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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

The debates use famous names to get your attention, but when I click on the details of each debate it says "Pending" next to those famous names. Apparently none of these people have agreed to debate or possibly even know tickets are being sold to their debate.

Selling (even pre-selling) tickets to debates between people who haven't agreed to participate in your debate is insanely misleading marketing.

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Charitable prediction: It'd only take 1 big name debate to happen for this idea to become viable. Once people know about it, and the most interesting debates get funded, the debate becomes like any other desirable speaking gig: a performance with a big paycheck and audience attached.

Less charitably, however, as soon as Logosive takes off a bit, the existing debating venues (news channels, big podcasts, etc.) can just look at what debate ideas are popular and make them happen, with the promise of a bigger paycheck and a bigger audience.

Can't really find a moat for Logosive here.

First, thank you for the confidence about Logosive taking off.

You describe an interesting problem with the moat. I'm hoping we can be the choice venue for debates by providing the best debate creation and discovery experience and by also providing larger paychecks to debaters than news channels and podcasts could ever hope to provide to debaters, hosts, and debate promoters, through Logosive's funding mechanism and a large revenue share for all parties involved in the debate.

And if these people aren’t aware, they haven’t even signed off on the “position” they are supposed to be debating. I can’t imagine many public intellectuals would end up agreeing to debate in support of words that were put in their mouth.

I think I get the idea of a kind of bounty on debate participation, but the logistics need more work.

Thanks for the feedback. One mechanism we can use to address this is to update the debate descriptions if the debaters have suggestions about how they'd like their positions described. Open to other ideas for this too, and I think we will figure out better approaches as we launch our first debates.

> Selling (even pre-selling) tickets to debates between people who haven't agreed to participate in your debate is insanely misleading marketing.

When I initially read your comment, I agreed with it. But, on second thought, if the site is presented as a sort of Kickstarter for debates where people are funding something they hope will happen, I think it might work. It is important that this is clearly communicated though.

Thanks for the feedback. I’ll update the messaging to make this more clear.

You’ve made a tech platform but you should just make content.

This won’t work out for you because you’ve designed it to be as close to a valueless middleman as possible. I don’t blame you as it’s a nice business model…when it works.

You sit back and do nothing while your community does all the work that a normal media company would do: coming up with content ideas, executive producing, and even doing the technical work of delivering the content if I’m reading your ToS right.

You used tech to solve a problem that isn’t tech related at all. You started with a decent vision statement for what you want the world to have more of, but you chose a hammer when your problem is a screw.

I think you’re more likely to realize this end goal by making a YouTube channel or whatever other social media profiles, do the hard work of consistently putting out debate content, and grow that audience organically to the point where you can actually invite well-known experts to make content with you.

I think much of the value is the funding infrastructure and also the debate creation and discoverability, similar in some ways to the role eventbrite serves for events.

Thanks for catching the copy and messaging edits. The homepage debate is a sample debate that directs to the list of proposed debates. I’ll change that sample debate so it’s less confusing.

Also good point about “create with AI”.

That's a good point. Before a debater agrees to the debate, the debater is marked as "pending" on the debate page, but that could be made more clear on some other parts of the platform.

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