5 ms·
There are some really neat ideas here, but a few quick thoughts about things that are pushing me away before I've even seen anything of the "actual site" yet (w
by Deimorz 10y ago
There are some really neat ideas here, but a few quick thoughts about things that are pushing me away before I've even seen anything of the "actual site" yet (which I don't seem to be able to do without registering):
* The http://hellolyra.org/ http://hellolyra.org/ page has that extremely generic "landing page" look, and doesn't actually show any of the unique things you say you're doing. I'd much rather see an example of a tree-based conversation than an unrelated stock photo or some gigantic icons in diamonds. The very start of the text on the page complains about words being replaced by images, but you're doing the same thing.
* All of the buttons inside the landing page content ("DISCOVER", and the three "MORE"s at the bottom) are useless and just scroll the page down slightly. I was expecting to be able to read more about the "no advertising" statement specifically, and just ended up with the page moving a tiny bit.
* https://hellolyra.com https://hellolyra.com doesn't display any content with javascript disabled. A site that's primarily text shouldn't require javascript just to view.
* Your charter says "We will never sell or give away any data concerning you. Not one single bit.", but you're using Google Analytics. Using GA is giving away a lot of user data.
* On the "How Lyra Works" page, the image of a tree-based conversation is definitely not showing a high-quality discussion. If the site emphasizes quality discussions, show one there. And is that the actual way that a discussion displays on the site? If not, replace it with an image of the real interface.
- lyra_comms 10y agoThanks, comments taken on board. - Will upgrade landing page shortly. I agree about those annoying "more" buttons. They are already gone. - Correct about Google Analytics. This is an interim measure and will be gone soon. - Good point re the sample discussion, we are changing this now.
- Deimorz 10y agoThanks for the quick response and updates. I want to emphasize that if you're serious about protecting user privacy (and by putting it as the #1 item on your charter, I believe that you want to be), you'll need to be far more careful. You absolutely can't use Google Analytics, even temporarily. You need to remove your usage of Google Fonts as well, and ideally every other third-party service/resource. This is not an easy thing to do, but truly protecting user privacy is difficult. If you have a small staff, you're going to have to make a choice about whether protecting privacy is worth all the additional effort that will be necessary. Regardless of your choice, make sure that your public statements (and especially your charter) reflect the reality of the situation. When I see your charter start with "We will never sell or give away any data concerning you. Not one single bit.", but a quick look shows me that you are, in fact, giving away data, that immediately makes me distrust all of your other statements and principles as well. User trust is easy to lose and extremely hard to gain back, do your best not to lose it in the first place.
- lyra_comms 10y agoThanks also for your well-thought-through comments. We have updated the charter to reflect use of Analytics and Fonts. We understand the security concerns associated with these services and will be phasing them out shortly.
- lyra_comms 10y agoIn fact, we have already removed Analytics! Could you elaborate a bit more on your concerns with Google Fonts? According to this: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/60464/are-there-privacy-considerations-in-using-google-web-fonts http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/60464/are-ther... ..they can only collect request headers.
- Deimorz 10y agoThe requests give them "this IP address just loaded a page on Lyra", which gives them the ability to keep track of which IP addresses are using your site, how many pages they're loading on it, how long they're spending on the site, and so on. With their other data, they'd often be able to associate an IP and those requests with a specific person. Again, maybe this isn't a level of privacy-loss that you're concerned about, but it's just not compatible with promising that you aren't giving away "a single bit" of user data.
- lyra_comms 10y agoYou're completely right :)
- lyra_comms 10y agoAlso, we use JS for rendering - it's a key part of how Lyra works at the moment. We'd like to have a graceful fallback to text, but we need some more engineers first!