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Comment by positron26 | Hacker News Reader

Mobile OSs are very consumer focused. I have criticized the FSF for, in there lengthily argued ways, abandoning the consumer.

You have to commercialize openness if you want the muscle of the consumer to be able to produce it.

Short presentation of the basic concept: https://youtu.be/SO46oEdlkY8

Some things with massive value in excess of the cost of production cannot be pursued by capital nor bought by the individual. Your choices are government, non-profit, or something in between all three. PrizeForge aims to be between all three and to completely change how we do consumer open source, incidentally bringing billions of dollars into making it.

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That's a very clear vision on how to solve this kind of funding/cooperation problem outside of government and mission-focused nonprofits. And incidentally would be an existential threat to surveillance capitalism should it reach critical mass.

BTW your password-based signup flow isn't working (on iOS Safari at least).

:-) Yeah. Only SSO was working because while email would double my users, I was doing an experiment and looking for at least some signs of life. Doubling nothing would be useless.

Turns out, some new enrollments topped up their accounts and dropped off before the final step that makes it show up on the home page, so now I know it's something, and something is worth doubling.

> existential threat to surveillance capitalism

Should I buy a gun? I'm an American.

> Should I buy a gun? I'm an American.

No, that's unnecessary. Nobody will be taking you that seriously.

> some new enrollments topped up their accounts and dropped off before the final step that makes it show up on the home page

Did they actually put money in?

Yeah, there were two streams that I tried so far. Interestingly, PrizeForge itself initially got $105, a $100 and a $5 enrollment. The UI was even shittier. I took one look at that $100 and knew I've got to f&*#ing go.

So, for a second experiment, I was actually running a stream for Emacs (yeah, yeah, I know, I know). They managed to raise all of $10 for themselves. The premise was to pay out a weekly prize for whoever developed something cool. Super simple.

There's so little data, but it very clearly, very, very clearly seems to say the enthusiasm is for PrizeForge to get good more than it was to use PrizeForge for something else.

And I'm going to keep expanding in various directions because there's no way I'm oriented yet, but it's not nothing. It's terrible UX, terrible everything, but just clearly enough on top of something.

> ...stream for Emacs...

> ...terrible UX, terrible everything...

I think I accidentally enrolled for emacs and can't unenroll on the site. I guess I'll have to finally start using emacs now

Hey at least customer support is still pretty good when I can twiddle the database for each one. Shoot something to support@prizeforge.com.

Oh I see your username. You were over the subreddit. Welcome aboard.

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