4 ms·
Another even more egregious example -- around 10 or so years ago, I was a big proponent of the writing website Urbis. It was a site where you could submit a pie
by ex3xu 8y ago
Another even more egregious example -- around 10 or so years ago, I was a big proponent of the writing website Urbis. It was a site where you could submit a piece of writing and get feedback from other users. You can still see its activity on the Wayback Machine. It was an interesting site still without equal as far as I can tell.
From what I understand, one day, the creator decided that the site wasn't making him any money and shut it all down. I foolishly didn't back anything up and all my prose was gone. Granted, my teenage writing wasn't about to win any awards or woo any publishers. But some of the stuff I wrote was meaningful reflections on experiences at the time, meticulously edited and reviewed, and I still wish I would have been able to read them now.
What really irks me is that all he had to do was give me one day and I would have been able to save all my stuff. I have very little sympathy for any company that does anything like what Rachel describes here.
- corey_moncure 8y agoDid you at least get your money back?
- leetcrew 8y agoi'm assuming it was an ad supported service.
- tlrobinson 8y agoI'm assuming (maybe incorrectly) that was corey_moncure's point.
- ex3xu 8y agoThis was 2008, only a few years after Facebook had come out and well before the "People are the product" conversation that would come to dominate the discourse around monetization. Free services like Gmail and Livejournal had set a precedent for my naivete in expecting a decent product to be available for free. I've certainly learned my lesson from that experience.
- bdr 8y agoA little OT, but I’m curious to know what made Urbis better than the other options out there.
- ex3xu 8y agoProbably the most unique thing about Urbis was their system for generating reviews which I thought was pretty interesting -- reviews on your work were locked by default. In order to unlock a review, you had to write a review of equal word count on someone else's work. I thought this was pretty successful method for incentivizing active participation on the site, something I haven't seen replicated anywhere else. Although I more or less grew out of writing recreationally, so I wouldn't even know if there were a successful modern alternative to Urbis.