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Comment by fusion_cow | Hacker News Reader

Hello! Hope you don't mind if I refer you to this page: https://www.hellolyra.com/about?page=how-lyra-works

And this one: https://www.hellolyra.com/about?page=how-lyra-compares

The points which are most blindingly marvellous are a) control over your audiences and your news feed and b) a respect for language and words, which comes across in lots of different places in the interface.

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I remember coming across a site a few years ago, whose owner would kick out anyone who posted without proper grammar or spelling. To preserve the word I think there also needs to be some form of enforcement.

The tools you use affect the way you think. You can do a lot with positive reinforcement as opposed to enforcement!

What positive reinforcement does Lyra offer?

The reward of seeing a nicely-formatted message which you wrote, and the reward of seeing replies to it which are obviously valued by the platform (as opposed to subsumed under a torrent of irrelevant notifications).

> b) a respect for language and words, which comes across in lots of different places in the interface.

Can you please give an example of how Lyra encourages a respect for language and words, when it is not moderated?

I'm trying hard not to be rude, as I respect anyone who produces their own platform, but as I see it, the only thing that makes words extra important in Lyra is the fact that it doesn't support images and other media.

That's my hangup. This promises a lot but only delivers on not having algorithms for your content and not having ads. That's great but adblock takes care of the ads and the algorithms are often not so big a deal (e.g. when subscribing to a small subreddit). I see literally not reason why it would encourage the language buzzwords.

And frankly, the UI is clunky af!

Hello! Adblock doesn't take care of the fact that everything Facebook does is built around the concept of serving ads. Even if you block them, you're still using an ad network.

Lyra isn't aiming to move into Reddit's space. Reddit is a machine for sorting strangers' comments by interestingness.

The UI is constantly improving; can you tell us some specific issues you have so that we can look at them?

Hello! Lyra encourages respect for language by providing editing tools, and display tools, that respect language. For instance, we never truncate comments (like Facebook). We offer users the chance to write a nicely formatted message rather than a "poke" or emoticon. We use paragraphs (an exquisitely tuned tool for guiding the eye across a section of text, evolved over several hundred years.

We are basically saying: your words are important, and we won't hide them.

Another massively important way in which we value language is that we don't build tools for the viral spreading of clickbait into our platform.

Moderation is a separate issue from whether you respect language or not. Lyra is carefully designed to be harrassment-proof without the need for moderation. We do this by prioritising people rather than online spaces (like forums or subreddits).

Typo on the how-lyra-works page, first paragraph in profiles section, dlick -> click

Seems like a neat project, though.

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