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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

This is kinda weird, it feels a little uncanny. So instead of doing the human thing, like remembering something, I'm going to store them in an electronic device. And instead of doing the human thing of quietly reflecting on memories, I'm going to grab my phone and have it dictate the memories back to me. I haven't used the app, but it just sounds unauthentic. What problem is it solving?

I read the blurb about where the idea came from, and I have to criticize a little bit; Without Fabric, learning about your father has become a wonderful journey, where you have to visit and talk with people to connect and learn about your father. If you had Fabric, you'd just flip through a couple of his pages while taking your morning dump.

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There is also the "archival" use-case that I can see (and appreciate). A single window into what I was doing this day 5 years back? People would pay for that.

Kind of useful for business purposes too. I was in this city, I took some cabs and photographed the receipts, I met with these people, I wrote these entries in my notebook (and snapped a picture of the pages) etc. Recap a business trip or even a busy week, get your expenses in order, associate handwritten notes both spatially and temporally with people and projects.

That's kind of cool, TimeHop does something similar already, but it just scrapes the social media accounts you give it.

I dunno that I would pay for this. I'd have to use it for 5 years to get any value out of it (I don't care about what happened last week, I care about what happened past what I can reasonably remember). That's a big ask - to get a user to open your app every day and also pay a subscription.

I feel like the more likely scenario is you do the ~human~ thing and just forget. Forget that random day at the park, forget that afternoon at the coffee short, forget that trip with your estranged cousins.

We go through life with hundreds of thousands of minor moments that, without the ease of cheap digital storage and recording, we just forget. To me the service feels like a digitized version of that family member that maintains the photo albums and scrapbooks which is certainly a ~human~ thing to want or appreciate; in my opinion it's not at all diminished because it's now portable. I think you're nostalgic for a time that hasn't existed for decades; with photos (and before them slides), journals, etc the era in wish you needed the "wonderful journey" is long gone.

Hi, one of the team members here.

Very insightful thoughts. We actually agree that there is a way to over-robotize this space and an app like ours, and we are in fact very cognizant of that fact. We think there's something there that explains why none of the apps in the quantified self space (which we see as tangential to ours) have quite lived up to their potential yet.

But we started from the original angles we could offer as highly experienced engineers, and we're working from there.

My thoughts, a bit too late:

I guess your takeaway from that story about my father is very different from mine. What I took from that was the extreme serendipity that my friend's parents happened to be in school with my dad, and that I happened to be friends with her in a different country, and that those people were still around to talk to me.

It's basically by sheer dumb luck that I managed to learn some of the most important things about the person I was once closest to in life.

Now of course, as you say, there's a way to do this well and a way to do this poorly. But that fact is, if we don't write it down it will be forgotten. We're just trying to do the easiest thing and write it down.

I got the same feeling. It seems like the app does not solve the problem that the original story stated: namely, the leaving behind of amazing stories. Instead, the app captures the mundane parts of everyday life, tracking locations, collating your Instagram food photos, recording your throwaway Snapchats.

My late Mom used to write a lot of stuff about in Multiply. She even got Boing-Boinged once by Cory Doctorow. Guess what? All those posts are gone when Multiply went down. If Fabric.me gets it right, it wouldn't matter if these sites go down - you'll still have the memories.

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