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Comment by endlessvoid94 | Hacker News Reader

I like this a lot.

However, I question whether or not making it realtime is the right way to go. I could be wrong, but it seems that stories like these would work best on a more laid-back timeline. I was about to start writing a story, and then I saw there was a "duration".

I set it to "no limit", and noticed that I can't write anything without someone else. Why? It's valentine's day, and most of the other folks I know who'd be interested are all busy. So I'm stuck unable to use your site. I should be able to do SOMETHING by myself.

I love the idea, though.

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If you want to write something alone, why not notepad, or google docs, or microsoft word? The idea is that it wouldn't be a level playing field if you could compete on the rankings page with something you had more direct control over.

As for duration... I can't really see it being used over a long span of time. Even the 2 minute duration is too long if it's more than 2 or 3 authors in there. 1 minute really gets the creative juices flowing and instantly makes it immersive as you always can't wait for the next line--and you don't have to!

Well, because then I wouldn't be using your product. The fact that this is BUILT for writing stories means I'd be more likely to try it for that reason. I'm on the west coast, and my friends are all on the east coast (who'd be interested), but I KNOW they would love to collaborate on something short and funny. It just wouldn't be realtime.

Sure, we could use google docs collaboration, but that isn't as fun. I'd rather click a button and have an email sent to my friends that says "Dave wants your help writing a story!" or something.

The fact that it's ranked seems...excessive. You could be on the right track, I admittedly know nothing about this space. Maybe I'm not the target user. But I suck at writing, and I wouldn't use this to compete. I'd use it because it would be fun.

If we can scale up to a point where people know about us, I'm not again allowing lone writing. You raise a very good point, and I'm going to admit I know nothing of the space except my own joy from writing. I misread your previous comment--allowing users to write at least one entry when alone in an unlimited turn book was something I thought was in there, but I was careless not to doublecheck that it was in the release. (Why would we have unlimited without that???) I'll get that put up soon for you.

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