Show HN: I made wits.chat – A way to read everyday and share what you learned
wits.chat
wits.chat
A. I love the MVP. A telegram based cms almost. Really low effort. I'm not entirely sure how one would browse lessons across the community since I can only see your contributions so far.
B. Which brings me to the second observation. I noticed that you could post any number of lessons on the same book for a single day. At this stage I suppose it's ok. But in the future at least you'll need some form of collation to keep that data under control.
C. This isn't an observation. Just a thought. I feel like you'd be able to create this community better by onboardibg people individually rather than through a blast adoption on sites like hacker news or product hunt. You run the risk of people coming in to see what this is about, not seeing activity and leaving. Ideally there should have been a community of 10-20 people you personally onboard before you pushed this. But never too late :).
Just my 2 cents throughout. Good luck with the future of this.
For A, there is currently contributions by me and I am trying to get more people in. I just wanted to get some feedback and potentially get some users in the community to get started.
For B, you make a very good point and I have been trying to see how one can best solve this problem. I am thinking of combination of user's lessons shared, likes etc that will give collated contributions. Plus, I am thinking of involving AI later in the stage to vote down contributions that are repeats and keep uniques on the top. But, currently I got no idea about how to do that with AI.
For C, I felt it too. But I was trying hard to get some people to do just that. I think I will try to onboard people more personally now.
Thanks and this has been very helpful.
Follow up question. Do you think its a good idea to gamify this such that you read/share everyday to keep a streak and if you dont share for one day your streak will go back to 0?
I'd put it this way, if faking users makes a better experience for actual users and actual users are your priority then this is a case where the ends ethically justify the means. It might even be the case at this stage that prioritizing a singular representation of yourself on the platform is putting your interests above those of the users. In any event, even if it doesn't work, fictionalizing users moves you out of your comfort zone and that's a good thing to inform your future decisions and projects.
Good luck.
Gamifying something like this ends up with people more likely to put token efforts in order to keep a streak. They'd post simple quotes from the book just to keep the streak for example. That behaviour takes away from the overall experience of the site. Basically it's the wrong kind of behaviour to reward.