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Comment by maximp | Hacker News Reader

This product seems to combine a few unrelated ideas. No monetization, reverse-chronological feed, no notifications: sweet. Easier to have cleaner, more meaningful conversations with people, hopefully. In short, a nicer, ad-free, less-harmful Facebook. How will you pay for it if it ever gets popular?

I'm not sure how limited posts play into this. I think the intention is to make users really think about what they're posting. But the arbitrary, "nice, round number" limit just feels existentially dreadful at best, and like a headline-generating schtick at worst. Surely there's some other mechanism that can nudge people towards more thoughtful, less self-promoting posts (or whatever the goal is); maybe limiting posts to one a day?

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> But the arbitrary, "nice, round number" limit just feels existentially dreadful at best, and like a headline-generating schtick at worst.

From TFA:

> Minus was created by Ben Grosser and commissioned by arebyte Gallery (London, UK) as part of the solo exhibition Software for Less [https://www.arebyte.com/software-for-less].

It's an art project. Headline-generating schticks and existential dread are to be expected.

This particular implementation isn't a product (it's an art piece).

Re: one a day

By coincidence, earlier today I had the same idea. I was thinking about how so much of what you encounter in social media is biased towards people who post a lot.

In politics, for example, most people are relatively moderate. People who spend more time talking about politics are more likely to hold extreme positions. And people who spend the most time talking about politics are the ones who spend the least time evaluating their and others' positions. So the political social media is dominated by uneducated extremists with hot takes. (I admit this often includes myself, though I do try to put effort into my comments).

A possible solution to this would be reducing the amount of allowed posts per time, which would quiet the noise and give high-effort interactions a more level playing field. Of course, that sucks for engagement and interferes with topics like humor that benefit from low-effort contributions. I wonder if there's a client-side way to bias your feed towards people who post less frequently.

I agree. Honestly, one a week would be great.

I think the question of "how will you pay for this if it gets popular" is so important for how often it gets ignored.

I know I've had many hobby projects I've just fallen short on because of fears of how I'd pay for it. Of course these might just be for the fun of making it, but the problem then is that, at least for me, I'd dread what should be a moment of celebration, it getting popular. It could easily put you in massive debt.

Of course a lot of people seem to be of the "I'll cross that bridge if I come to it" type but me, I just couldnt work like that. So congrats to those people I suppose

The way I've always prepared for that was to run things on fixed-cost hosting and if it crashes, it crashes. No way I could get a 10k€ AWS bill overnight if my project blew up on HN because they all run on one dedicated machine that costs me almost exactly 1 espresso per day.

If people end up liking something enough to need more capacity, I can scale the server manually to however much I'm willing to spend and immediately set up Patreon/Kofi/whatever. If people contribute enough to pay for a bigger server, I do that. If they don't, it's their problem that it's slow or keeps crashing. My IPs are always prioritised by the load balancer, so it makes little difference to me.

I had a similar idea a few months ago, basically have a patreon/whatever monthly goal, if it doesn't get hit (enough to pay for the server costs), it doesnt get paid for and goes down. You could even have a "stretch goal" for dev time (basically what would be your profits), if it earns enough you spend time fixing bugs and adding features, if it just gets enough to keep it running, it just keeps running.

It seems like a nice and safe idea, but it does somewhat limit profitability I suppose, but thats an entirely different matter

I went to https://www.arebyte.com/ and right-clicked the Twitter feed icon. Right click for this had been disabled.

So then I looked at the source, and saw it was done on Sharespace. So, not sure how much dog food is being eaten in

> Each work is presented as a product that could have come out of an alternative Silicon Valley, interrogating and reimagining how software is created, operated, and sold.

And,

> Utilising custom methods such as software recomposition, techniques such as data obfuscation

But use Google Analytics.

And then, from the speech...

> The last twenty years have been characterized by the rise of software.

Twenty years ago was recovery period from the .com boom. It's been a little more than 20 years. If anything I'd call the past 10 years dull, where walled social networks have sought to raise their walls ever higher, that might be interesting.

I scaled Subreply with the same amount of money I would pay for Netflix/Spotify.

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