm curious about what other people have submitted, though I expect there's a lot of noise in that data.
Yeah I'd like to have some way to showcase user-submitted solutions at some point, because there are always multiple good ways to approach these challenges that a single human couldn't possibly devise. I don't save any data on the server-side for users who aren't logged in, but as more people sign up (hopefully), I'll have more submissions to play with.
Yes, the games without a paid membership are fun but not really a learning tool. Paying users can get real human feedback whenever they like.
Not sure if intentional, but either way, well done!
Yeah, the time limit doesn't serve much of a purpose beyond creating some playful pressure.
> It's not clear what other rules (AI?) are being used to judge whether a response is valid, so when you get marked invalid even though you're using all the required terms, it's not clear what you're supposed to do to make it valid.
> It would be nice to be able to review the Background section of the instructions while writing.
> After completion, you see your response compared to a target, but you can't see the original anymore to compare target vs original to see how the target improved on the original.
These are all good points that I will work on.
Writing instruction should instead focus on writing faults so that people know how to actually improve whatever they initially wrote down.
I discuss that notion more here:
Part of the reason I went public this early was that I wanted to work directly with people to provide them feedback on their own writing samples. That will help me better understand this site's users, but there's a selfish motive also: it will help me gather writing samples to use for the next ~490 games that need to be built.
All that to say -- I don't mention it on the site, but for the near-term, everyone who signs up will get pretty personalized attention and feedback.
But you're totally correct. Maybe that's not the best place to flex rule-breaking :D
The site is visually designed to be responsive but it's really designed to be used with a non-mobile screen and a real keyboard.
If you think it's something other than your on-screen keyboard that's messing it up, feel free to link a screenshot and tell me your device, browser, etc so I can look into it.
If you click the "i" button in the bottom-left during a game, you'll see the original text with required terms highlighted. Lots of people seem to miss that so I need to figure out a way to make it more clear.
In early testing, people seemed to enjoy the challenge the timer provides. But yeah to be honest, I personally don't like it...I'm a slow writer and hate to be rushed. Paid users can disable the timer.
Writing is improved through practice. That's why there will be 500 games.
> this website does not handle tone, style, or describe how to use grammar as a tool as opposed to it acting as a governance over your writing
Guidance on tone and style is provided, and paid users get lessons that go over techniques to achieve desired tone and style.
> The people you’re talking about do not actually need to write well.
Not sure what you're talking about...my experiences are first-hand accounts.
> in general we only require them to understand approximately 60-70% of what they read
Right, so if the underlying material had less crap in it, people would get more out of the time they spent reading it.
> That’s why I believe you noticed that most people don’t do well in reading/writing… it’s simply not a skill most have and it also is not overly meaningful that is the case. Why paint for the blind?
Most people cannot speak well in front of an audience either. Does that mean public speaking is not worth learning? Learn how to write well if you want, or don't...it's up to you to determine if it's worthwhile or not.
There are others who don't share your opinion who may gain a lot from this site.
Possibly. Knowing how to be terse and how to be meandering is a valuable skill in itself. In the business world, a long winding approach can be helpful to take the spotlight off of something. In the fiction world, maybe you could use long-winded dialogue to establish a particular personality for a character.
Did you click the info icon in the bottom-left? That should show the required terms.
> But I didn't like that it seemed I could completely mangle the text and it would say great job as long as it was short and still had those phrases.
Yeah my algorithm for determining spam and/or bad attempts isn't very advanced. I intend the site to help teach brevity to people who already know English well, so while it might be nice for the game to detect mangled text, it's not really a priority. I suppose people who want the functionality could use one of the automated writing assistant browser extensions for now.
One could "cheat" by submitting mangled text for amazing scores, but that would defeat the purpose of the game and be a waste of time :)
https://brevity500.com/thoughts/why-only-brevity/
In short, brevity is a surprisingly excellent heuristic for writing quality. It can provide a quick and objective metric, which is handy for an online game meant to provide an engaging learning experience. Note that brevity on Brevity 500 is relative to a human-derived metric, which makes the conciseness you're aiming for more meaningful.
But yes -- shorter is not always better, certainly, which is why paid users are encouraged to reach out for human feedback.
Hi folks, I've been experimenting with ways to teach people how to write better for a few years. During this time, I've worked in finance, sales, and software -- and everywhere I went, most people didn't write effectively, even when their job depended on it!Learning how to become a better writer is generally not fun...books, lectures, and videos are passive and boring and tedious. Getting...
Do any alternatives offer this ability to see content without having to sign up for an account?
Slack et al are walled gardens because none of their content is publicly available...forums are the opposite, but they lack the real-time dynamic of chat.
This public access feature from Zulip seems like it might bridge the gap nicely.
I run a book-discovery extension full of bibliophiles who might really like this...would be interested to hear what you have in mind for developing this further.
What's a good way to get in touch? Email embedded in your public key?
https://swapped.cc/#!/personal-mark
This "personal mark" seems to be encapsulated well in this kanban board. Bravo!
Can you elaborate on that a bit? In my experience, Matrix implementations tend to be Slack/IRC-style chat interfaces.
Are you saying you find such interfaces to be good for long-form content, or are there other Matrix implementations that work out well for long-form content?