Ask HN: Diaspora hasn't updated their blog in a month.
Anyone know what's up? By now they're apparently supposed to have awesome user interfaces. Hope they're set to launch by September.
It's not just a bad idea. It's really cruel. I have been to a first-rate grad school. I have read Pepper White's The Idea Factory, a book which gave me nightmares and made me want to travel across the campus offering hugs to every grad student I could find. And thus I have seen some of the best minds of my generation driven into near-suicidal depression by their self-perceived inability to live up to their expectations of greatness, or their parents' expectations, or their own perception of their parents' expectations. And these are people without an audience of thousands.
So I'm really afraid for these Diaspora guys. Way too much spotlight, way too soon. Startup ideas fail; that is what they do most of the time. Are these guys going to be given room to fail a few times? Or are they ultimately going to need therapy?
Let me try to help: If the Diaspora team gets together at the end of September and puts on a Youtube production of Springtime for Hitler I'll send them fifty bucks. If they ship some software as well, I'll make it sixty.
* the wrong amount of money being given
* extremely high expectations
* 24 / 7 monitoring, with anger if any tiny mistake is made
In Diaspora's case, I suspect many of the donors have low expectations and are not monitoring the project carefully, because it doesn't make sense to spend much time following up on a $20 donation.
Still, I suspect that Kickstarter will suffer more than the Diaspora guys if Diaspora fails.
My own take: wake me when they've shipped real, working software I can actually use to replace Facebook while controlling my own data's access rights and durability. Until then, this is still pretty much another case of a few guys making a piece of software somewhere, that may or may not ship, that may or may not succeed, and they started only a month ago. Yawn.
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/
And, yes, that is what it means. I guess http://stufftheuppermiddleclasslikes.com didn't test as well.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2255807183978932387#
But I'll say three serious things:
1) Yes, of course nearly everybody in the world is worse off than these guys.
2) No, such facts do nothing to cheer anybody up, however factual they may be:
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/richard-cory/
3) Empathy is not a zero-sum game, in which giving it to one person implies that you must withhold it from another. Rather, empathy is like a muscle: If you work it, it gets stronger. The opposite is also true: If one makes a habit of sneering at the pain of the rich, one may soon find oneself sneering at the pain of the poor as well. Practice makes perfect.
Some people have a lot of problems dealing with peer pressure, and are willing to make promises because they think that's what people expect of them, not necessarily because they're convinced they can actually deliver.
Sure, they could have chosen not to make those promises, but you have to put it into context.
I think Kickstarter is an awesome website and I really hope they don't get any ill will towards them due to the possible failure of Diaspora.
What they need is some solid UI people to come take a look, and a few backend people wouldn't hurt either. They probably have something right now, they're just terrified of launching. What they need is a safe group to beta-test with who can help clean up some of the rough edges.
That said, if they don't want the money I'll bake a cake instead.
Your serious advice is, of course, perfectly fine, if serious advice is what the project actually needs. If, however, what the project needs is fewer expectations and more whimsy, I offer my services. I am a very poor substitute for _why, but open source projects must make do with what they can get.
Your reference to Springtime to Hitler brings another question: have there been known cases of startups who raised money with intention to fail, The Producers-style?
(To clarify, this is obviously not a reference to Diaspora, just a tangential question.)
"Some of these schemes were plausible enough, and, had they been undertaken at a time when the public mind was unexcited, might have been pursued with advantage to all concerned. But they were established merely with the view of raising the shares in the market. The projectors took the first opportunity of a rise to sell out, and next morning the scheme was at an end. Maitland, in his History of London, gravely informs us, that one of the projects which received great encouragement, was for the establishment of a company "to make deal boards out of saw-dust." This is no doubt intended as a joke; but there is abundance of evidence to shew that dozens of schemes, hardly a whit more reasonable, lived their little day, ruining hundreds ere they fell. One of them was for a wheel for perpetual motion—capital, one million..."
"But the most absurd and preposterous of all, and which shewed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled 'A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.' Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100l. each, deposit 2l. per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100l. per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98l. of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2,000l. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again."
This, of course, is Mackay's account of the South Sea Bubble of 1720. There are countless subsequent examples.
(By the way, in case it isn't obvious: I am convinced that the Diaspora guys are absolutely serious and above-board. That is why it might be amusing to pretend otherwise.
And I'm rooting for them too. That's why I'm engaged in the vital project of talking down expectations. How else are they supposed to make a splash at this point?)
Examples:
-Phantom Entertainment
-Moller International
-Blacklight Power
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
The best minds of all generations always suffer!
http://www.joindiaspora.com/2010/05/31/a-little-more-than-24...
"You may not hear too much from us in the coming months and we will try our best to provide regular updates, but our silence means we are hard at work."
It's not like they had daily updates for weeks and then stopped. Since starting they've had one post. It appears intentional.
"Guys,
Our meeting on Friday at 4PM still stands. I will submit the deliverables by then and you will have 5 business days to evaluate my work. In the meantime, it would be super-nice if I didn't have to make daily statements, as the conference calls and meetings are taking up a lot of my energy and time. My work is documented, to the extent that any competent developer can dive-in and understand the gist of it immediately. At the moment, I am unable to communicate our progress to several people, at several different levels of technical sophistication, at the same time. So I would really appreciate it if you let me get this done, at once, and we talk about it afterwards.
Regards
- mahmud"
What are the other reasons?
I use RoR, but if I had to build a product that users would install on a server and run themselves, I would probably build it in PHP, despite the other known disadvantages.
A lot of people seem to be concentrating on this idea that having a lot of money is bad for these guys. I'm on the other side of the fence. History favors companies that have taken money. And unlike any investment round I've ever participated in, they gave up no equity to fundraise. They also have a gaggle of really awesome, very experienced mentors helping them. I think they will be fine. I'm rooting for them. REALLY rooting for them. They're just nose down in code with the door shut and the phone off the hook. Good on ya.
NEVER believe anyone who says this, that etc. can be done in three months. I don't believe people who insist 'I wrote this and this in a weekend!' either. Yeah, you and that library that took three months to write. Six-nine months would make sense for a project like this, at least if you're planning on ending up with something worth using.
I have my doubts though.
And they wouldn't need the critical mass: the plug computer could come with a blog engine, bittorrent (client and tracker), a mail server for the family… It could be the Eben Moglen's freedom box that inspired them to start Diaspora in the first place.
With enough work, it would be as easy to set up (or easier) than any other blog. The connections to other diaspora instances would be as easy as logging into OpenID... Just visit their page, put in your URL, request a link, and wait for the other person to grant it. It could also be done the other way with putting their link into your blog, and having the backend take care of it. I'm sure there are other ways, too.
So yeah, it could work. Not in that short amount of time, but it could work.