A Letter from the Publisher of Nautilus
m.nautil.us
m.nautil.us
Now I don't know what the odds are, but considering there's about $79m left, I'd say they aren't too far from the odds of the potential acquisition talks coming through.
It won't solve the underlying issue, but it will make possible to at least think about better ways of solving it.
As a minor technical note: If the site is truly hosted by GitHub Pages as it proclaims, how does it have HTTPS support on a custom domain?
I found this tutorial [1] very helpful when setting up my own site [2] (which you can see is HTTPS and served by GitHub Pages [3]).
[1] https://www.jonathan-petitcolas.com/2017/01/13/using-https-w...
Takes the traffic burden off Pages.
> Using flexible SSL, all communications between CloudFlare servers and GitHub ones are not encrypted. Not really secured, even if your domain would be served in HTTPs. [1]
[1]: https://www.jonathan-petitcolas.com/2017/01/13/using-https-w...
EDIT: clarified industry
In this case, by his own words, John Steele is either completely unqualified to run a publication or he is completely full of shit. Grants don't just magically disappear...you know one will expire for several months before it does. Subscribers don't just magically stop subscribing...a qualified publisher will see complaints build and will recognize a groundswell of frustration for what it is.
And, seriously, who keeps commissioning work because they're convinced a merger is right around the corner??
I think almost every founder of a new enterprise makes promises like this.
It's not an isolated story. For every successful business that doesn't something insane and wins there are 10 that fail. We never heard about all the other shipping startups that failed and whose employees went home with empty paychecks. We praise this fucked up psychopathic level of risk taking, and then we end up with companies and cut throat and toxic as Uber.
I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (and some research-based businesses). Publicly funded grants generally don't just disappear, except in the case of recission: http://seliger.com/2011/01/09/as-predicted-in-january-2010-t... . We've had clients who've suffered from recissions.
Private foundations, however, can play by just about whatever rules they want, as long as they give away 5% of their assets every year. So a foundation that promises $1 million over three years (say), may give away a third of that in the first year and then say "just kidding" in year two.
Or it may say nothing at all.
I'm not saying that happened here, but I am saying that it's possible for grants to "just disappear," even if that isn't common. I've had clients experience just that.
That is absolutely not true. Even if the grant is well-managed and the outlook seems positive, a foundation can simply change their priorities or staff.
Haven't received a single issues, contacted them a couple of times, said to wait & then they "shipped themselves". Still got nothing. :(
I want them to succeed and really like the content, but success is self-reinforcing in media.
Its definitely one of the best sources for long reads and tbh I never thought about it. They should display a support us banner like theguardian does.
It may be true that his staff were in the dark, but he wasn't, and to the extent that he authorized them to commission that work, he permitted them to commission work that he knew the magazine couldn't pay for.
Nautilus might be a first-rate science magazine, but it's only first-rate because it commissioned first-rate writers.
Do you think it will ever be able to attract and retain that caliber of writers now? I certainly don't. Definitely not with Steele at the helm.
EDIT: I looked up NautilusThink's 2015 IRS Form 990 (the latest available on GuideStar) and found an interesting line item. In that year, John Steele was paid $2,408,000 for "consulting fees" for the publication of the magazine. (The previous year he was paid a more modest $134,000.)
That can't be true, and if true, disgusting. That's half a million more than they claimed to have paid for the totality of their content from the start of publication.
If an editor who made millions from a publication by extracting what must be a majority of its revenue as personal income allowed it to go $180K into arrears with the low-paid providers of its content without even making a personal loan, I'm grossed out.
I'm deciding this isn't true. You should add a link.
See the bottom of PDF page 8 under Independent Contractors and the bottom of page 27. Note that p27 is NOT saying that all that money went to John Steele, just that he is an interested person in the transaction.
It looks to me like "Nautilus Ventures" is a for-profit that actually publishes and the non-profit pays that entity. All the operating expenses are there so the 990 doesn't really tell you what they spent.
"PAYMENT OF CONSULTING
FEES FOR PUBLICATION OF
THE MAGAZINE "NAUTILUS"
TO NAUTILUS VENTURES LLC,
AN ENTITY 100% OWNED BY
JOHN STEELE"
This isn’t true, and people here should stop repeating it. These payments were to Nautilus Ventures LCC, which Steele owns. It’s not totally clear what this is for, but if I had to guess I’d say these are publishing costs that Steele has spun out into a separate entity (probably for tax purposes). It’s possible that Steele is using these payments to enrich himself, but this line on the 990 isn’t good evidence of that.
The rest of my opinion hasn't changed, though. I think Steele is using his staff's ignorance as a red herring, and I highly doubt that top-rate writers will want to work for Nautilus in the future.
You're willing to let it go? You accused someone of some kind of massive financial impropriety without any serious evidence. Other people started repeating it as fact. You owe that person an apology and a retraction and yourself some reflection beyond a rather generous 'letting it go'.
Ha who the hell are you to let anything go? You are a liar that made a random claim without bothering to verify anything.
Or maybe they should repeat it until it's acknowledged, corrected, and they're satisfied with the answer?
First of all, I would have thought I've already provided enough evidence to correct the latter assertion to any reasonable person's satisfaction. And second, simply repeating an accusation for which we have no solid evidence is, at best, inconsistent with rational discourse. And at worst will get you sued for defamation.
I have no problem at all with people asking where the money went. Bot that's not what you seem to be suggesting, and it's certainly not what I recommended people stop doing. It's also worth noting that Nautilus itself has weighed in to address this elsewhere in this thread:
>In 2015 Nautilus was transferred from an LLC to a 501(c)(3). As the transfer was in process, NautilusThink paid Nautilus Venture LLC to produce the magazine because the staff and contracts were still in the name of Nautilus Ventures. Is was a cost passthrough. Nautilus is fully owned by NautilusThink and Nautilus Ventures was closed.
i actually also just went to check out some of the writers on patreon. first name that came up is jim davies who seems to be a professor amongst other things. another is george musser who is a contributing editor to scientific american. now i dont know who hasnt gotten paid, but i wonder if the people that are writing for nautilus are mostly all already very accomplished and have no need to use things like patreon.
Regardless, I believe I got at least 10 emails about donating to the magazine in the last 6 months.
Maybe they're just broke, which is sad.
Hope he solves it, not for his sake but that of the people he owes money.
This sounds very similar to trading while insolvent to me. It happens a lot in small businesses and it's a major pain to freelancers who have to wait for payment.
Come to think of it, I'd actually be interested in a way to analyze my browsing history to tell me which sites I visit most. With pie charts and all. So I can be told which sites I apparently visit/read a lot. I bet I'll be surprised about a thing or two.
Flattr was a good step in the right direction but unfortunately it never reached critical mass.
If Google and Facebook combined their market force to introduce such a system then it would be an instant game changer when it comes to supporting websites. Nowadays I can use Facebook/Gmail to log into random webpages, why can't I also use those accounts for tipping?
I'm assuming you're including debit cards in that statement, but if not: Debit cards? Bitcoin? Wire transfer? ACH?
Well in "civilized" countries with a modern banking system there'S this thing called "direct debit". It's how practically all recurring payment (rent, subscriptions, etc.) in, e.g. Germany, are done.
An updated version for the Internet could work like the following (to the user): Say you want to subscribe to "Bob's totally cool online publication". During the subscription process, when it comes to payment method you're presented with a "reference number" (actually a cryptographic token, but don't scare average joe with that), which you are asked to enter in your bank's internet-banking system. You do so, the banking system goes through the usual 2FA process you already know and that's it.
On the backside like this:
- Encode cryptographic nonce and service URL into token.
- Banking system uses token to identify which service to talk to and query if the contained user nonce is part of an ongoing transaction and within the timeout window.
- If the query passes all checks, ask the user for 2FA (Smart-TAN, HBCI, you name it).
- If 2FA is successfull send confirmation code to the service.
- Service shows the user that the subscription was successfull.
http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-is...
As you've mentioned in Germany you have TAN numbers, in Australia and New Zealand you can send money to any person with their name and account number, free of any fee or charge.
With companies like Paypal, Venmo and Square profiting so much from that gap, I doubt we'll ever see the US banking system work as well as those in the rest of the world.
(And yes, I pay for it - I like the print version that shows up every so often, in addition to the articles I read online).
I am very conflicted. I love consuming quality journalism online. But there is no way I'd be able to subscribe to every site I visit – off the top of my head I regularly read The Register (UK), Economist (UK), The Atlantic (US), The Grauniad (UK), Nautilus (US), The Intercept_, and quite a few more …
Maybe I should just disable ad-blocking on the quality news-media sites I visit. However online ads are just so _ugh_. They destroy the reading experience in a way print-media ads don't. They load in unusual places, they contain animations or audio, they track me (what the hell?), they may contain malware. It wasn't so bad back in the day but there came a point when it was just easier to install an ad-blocker and blanket ban them rather than to vet them on a site-by-site basis.
It's why I like podcasts. Ads there are read out by the host. It's not jarring. They can even be fun they way someone like Bill Burr does it. They don't track me. It shouldn't be my job to figure out for online text-media how to package their advertising in a way that doesn't repel their audience. How about a consortium for advertising solely in quality news-media? Set standards. Feature the benevolent ad promise prominently. Communicate your standards. Have a way for ad-blockers to have a switch for Content R (Responsible Ads).
If they can't make that happen then the only alternative would be some kind of way would be to bundle news media together (a la Spotify for diverse labels, and Netflix for diverse studios) and let me subscribe monthly to a swath of online titles. Kind of like how I get access to a whole host of journal publishers via my university's subscription channel.
Otherwise …
To re-iterate, I can't afford to pay a subscription to every news org I visit online. I won't disable my ad-blocker until quality news media and advertisers figure out together how to deliver appropriate, responsible, and vetted advertising alongside their quality content, just an static image in an appropriate place, not repeated with no fancy CSS or JS.
Maybe (you have every right to argue) that if I can't afford to pay and won't disable my ad-blocker then I should be deprived of the content by a paywall. And I say, fair enough, if that's what the solution turns out to be – I'll go back to buying print media. Is there no halfway house by which my browsing/consuming could be subsidized by responsible advertising thus increasing readership?
Are others in the same boat as me? I'd love to know. How can we make our voices heard?
This is basically three monthly magazines, one fortnightly and a daily newspaper. That’s a fraction of my load in the days of print — I was regularly getting eight or nine magazines a month, on student money.
I don’t want to make assumptions about your financial situation, but your argument is one I hear a lot — “I can’t afford all that!” - even from well-paid people.
I don’t think it is a case of “can”. People certainly can afford to pay their regular reads. I think the problem is more that people’s expectations have been changed to expect media for free, and maybe carry a load of 2-3 subscription charges a month for things like Spotify or cloud services.
This is a big, big expectation change from eg the 1990s.
How much are you spending monthly now may I ask?
The difference is this. If I buy a CD or DVD then I can make copies, consume them on the device of my choice (with suitable transcoding and loading), I theoretically have them forever.
With the new model once I unsubscribe from my movie or music cloud service I no longer have access. All I'm doing is renting. For that I don't expect to pay as much, I get no physical media, I no artwork. Totally different model.
I would be prepared to pay a reasonable amount every month for one each of journalism / movies / music – I think that's fair. I'll purchase the physical media of the bands I love, the directors/actors/franchises I love, the print/journalism I love† – there's not a hope in hell given my current situation that I could subscribe to six or seven or more print outlets.
† I forgot to mention The TLS – I guess if push came to shove I'd subscribe to The TLS, The Economist, and one other, perhaps it might even be Nautilus.
> I would be prepared to pay a reasonable amount every month for one each of journalism / movies / music
I guess this is equivalent to saying "I'll see one movie a month, buy one album and get a daily paper". Which is a bit spartan for me, but totally reasonable on a tight budget.
The way I look at it is that the £5 I pay the Economist (for example) per week pays for the hundreds of hours of writing and editorial time (not to mention everything else) that enables this thing to be in front of me. If I didn't pay it, it couldn't exist, so I don't really see it as a choice. If I only read one article once in a while, I would feel differently, but I regularly read: The Economist, the New Statesman, The Grauniad, The FT Weekend, Nautilus and I just choose how to allocate my resources to support them (otherwise I don't really feel comfortable consuming their work without compensation). Yes, it cuts into other spending money, but one has to make a choice. I don't take coffee from a coffee shop every day without paying for it (also, compared to the price of a coffee in London, these subscriptions really aren't _that_ expensive).
> if that's what the solution turns out to be – I'll go back to buying print media
I mostly consume the print versions of these things anyway.
> Is there no halfway house by which my browsing/consuming could be subsidized by responsible advertising thus increasing readership?
I think a good halfway-house would be having a model like the one Brave was trying (I think) where you pay for content in small blocks every time you consume something. So when I read an article in my browser, a small amount of value is transferred, automatically, to the publisher. This is a model I like to an extent, but I think the problem is that you end up biasing things on popularity, rather than actual value (imagine how much money clickbait will make). Publications are really just bundles of contributors and topics, and paying for them as a bundle allows less popular (but still important and interesting) content to be created. This is one of the nice things about the BBC, the decreased commercial pressure allows them to make some really amazing programmes that no commercial house could, because everything is bundled into a single budget.
Articles cost around 0.2$ to 0.5$ each, which is pretty fair for medium-long pieces (they provide a time estimate for each article before you pay).
As for the cost. According to Wikipedia: "The prices are determined by the publishers and range between €0.09 (snippets) and €1.99 (feature stories) and are often around €0.25,[9] 30% of which is paid to Blendle.[4][10] Users can top up their accounts manually or set up an automatic top-up."
There's also an "all you can read" feature called Premium. Costs 10 EUR/month.
These are NL prices (I get geolocked I guess) so I don't know the German or US prices. They're only catering to NL, DE, and since 2016, US.
I'd love to fund journalists, and reputable news-sites, but there are far too many for me to keep track of, and not enough time and interest. I'm not sure what the solution is, but doing things the old way, just because "we've always done it that way" is silly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if...
I see a few things that seem hand-wavy to me:
> Advertising? Mostly stripped out.
> Clickbait and malware sites? Dittos.
How? I like those ideas, but I'm not seeing implementation details (It's possible I'm missing them, or misunderstanding other parts of the writeup).
And this is more of a UX issue, but: I can foresee problems with people mistaking their local system for remote systems. Especially with doing some kind of recursive operation, example:
grep -r "somestringhere" /
I'm also not sure that our current filesystem setup is going to stick around, opposed to a tagging filesystem, or something similar. I've also never seen a filesystem that handled random disconnects well, and this would likely have a lot of them.
But I'm being intentionally overly-critical. I like the idea, and it would give us a "closer" understanding of what we are accessing and how it's structured.
Do you have a blog or something that for this?
A key concept re disconects is that downloaded data stay downloaded.
Ads: there are existing tools, e.g. uBlock, which are effective. Borrowing or reimplementing from these, including host/IP blocklists, page element logic, and other heuristics, buys much of the win.
Distinguishing local v. remote ops is something to think about.
This is in respects a tagged FS, but with yet more elements.
Recognise this is prelim and very fluid:
https://drive.google.com/drive/mobile/folders/1aJOIlyFMLzLrY...
Most of these will refer to searches, though there are also Web requests (e.g., from links or through docs). Here the local/remote distinction is much the same as for any browser, with the distinction that if you have fetched a document it remains referenced locally rather than remotely.
Also, to be clear, the focus here is on document-oriented data, or stuff that acts as a document: audio, images, a specific video. Something that is created and remains constant after creation, by and large, as opposed to programmatic or dynamic data. Even much dynamic data -- say, a stream, is considered largely a set of static messages or status updates, arriving over time.
Appreciate your thoughts: dredmorbius <at> protonmail <dot> com
thank you for being forthright and explaining the situation publicly. I am a reader and your open letter has prompted me to buy a subscription.
I empathize with you. Making predictions about the future is difficult and there are times when they will be incorrect. When these predictions concern incoming cash and they fail to materialize, the situation becomes frustrating.
I wish you all the best and hope that you will be able to overcome this challenge, as well as any future ones that come your way. I do so for the very selfish reason of being able to continue to read quality content in the future.
On one hand I feel for the guy. This is every dreamer's nightmare.
On the other hand he sounds naive, if not a liar. To commission work on a deal that was still 100% unfinalized isn't exactly playing fair.
Entrepreneurs are by definition optimistic. They see the opportunity as brighter and risk dim. That's great when things are going well. However, it's a dangerous trait when things go sideways.
Perhaps he should have been more transparent sooner? Ya think?
It's an extremely niche saas business. You have to build billing and banking integrations. You have to make a bunch of enterprise sales. And all your potential customers are by definition on the verge of bankruptcy, already behind on invoices
You've found it; the Worst Startup
Not hating, I just think it's hilarious, happy holidays
Nautilus has received financial support from: "John Templeton Foundation"
Which themselves state:
"By supporting multi-disciplinary scientific, theological, and philosophical research, we aim to deepen our understanding of the possibility and purposes of the divine."
https://www.templeton.org/funding-areas/science-big-question...