Dissident.ai | Hacker News Reader

Dissident.ai

dissident.ai

36 pointsNetOpWibby27 comments

Yet another landing page that doesn't actually tell me what the company does!

I get a "home for my digital belongings" - so this is a DropBox clone?

"A new way to explore, filter and research content inside Social Media." - oh, sorry, it's TweetDeck?

"Discover hidden gems, explore music films, books and art" - nope, my bad, it's a curated archive.org?

There's some vague screenshots. But nothing meaningful. I suppose I should be grateful that there's not a full screen video with a ukulele playing...

More of my ranting at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/11/yes-but-what-does-your-star...

(I especially like the irony of saying they don't like tracking, but the only sign-up options are Google or Facebook.)

Yep, no email signup and Google Analytics. Funky.

It took quite a bit of digging but I think I've finally figured out what the heck this thing actually is.

* Desktop is a web-based file manager that ties into a bunch of proprietary cloud storage systems

* Dashboard is some sort of cross-network social media reader

* Library is a catalog of public-domain content, for some reason

What any of this has to do with the high-minded visioneering slogans and impenetrable marketing text I have no idea.

Of the three, only Dashboard sounds like it might have any value at all; unfortunately the very first thing it does on signup is:

(if you sign in via facebook) demand access to "your public profile, photos, videos, likes and email address".

(if you sign in via google) demand total access to Google Drive and to "View and manage your YouTube activity, including posting public comments".

(if you try to sign in via email) this appears to be impossible; there's a "forgotten password" link but no apparent way to actually create a new account.

This doesn't sit very well with the whole "respectful of your time, attention and personal data" thing.

I should follow up to say: I do recognize that if the service wants to be able to display content from your facebook feed or youtube channel, certainly it needs to ask for access to that content. I don't object to that; I object to it asking for far more access than it needs, before you're even able to see the product you're granting access to, after making such a big deal about "putting the user back in control" of their data.

I went ahead and sucked it up and signed up via facebook. (There's a "free invitation code" on Dissident's facebook page, if you're curious.) It's... eh. For facebook content it only has the ability to show "Pages", not people -- I believe this is a facebook-imposed limitation, but it makes Dashboard fairly useless for that site at least. You can import RSS feeds and read them inside this app, which works reasonably well. There are dozen or so other services that can be imported as sources (mostly the usual suspects: youtube, vimeo, medium, flickr, etc). In all cases that I tried, the app asks to be granted maximal permission, whether that's reasonable or not. That's about it. The UI feels a little old-school -- it's all nested folders and tiny type -- but isn't terrible.

I dunno. Maybe if I hadn't been so turned off by the awful marketing copy I'd be feeling more charitable about the app itself -- it looks like a not-terrible feed reader, I suppose -- but as it stands I don't see anything here that seems worth paying money for, and I don't see anything that has anything to do with the manifestos and sloganeering.

> I object to it asking for far more access than it needs, before you're even able to see the product you're granting access to.

If after trying it, you don't like it and revoke its access, it's fine. The most meaningful data was probably siphoned already.

> The most meaningful data was probably siphoned already

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly the part I object to.

Looks like they're bundling MAME[[1] that's under GPL, but I can't find the sources anywhere. Seems to include the games too, which defiantly isn't legal.

[1]https://blog.dissident.ai/weve-just-added-tons-of-emulated-a...

This games are via archive.org, it's not unlicensed in that regard I should think?

https://archive.org/details/internetarcade

Hello, Thanks for all the feedback. I am one of the founders of Dissident and happy to answer any questions.

We became frustrated that many storage don't allow us to fully enjoy our content (I can't listen to my FLAC music on my Google Drive, even if I have 1To of storage there, I can't read my epubs on dropbox,...) so we decided to create our own desktop and use the most popular web viewers. We added the ability to do cross search and also move files from one service to another. For some services that allow it like Put.io we even convert torrents into files.

The idea is to have the same interface and features, no matter if you are on Box, Hubic or your Owncloud server. You can pin important folders and we let you know when they have been updated. We allow cross service search and cloud to cloud between storage, one of our most popular feature. We also added the ability to browse Slack, Facebook, Instagram, Smugmug or Pocket as a “file system”.

We decided to create Dashboard to browse social media (without the noise) and every Friday we work on Library to offer a free access to public domain content.

We want to create a nice environment to access our content. We don’t want to do advertising so we decided to provide the product for a subscription.

Few remarks: We have changed our website copy to be less “marketing” We are bringing back our email login (we agree with everything that was said here, it will be available shortly)

Regarding oAuth permission, we have always focus on effortless sign up (you login and boom you have everything setup) and, of course, we don’t store/sell any user data. But we understand what was said here.

We are looking to ask for less permission for login even if means ask more permission later for specific services (youtube, google drive)

We are still a work in progress and would love to have more feedback on the product. Here is an invite code: DISSIDENT_HNEWS

"Take back control of your content and unlock your sources of inspiration for just 5€/ Month."

Sounds like a tagline for a "Silicon Valley" episode.

I hope this project crashes and burns, honestly. "Regain your life" by giving literally all your data to us, for 5€/month.

Confused about this. How are you making money? Why do I need a central server? Is part of your unique (presumably commercial) offering that we can't run servers ourselves? It appears quite closed with regards to tech details (e.g. how you are fetching things for people). I am probably not going to sign up with this limited information, sorry.

So... it gives UI access to a bunch services all in one place? Quite underwhelning given the name.

"Reclaim access to your own content..." by putting it on this closed centralized proprietary server?

No.

Yeah, I got pretty excited for another nifty self-hosted FOSS that I could set up for my friends. Then I saw that tagline.

... that requires a sign up with either Google or Facebook. PERFECT!

https://twitter.com/wearedissident/status/982257661935693824

A more product appropriate name might have been AggregatingTheStatusQuo.ai.

I see no pathway to becoming a dissident here.

This is a very ambitious project.

Aggregators like this can't control their own destiny until they become their own content platform. While navigating the long road to become a platform, they're at the mercy of changing API policies and rate limits of the different content platforms.

Instagram can decide at anytime to shut off access or remove an endpoint which will greatly reduce the user's experience.

It's also tough to build a unified AI to engage with so many different types of content. Most people will be familiar with the the UIs of the respective platforms which are already tuned toward content consumption. I do grant those UIs may not have the user's best interests in mind as they focus on hitting engagement and retention KPIs.

It is an interesting one though, almost an "adblock for over-optimized UIs".

They may be able to find something that works for a niche group of creatives if they can manage the challenges above.

> This is a very ambitious project.

I’m quite certain the word you’re looking for “Ambiguous”. The entire landing page was confusion personified, with loads of promises and assembly-language-like marketing that only a few exceptional people with limitless amount of time will dedicate themselves to be trapped by

There are probably good ideas but I really do not like the the name. To me this is neither dissident nor AI related.

I have a feeling that if this product is going to become successful, it will find some as-yet-unthought-of use case which will take off with some subset.

If that is right (and who knows), then you would be better off giving it a generic name "Allinonespot.ai" or "Aggregate.ai".

Calling it dissident is okay, except that now I think the use case is somehow making some kind of statement against something. And that is confusing. Why am I dissenting? Am I dissenting against HBO? I like HBO. I have nothing against Game of Thrones or Silicon Valley. What am I taking control of?

"Tech is the center of our modern lives. But it's broken."

on a page that doesn't properly render without running Javascript from 2 third-party services. There are also multiple third party javascript includes explicitly for surveillance/metrics. I agree that the system is broken but I don't trust these clowns to help

This is beautiful and I love the nostalgic UI design, but I really don't see any reason to use it.

"it's time to take back control" they say. by asking users to give dissident.ai access to Facebook for "your public profile, photos, videos, likes and email address" and to Google for "View and manage your YouTube activity, including posting public comments" it seems the only ones taking back control are dissident.ai. another company helping Facebook and Google to rule the world and control us.

What pissed me off is when you try to login using your google account, it asks permissions to access and manage files in your Google Drive.

I forgot to add that I received am email with this info from the creators of Jolicloud. Seemed like more of the same thing but I wanted to see HN’s take on it (the lack of email signup was a red flag for me).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com