Diaspora’s (YC S12) Next Act: Social Remixing Site Makr.io | Hacker News Reader

Diaspora’s (YC S12) Next Act: Social Remixing Site Makr.io

allthingsd.com

99 pointsmbs34891 comments

This is exactly what the internet needs less of. Sad to see the diaspora guys reduced to overlaying unfunny text captions over jpgs.

Indeed, I tend to agree with 4chan (in their tirade against http://9gag.com) that this type of stuff has become the "cancer" of internet culture. Even though they are responsible for spawning it.

Oddly enough, 4chan's creator moot went on to make Canv.as, which this seemingly rips off.

Hm, this is kind of sad.

On one hand, I understand that the original concept wasn't as successful as everyone thought, so the best thing to do is try to do something else.

On the other hand, "meme creation" is so overdone at this point that I am surprised that this is the "next big thing" that they try to build

Actually, the prevailing attitude when Diaspora was announced was that it had as much chance as a bumblebee's fart in a hurricane.

But it didn't actually have to take over, right? It just had to build up a decent user base. Then it could be linked with identi.ca, and they would be linked to whatever came along next . . .

Meme creation isn't fully overdone until someone creates meta-meme creation: Where you fill in a few blanks, and the meme meta-creator gives you a website where people can create new memes tailored to some specific parameters.

I recommend taking the time to use it, especially with friends. When you're not just passively sitting and staring, but contributing to the content, it turns it something else. You become part of a conversation that's surprisingly addictive, and not something you come across in 'post random pictures here' sites.

If you're one of the founders, all I can say is stop doing stupid shit. I don't mean to offend-- finding pictures and clever captioning them is surprisingly addictive, but this really is a step away from social-games' Skinnerian conditioning. In short, it's addictive, not fulfilling.

Diaspora started out wanting to change the world-- creating something addictive may be profitable, but as other commenters say, underwhelming.

I would argue that it's fundamentally non-Skinnerian. There's no intermittent reward mechanism and it's fundamentally communal. It's fun and it's a little weird, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

koji isn't a founder, but I am. I can understand why you think that way, but to some degree this is about a bigger problem that we lived through, first hand. That is, people don't know what they data is, so why would they use even the most perfect distributed system over something that provided basically the exact same functionality.

Owning the bits is an important problem that will get solved with time, but unless people feel like they are actually creating and making something of value on social networks, then it will be hard for any system to pull it off, even if it gets all the tech right. Turns out the 'social' in social networks is actually the hard part.

This is our stab at it. Sorry if its not for you :)

I don't know why there are so many comments along the lines of "come on this is meme creation old and boring". But I do think this has value. What's created out of the whole activity(colloborative editing) may or may not be a big thing, but the participation works well and is missing in social networks. So +1. :-)

It's value is completely orthogonal to the idea of a free social network. Making "Fark 2012" is what Diaspora meas to almost anyone I know who was previously excited about it.

The problem is not in low value of memes creation. It may be useful and interesting for someone (and useless and not interesting for others). The problem is in the limited resources of the Diaspora team, which are scattered on another project now, leaving Diaspora underdeveloped. There is some talk that it's really for the sake of Diaspora architectural redesign, which will lead to improving federation and etc, but I'm not convinced yet, since now Makr is positioned as a "service" which drags in support and etc. reducing resources available for Diaspora even more. So you can understand why many people who support the Diaspora project are seriously upset about it.

Hmm. Now i understand the reactions better. But isn't it a little akin to going on to ubuntu/ any linux forum and asking(demanding??) for new features. As far as i can see, they haven't been able to convert the diaspora work into profit-making. So from their view point it does make sense to try something new.

Well, they can probably do whatever they want with new projects, but if they decided to slow down Diaspora development, they had to reach out to the community with explicit statement that they are changing focus now. This never happened, on the contrary D* team said that they aren't dropping D* (however they didn't clarify if they slow down D* development). And it's not about demanding new features - the most core advertised features which were intended for Diaspora from the beginning aren't complete yet.

I'm not sure if they wanted to turn it into "for profit" thing. It's a FOSS project, not a for profit venture. Though the project needs to be sustainable of course.

I'll buy it. Unlike a lot of tech/nerd folk, I actually don't think privacy/data ownership makes people jump platforms. If pictures+captions is the thin end of the wedge, that's great :)

I know we had this discussion a lot, but I can't be the only one to find this trend a little disturbing.

I seriously admired (and still do) the Diaspora guys for tackling probably the hardest problem there is, replacing facebook with a distributed alternative. And things have probably been a lot tougher than any of us can imagine.

However, how do you go from the ambitious Facebook-Killer to an quickmeme/pinterest mashup, especially from the godfather YC? I know all the big things start small somewhere, but something just doesnt feel right to me. There must be some secret sauce that only pg et al. know.

I appreciate your thoughts. Makr actually comes out of a lot of learnings of building something really hard. At some level we realized that even the most perfect centralized system only solves part of the problem. People won't use it just because its decentralized, or built on open standards/software, except the people who already understand the intrinsic value of such things.

We feel like people need to feel like they have investment in the stuff they create. It is kinda like when Betty Crocker re-jigged instant cake mix in the 50s to add eggs, and then people felt like they were cooking with love™. We hope that Makr gets people to be creative, and thus care more about the stuff they have online.

It a different direction than the distributed bits problem (and D* continues to exist to solve this problem), but making people care about their stuff online might actually be a harder one in practice.

All of these bullshit attempts to legitimize your idea aside - if you're really sticking to your mission of making this work, you should work on not making your text captions look so lazy. It honestly looks like someone screencapping Pinterest posts and writing text captions over them in MSPaint.

thanks, we will work on improving our captions!

"Just" being able to freely place them, choosing alignment (left, center, right, justify?), various fonts, selectable font color and maybe even an outline color and width (you can simulate that with a bunch of text-shadows) would go a long way :)

The fridge thingy could also do with several fonts, but I actually quite like it as is. Though here a selectable background and font color would also be nice, or the option to put the caption above the image.

Happy coding!

Don't do this. Pick good defaults. Options are for nerds, simplicity is for real people.

How do good defaults and options exclude each other?

Also, we're talking about creativity here: you cannot be very creative without a toolbox and some options. And frankly, I think you're grossly underestimating "real people" (and good user interfaces).

It's hard to rage against you when you respond so nicely!

This is a general lesson: whenever someone criticizes something you've built, be extremely polite and you'll deflate their ill-conceived anger at you. Several times I've received angry emails about a (free) web site I run, like "your site is sh*t", or "I give you a D", and I look for whatever's legitimate about their complaints. If there's nothing worth doing based on their complaints, then I just thank them for their feedback and say I'm sorry it didn't do what they wanted. None of those people has ever written me a second time.

So bravo to mbs348 for ignoring mikemarotti's use of "bullshit" and "lazy" and just getting out of his comments that you could improve your captions.

I appreciate that you don't discount me as a hater.

That being said, it does feel quite off your core mission. What is your indication/evidence that people care more about ownership about the stuff they create than their actual identity online?

Actually, I don't think its far from our core mission at all. I'll give people credit that its not entirely obvious, but our core mission has always been "give people ownership over their data". Along the way, we got associated with a set of tools that help us do that, but at our core, that is the problem we wanted to solve all along. We have worked long and hard to trying to crack that nut. After working on the 'bits' side of the problem, we saw again and again that people don't know what it really means to own your data. Even people who claim to know have wildly different definitions, and many self defined advocates of the cause have radically different and sometimes even conflicting notions of what that means.

We started D* because wanted to make a the internet a place we didn't have to worry about all the bullshit that comes with doing stuff we feel comes naturally. While media ran with us being serious business™, we wanted to scratch and itch and make the world a better place. So in the interest of making progress, we are solving something we think is a total blocker to ANY network that is trying to focus on the contrary. If you look at Makr and just see a meme generator, then I guess you are missing the point and the power of what it could be, which is a simple way to let people create things together, which builds off of what came before, but lets them be unique and original at the same time. If that makes sense to you, great!

If it doesn't, your going to have to excuse us because our work here is not finished :)

(Also worth nothing, the features in Makr started INSIDE D, and we got (good) advice to let it blossom and spin it out into its own thing, as lots of people in the d community like D* the way it is. )

Just to offer a counterpoint. If you focus on Facebook's original audience from when they started getting big in ~2005 (college kids) and check out how today's college kids use Facebook, a lot of screentime is being spent sending jokes back and forth.

I remember visiting a college sophomore when I was a senior in HS and FB was still restricted to college students. He and his friends were all making joke groups[1] and inviting everyone.

Honestly, I think that if a company is aiming for the social brass ring, gunning for Facebook, the best thing they could do is become 20 year olds' favorite way to joke around with each other online. High school kids are all too happy to follow whatever college kids are doing, and these young audiences are much more likely to break out of their established surfing habits than adults are. Imgur.com is the backbone of the teenage social web.

[1] For example: http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-Will-Go-Slightly-Out-of-My-W...

I'm noticing many problems with your perspective, and since I'm in a good mood this morning I'm going to try and help force-puke the cool aid out of you.

> I seriously admired (and still do) the Diaspora guys for tackling probably the hardest problem there is

Its a trivial problem compared to what SpaceX, Solum, and tons of others are tackling.

> However, how do you go from the ambitious Facebook-Killer to an quickmeme/pinterest mashup

This sentence is a great example of cognitive dissonance. The reality is, it is easy to go from one to the other because they are pretty much the same thing: People get to share stuff with each other on a web interface.

> especially from the godfather YC

> There must be some secret sauce that only pg et al. know

PG invests in dumb shit. YC invests in dumb shit. All the time. Their business model is not "invest in the best ideas in the world" its "invest in people who have the potential to make billion dollar companies".

Furthermore, PG has stated this in his essays, and there is ample evidence in the many startups they have invested in throughout the years.

So, I hope I've helped push you through the social-web-center-of-the-universe and YC-the-creator stage.

I've been there, and its nice to move on.

I love how this is what you have to say when you're in a good mood...

Facebook is a powerful societal force at this point, and successfully disrupting it with a distributed, non-corporate-controlled service would make a big difference for individual choice. See what I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389118

I get your frustration with the constant stream of Blathrs and idiot.lys — most of these trendy social sites are never going to amount to anything. But what Diaspora originally set out to do was and is important.

> Facebook is a powerful societal force at this point, and successfully disrupting it with a distributed, non-corporate-controlled service would make a big difference for individual choice.

What individual choices would it make a big difference for?

> I get your frustration with the constant stream of Blathrs and idiot.lys

I'm not frustrated.

> But what Diaspora originally set out to do was and is important.

I didn't say otherwise.

> What individual choices would it make a big difference for?

As I said in the linked post: choosing not to use Facebook is currently a high-cost/impractical choice for many people. That means we're almost obliged to accept how they use our data.

You called Diaspora's original aims "a trivial problem". That sounds like the opposite of "important" to me.

I called Diaspora's original aim trivial compared to the aims of SpaceX.

Well, that seems like apples and oranges to me. Space exploration may (or may not) end up being important to human race's survival super-long-term, but breaking Facebook's monopoly, replacing it with services that offer clear, honest privacy settings, would help a lot of people now. There's no reason we can't have both SpaceX and a Diaspora-like project — important in different ways to different groups of people.

>What individual choices would it make a big difference for?

Control your own data, for ex. when it's deleted it's really gone (except for whom you already shared with,) not just hidden until it's sold to somebody or hacked.

Not necessarily being forced into changing user interface ala Timeline, or any of the other dozen times it's happened, just to fit some corporate goal.

Sharing pictures or stories or groups with friends without violating the lowest common denominator social norms enforced by a corporate terms of service, and thereby being banned from the service for life.

Probably a more free "application" ecosystem whose selection criteria isn't #1 does this make Facebook, Inc. money or cost it money.

Wow.. that's soooo much like https://canv.as/x/everything (aka the site built by 4chan moot).

Besides there is so many of such sites already, it makes me sad to think that resources are wasted there instead of on Diaspora (or other "usefull" stuff).

Yeah... that was my first thought – looks like a canv.as competitor.

However, I do not think it's sad in any way. In my book, entertainment is is useful.

As a big diaspora fan I was confused and dismayed by this at first. Then I realized they simply made another app based on what they learned/coded for diaspora, not "going into a new direction" or anything. THEN I tried it out, and remember that I'm a hobby photographer and started uploading some with captions. Now it's actually growing on me. Sure, it's not any "new big thing", but it's fine, and light-hearted and simple. It's always good to make more than just one app, right? You never know what you'll learn. Also, all work and no play makes people poopyheads.

I just wish it had a way to link it with diaspora profiles, so diaspora could gain some users through it :)

Canvas is a lot more fun because it adds a level of playful interaction (stickers) and brings along a known-for-lulz community (4chan and by proxy Reddit) that Makr.io doesn't. My problem with Makr is that if it's trying to create memes, not only is the audience terrible at choosing photos, but the design isn't even using Impact (which may seem silly on the surface, but ensures the content is read to be funny/sarcastic).

In this sense, it reminds me more of an LJSecret's Pinterest, and these two audience types don't blend well together at a social level, so I'm not sure how a a platform catering to both of them will do over time.

What's impact?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_(typeface)

So does that mean that Diaspora dream of replacing Facebook is dead? A Facebook login option and .io domain points strongly in that direction.

This is still there http://diasporaproject.org/

makr actually came out of D... we started by trying some completely different features, but figured it was best for both to try them as separate things. Lots of people like D the way it is, so we spun it out into it's own thing.

Lot's of people feel that D* is unpolished and lacks advertised features like moving from pod to pod, real solid federation and so on. D* developers said they didn't abandon those, but they surely look distracted with too much UI stuff in Mark.

That was kind of a badass decision, by the way. It can't have been easy to sacrifice a pre existing user base for Makr.

I think they are delegating the task to app.net

Except app.net is neither distributed nor open source.

Yeah, this needs to be made entirely clear. App.net is a change in degree, trying to make another twitter, but better. Diaspora and identi.ca are changes in kind, trying to make something different to replace fb/twitter.

Regardless of how different Diaspora is from Facebook, they still tried to do the "social network" better. I'm pretty sure every startup wants to make stuff less suck.

By the way I remember last time when Diaspora first surfaced as the real alternative of Facebook and I was kinda excited with it. For the first time I can customized everything I want from my social network. But then the project run out of any traction and suddenly just disappeared. So I guess, while we can dream big and aim big, the big stuff would come up eventually and not just boom in the first place (as Google comes out from home garage and Facebook comes out from college dorm). It's a big disturbing how App.net just really booming in its first release but I wish them the best and hope they will succeed.

They only had funding for about a year or so. And with a problem of the scale they were tackling there was simply no way it would've been successful. Everyone could see what was going to happen a mile away. They'd work on some flimsy FB clone, nobody would use it, and they'd move onto real jobs or start something else.

They say it's hard, yet nobody is gonna pay anything for this. That's the worst of both worlds. These guys still haven't learned their lesson from making Diaspora.

Visiting the home page gives the impression of someone's not-quite-technical mother trying to "do a meme."

Login with Facebook, Pinterest + 9Gag clone, meme... What the hell??? Hmm, it smells like April Fools to me but... it's not even April =/

To me, this just demonstrates the problems that arise when you say you're trying to tackle this huge gigantic problem. There's a ton of building hype, and then people are disappointed/scornful when you can't deliver. It reminds me a bit of the Thiel Fellowship.

Maybe this YC class is just a result of many lessons learned. It does seem the problems they tackle are, for lack of a better word, lame, but that doesn't mean they can't grow into something really big.

I guess time will tell, but best of luck to Makr.io. My only wish is that they share everything they must have learned through the process of Diaspora.

Questions on ownership:

1. Does Y Combinator then own a stake in their product Makr, or in Disapora?

2. When Allerta went from Waterloo Velocity's incubator to inPulse (at Y Combinator) and then Pebble (with Kickstarter's help), which pivot does Y Combinator have an ownership in? The parent company, or the new product?

3. Did everyday.me get accepted into the YC class, or Noodle Labs (makers of everyday.me) receive funding?

4. If you start an unrelated side project while you're there, is it seen as a pivot? And does YC have a claim in that?

The most confusing part about this is that they don't seem to acknowledge the disappointment that the public might have after reading this. Diaspora did such a good job of capturing people's imaginations, but did a terrible job of communicating about its shortcomings. This just seems to be a continuation of that.

If its a remixing place for memes, why not make them look like original memes? I don't like the font you chose to overlay since I'm so used to the ones currently on all the meme generators.

so bunch of youngsters abandon ideals and create yet another photo with a caption sharing site?

color me disappointed

Just curious, if any of the funds raised via Kickstarter for Diaspora were used in the development of Makr.io, including founders/developers salaries/expenses/etc.?

If yes, that is the biggest flaw of Kickstarter, no accountability. I can dream something really great, raise tons of cash via Kickstarter, and use that to do something else.

They burnt through the Kickstarter funding long before Makr.io.

well, 4 guys for almost two years on about 150k (after taxes and teeshirts)

They have Login with Facebook. What can we say.

feel free to use login with email.

I think his point is that we can login with Facebook or email but there is no Diaspora option. In other words you support your competitor but not your own company.

there is no login with Diaspora.

Sorry, didn't know that. I still think it's a bit strange to support a competing social network when it's not necessary (people could just sign up with email).

They should better focus on cleaning up D* code, solid federation and security (such as end to end encryption and etc.). Flashy UI is really secondary.

Flashy UI and solid backend code are almost always done by different people. The designer may be writing markup or some JS, but they won't be hacking on end to end encryption. The alternative then, would be to fire the designer and hire another backend guy.

Except they're not going to just not have any UI design at all, and hiring contractors for a whole project would probably end up being more expensive than a full time person anyway. Other members of the team could do it (probably not as well as a specialist), but then they would actually be spending time on design that they would have spent on the back end, which was your original criticism.

Also, the "flashiness" of the interface has a lot more to do with the talent of the designer than anything else. A talented designer may charge more, but probably not that much more, especially on a feel-good open source kickstarter project.

In general yes, but in D* case the team is so small, that core devs do all work including UI and backend. Unless I misunderstood their situation.

What's the point of this? Why would you even write an article on this?

Quick note to all the people who ask: "How is this site different from XYZ?"

Makrio may or may not be different from 4chan (some thoughts on that here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4393668), but regardless, for many of us it might be the first service that actually works!

I don't like memes, I think they are stupid, and that's why I've never used 4chan or 9gag or cared much for the Cheeseburger network. But, with Makrio I actually have fun; something about it is different and it draws me in.

Before you dismiss the site as "just another X", give it a try for a few days, you just might like it!

What the internet truly needs right now is more image macros.

Slightly weird that they didn't actually link to http://makr.io once in the whole article?

I know, I emailed the author :/

While I don't mean to come down on Diaspora specifically, I feel like YC S12 is a decidedly weak class (at least what we've seen of it so far). When the online interior design site is one of the strongest offerings of the bunch, what can you really say?

I'd say S12's their best one yet, with Coco Controller, Double Robotics, Flight Fox far ahead in monetization (and business model development) stages than was previously seen.

The irony of this site using a facebook login is so thick you could swim in it.

Yet another Pinteresting UI. Disappointing.

Wow some of the comments here are brutal. Granted that the more recent YC graduates are not the most exciting it seems unnecessary to react with so much anger.

When I look at companies like SpotHero, who are trying to help people have a better (and cheaper) parking experience, I'm happy they're trying to help real people by solving real problems.

When I look at companies like Makr, I simply just wonder "why"? I'm unconvinced many people in "the real world" will use this or need to use this.

Am I missing something?

'Real people' use the Internet, and you spend almost as much time online as you do in the "real world." You're right - not everyone will use this or need this, but it's our way of making the Internet - the place we now spend so much time - a better place, in a different way.

I guess all the hate stays here but judging by the explosion of programming memes, some hacker news people are having fun over there.

Wow.. I guess I am late to this thread. But have any haters here actually tried to use Makr at all? I second Koji - when you're not just passively watching, but contributing is when the real fun begins! You become part of a conversation, almost a little competitive fun to outdo your friends. Not something you will find in random cat picture sites.

This is a duplicate. Makr.io has been discussed here not too long ago and heavily criticized.

Why is distributed social apparently so hard that we couldn't buy it with $150,000?

Is sharing status really a lot more complicated than an RSS feed with public key encryption?

Yes. Yes it is.

I'm willing to believe that. Actually, I'm happy to believe that, because it just always nags on me. You would be doing me a big favor by pointing out how it is more complicated than that.

More insular, inward, bubble-bound myopic nonsense.

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