5 karma · joined June 10, 2021
I'm personally the admin of a (very small) OCF collective. It's sad to see them stopping. When starting the collective ~2 years ago, OCF was an attractive option because of their fees, which were significantly lower than many other big fiscal hosts (5% instead of 10%). Their array of services was also impressive, but I never made use of any service outside the core Open Collective feature set. I wonder if raising their fees, or cutting down services, would have made the operation more sustainable.
I think our missions are quite aligned! We're mostly trying to incentivize & monetize the deep reading of medium- & long-form stories on the web. If that's something Forth is also going into (next to streams of shorter updates?), we may be able to collaborate!
You'd still have the issue of being able to open multiple browser tabs, and they can be more distracting than apps. But there are already plenty of browser extensions for that; personal fav: the Defaulter in https://github.com/louisbarclay/nudge (unfortunately temporarily unmaintained)
Have you also considered integrating with pre-existing web monetization models? I'm thinking mostly of Coil, but also Brave Rewards/Flattr/...
What really helps me with reading long articles online is a little "% read" counter in readup.com. This app tries to track exactly what you're reading. The feeling of getting credit for actually reading something adds motivation to read it, and helps me get through small moments of distraction (disclaimer: I'm working for Readup. Here's how that tracking works! https://blog.readup.com/2020/11/02/how-readup-knows-whether-...)
Reading physical books also may to be correlated to higher, active comprehension: "human beings need a knowledge of where they are in time and space that allows them to return to things and learn from re-examination" (article with related discussion https://readup.com/comments/the-guardian/skim-reading-is-the...)
Makes sense! Because it does force me to context-switch if I have to open a browser to consult my notes. Browsers are notoriously distracting as well.
The browser extension looks good and functions well, but for me it would be more useful as a front-end to an existing note taking app (in my case, Notion).
Another thing I noticed: keyboard events while typing in a note seem to still be sent to the underlying page, which may react weirdly to that.
Our universal monetization model indeed draws comparisons to Coil, Brave Rewards, Flattr, Twitter Blue... we have in common that we try to make the web more ethical & sustainable. For a writer or publisher, we're one more monetization source for which they don't have to do extra work. And we come with a community of readers that you can interact deeply with (example: https://readup.com/comments/organizer-sandbox/ginny-our-litt...).
Coil had [an article discovery Reddit-clone](https://coil.com/blogs), but they have moved that to [Write.as](https://write.as/) now. I invite you to look at Readup's ranking and compare what you see!
Readup hit all the right chords. The read-before-you-comment and ranking algorithm was a great response to my frustration with incumbent social media, and Readup could feed my curiosity like no other venue. Over the course of 2020 I got to know Bill & Jeff better, and in June this year I took a serious leap quitting my job to join the team. I blogged about all that in more detail here https://blog.readup.com/2021/09/08/why-I-joined-readup.html. Glad to answer any questions!
In contrast, Apple's ultimate goal is to sell more devices and get more people onto their subscription services.
The ideas mentioned in the article don't collide with this goal. They are intended to provide more (not less) value to the lives of Apple's customers. To help you when you yourself recognize you're engaging too much, or in a bad way. They seem to be configurable to the customer's preferences too. If you wouldn't want these features, fine, but others might want them, and prefer Apple's products over e.g. Android phones because of having the option.
The only party who could be displeased with these system interventions are the big ad-based app or platform developers that do rely on user engagement.
Update: Apple has some shared incentives with engagement-based business models, like their revenue stream of App Store (in-)app purchase commissions, but it's still much less than Google/Facebook/Twitter's reliance on that stuff.
But the problem is broader and more systemic than Apple can address I'm afraid. "persuasive design" is a direct result of ad-based attention-seeking business models. We need purposeful social apps like https://readup.com or Strava, whose business model incentives are directly aligned with our wellbeing. I'm spending 4-10 hours reading on Readup weekly, and I invariably consider that Time Well Spent (https://readup.com/@thorgalle).