Show HN: JournalJerk – In 2017, keep a journal—or else | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: JournalJerk – In 2017, keep a journal—or else

journaljerk.com

43 pointscolinmcd35 comments

While there is no way I'd use this service - I value my privacy to an abnormal degree and am not interested in a hard copy of my journal - I'm baffled by the negative feedback so far. This service clearly is not for me. But to say that it is therefore a bad service is logically inexplicable. Do people not have the imagination to conceive of a situation in which (for some) amusing negative rhetoric may have a marketing value? Is it so hard to find something to admire in the audacity of this idea? I have no use for menstrual cups, but I wouldn't scream "But I don't even menstruate!" in a thread started by someone trying to sell them.

Hey Colin,

I really like the idea of this! I have a couple questions:

* Do you support any sort of formatting for the contents of the book? e.g. Markdown, LateX, ? Or is it all "subject": $email_title, "text": $email_body?

* Do you have any estimate on how much text fits in a 5x8 book? Does your printing service scale the width of the book based on contents? Aka, if I wrote "walked dog, ate food", every day, would I get a pamphlet? Is there some kind of upper limit?

* Do I have to buy all my cheat days up front? It seems like you could charge "absolutions", maybe even at the end, maybe something like $0.50 for non-prepaid days? It might help people throw good money after bad :)

Thanks for sharing!

You don't display any details at all about the final product. Always refer to it as a "beautiful journal" but fail to picture anywhere.

If anyone was even interested in the premise in the end they want the deliverable... So show it.

Hi CaveTech,

Great point with a simple answer. I don't have any print samples yet. Turns out the Printing On Demand companies I was working with enjoy taking of several weeks on either side of Christmas. I'm pretty miffed about this myself, frankly.

To further put your mind at ease, I have extensive experience working with printing-on-demand and dropshipping services. I've built out complete pipeline integrations with IngramSpark, Ingram LightningSource, and ZenPrint from scratch. If you keep the journal, you will get your book. Guaranteed.

This is a very creative approach for to charge monies first and give discount on application usages..

Hi CaveTech,

I've added an FAQ (should be percolating through the Internet as we speak, with some very basic details about the book. For anyone who is interested, the book is a 5x8inch (203x127mm) hardback with a cloth cover and professional typography and layout. You will be able to personalize the cover color and book title.

Thanks for your comment!

I don't see anything at the site about who is "really" doing this, and am more than a bit concerned someone could spend January collecting $29+ subscriptions from folks with New Years resolutions, and then depend on folks forgetting about it come December. Particularly among those who drop the habit...

Hi Ewan,

I definitely understand your concerns. Here's some answers:

I'm doing this. My name is Colin McDonnell, my email is colinmcd94@gmail.com. I'm not a scammer.

The service definitely defies some expectations, since its entire goal is to induce a given behavior through (mostly) negative reinforcement. Clearly I (that is, "The Jerk") benefits if people drop the habit. That's part of the incentive. It's why the service is personified as a Jerk...you're not supposed to like him and you certainly don't want him to have your money.

Also remember, there's a positive reinforcement too, in the form of the end-of-year book. And $29 is a GREAT price for a custom hardbound book with shipping. Here's a comparable service that charges $79: https://www.storyworth.com/holidays. We expect to make the vast majority of profit from the cheat day markup.

To piggyback off of the idea to journal in 2017:

I built http://write.surge.sh a few weeks ago and have been using it to keep my own journal and have been successful (unlike the last few times I tried).

It's mainly worked because:

- it's duration-bound (every journalling session I do is 15 minutes only, you can set a different duration)

- inactivity within that duration erases your work so I have to keep writing for the whole session.

I was going to post it on Show HN but I'd love people in this thread's feedback on it as well. Source code is also on GitHub: https://github.com/krrishd/write

EDIT: also worth noting based on some criticisms of existing stuff in this thread, everything is locally stored and exportable/importable as JSON, the app is completely client-side.

I see this as really good idea for people who are motivated by this kind of accountability. I think the concept of journal and the privacy of such things is kind of leading some commentors astray. I see several use cases that would not be private as such... Or at least would be private but not embarrassing. I love the sense of a finished product at stake, I personally have often been at my most effective creatively in "show must go on" deadline situations. I miiiight become a customer if I can refine my own plan for how I would use it. (eg, I'm considering a poem a day, since that is in my wheelhouse and is broad enough that even 2 words can count.)

Best of luck to you, journal jerk.

I love it. So far the negative feedback is privacy but for a project that isn't at a full serious company point yet why is everyone else taking it so serious? Write some funny stuff about the day it doesn't have to be a deep dark secret, if that's what you want do it on your own.

Also I enjoy the idea of mean services for procrastinators like me, if only start farm would yell at me for being late to pay my insurance would stop getting cancelled since I can't pay ahead and their site sucks ass.

This seems similar to DayOne. I left day one when they went to their second version where they wanted to keep my journal on their servers. For similar reasons, I won't be signing up for your service. I know your journals are cheaper than self printing (I think you said $29 vs $79) but my privacy and controlling my journal data is easily worth $50 if I wanted a hard copy.

Best of luck going forward!

I laughed out loud when I saw this and thought "Genius!" I love the negative reinforcement and I love the cheat day upgrade. Being a huge type snob / nerd / jerk, I, too, would love to at least have some exemplars of the finished product (maybe even a size? perfect bound? saddle stitched?) before plunking down my money. But the psychology is a home run. Kudos.

I probably won't use this because a) privacy (not your end, but mine! I use gmail for this sort of thing and they don't need to know my secrets) b) I don't struggle to journal

HOWEVER I really like the idea of the halving fees, and replying by email makes life so easy. Best of luck with it.

Great idea, and I like the approach. Something like this can be tricky to pull off.

I did something similar, but as a 30 day meditation challenge: http://tinyurl.com/gskmt7d

Note: my site isn't operational at the moment.

What a great idea. I'd suggest enlarging your appeal though by branding it as a sort of log. People could track projects, write what they've learned about a particular skill etc. rather than focusing on journals only.

Can this be automated as a script such that if I forget a day, the computer will automatically write something like "walked the dog, was nice"?

Haha I'm sure you could. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader :)

With the success of things like recurrent neural networks for text generation, an entirely computer-generated journal would be interesting in itself.

Love this idea, just signed up for this, but I'm getting a relay error on sending emails to jerk@journaljerk.com or reply@journaljerk.com... So effectively I can't write anything

"If you actually pay that, I won't hesitate to send you a book of..."

i'm tempted.

Try me.

Nice work! Fun service, Keep it up!

Reminds me of the rich jerk in terms of selling style

So you want someone to pay you 27 bucks to take their deepest darkest secretes, all of their lifes troubles, and store them on your servers of unknown levels of security then you want to print that out (automatically revealing it's contents to at least one person printing everything), then finally you want to ship it through an unspecified postal service.

Yea maybe I'm paranoid but I don't think I'd be writing much other then "had coffee" or "walked dog". I'd definetly not say who I'm in love with, what I'm working on, how my social life is going, what experiments I'm working. Sadly that's exactly the kind of contents that you want in a journal.

Edit: My bad, 29 dollars, not 27.

Hi gravypod,

Good points all around. I've added an FAQ (journaljerk.com/faq.html) that addresses some of the data security points.

As for the printing and shipping, there's of course nothing we can do about that. I'm printing through IngramSpark, which was a highly automated printing pipeline. It's unlikely someone will pick up your book, especially with malicious intent. As for shipping, I'll likely use UPS or USPS Media Mail, depending on the season and pricing. I'm quite certain they don't read what they ship. But your points are well taken.

Colin

Journals are not just for deep dark introspection. What about journaling about things you've read, art that inspired you, things you saw in the world, things that might be significant to you in some non revealing way? If you need a totally private secure journal, there are many ways to do it. This is a different thing, surely.

The word privacy does not appear anywhere on the site. Nope.

Hi fluxsauce,

That is a great point.

As you can see, the site is fully HTTPS secured. The Stripe endpoint is also cryptographically secure.

Naturally the server has to deal with your entries in plaintext form to print the book, but everything is totally automated. No human will every see anything you print.

I use Firebase as a database. The database can't be read from or written to by ANYONE OR ANYTHING but our authenticated servers. (For Firebase users, there is a blanket {.read:false, .write:false} on all locations).

Thanks for voicing your concerns. I'll be sure to include this information somewhere on the site ASAP.

Please don't be a jerk on HN, especially when responding to another user's work. Asking a polite question would have more than sufficed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Apologies, the tone was stronger than intended.

Hi fluxsauce,

I've added an FAQ (journaljerk.com/faq.html) that addresses your point. Thanks for your comment.

Colin

Thanks, and apologies for the strongly worded response. However, the FAQ does not describe the privacy of content entered in the system itself, like restrictions on copying or selling user data or content.

Read the first two words of the page.

Thought "fuck you".

Closed the page.

Try and make something actually useful.

really? you took the time to write that as feedback for this project, and couldn't think of something more constructive to say. How about "I was put off by the negative tone. I see what you were going for there, but it came across as too strong for me."

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