6 ms·

Few thoughts/comments: - I like the overall idea and execution seems great. It's even free so you're reducing a lot of friction, great job. - My gut reaction

by yumraj 5y ago

Few thoughts/comments: - I like the overall idea and execution seems great. It's even free so you're reducing a lot of friction, great job. - My gut reaction is that except in very few settings, once a day delivery is going to be problematic. Perhaps a once an hour, or once every 2-3 hours delivery could be supported. Unfortunately that will defeat the entire purpose, so am not really sure. I guess you'll have to just wait and watch how it's being adopted and adjust if needed. - Not sure how the backend works, but if you're pooling all requests for delivery at the same time you will have very high peaks with mostly idle time in between. Am curious how you are adjusting for that? AWS Lambda?? - How about delivering the messages via email over SMTP, so that this becomes an email client and takes care of having person at the other end also having Pony. A lot of people may like reading/drafting emails at quiet times, periodically say every 2 hours. Again, this is not inline with the original intent of this, so not suggesting you change anything just something to keep in mind depending on the traction you get. All the best!!

floatingatoll 5y ago
There is one setting where once a day delivery is beyond acceptable: Any time you would be willing to send a written letter by postal mail. For content of that nature, once a day is well beyond what's expected of the postal service. About the fastest you can exchange letters with someone by post is one week round trip, assuming a letter and a reply. It is also well-proven that humanity is able to maintain human connection and relationships using mailed postal letters, so once a day is certainly no barrier in that regard.
- dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
  > There is one setting where once a day delivery is beyond acceptable: Any time you would be willing to send a written letter by postal mail. Yep, that is a good heuristic! I think it could be generalized by saying that anything that isn't time-bound or time-sensitive (i.e. making plans) is fine for once-daily delivery. Everything that is time-sensitive or perhaps just quick and low-effort should be kept in the instant realm, because that's why the Internet got so huge in the first place. The only problem was that absolutely everything became instant and no non-instant ways to communicate online were left, thereby making it pretty hard to have correspondence like people used to correspond. Which is the problem Pony tries to address.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    A fun anecdote: My grandmother says that before telephones, she used to make plans by post! At that time there were 4-5 postal deliveries per day, so she could exchange messages with friends while at work to make arrangements for that evening. Bu I agree that it’s nice to have that separation. I think email used to provide that long-form channel, but it’s too swamped by transactional rubbish these days.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      That is an awesome story.
    - yumraj 5y ago
      > At that time there were 4-5 postal deliveries per day, This was in the US? Urban or Rural area? Very curious since I've only seen once a day deliveries, between 2 countries I've lived in.
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        In the UK in a decent sized town, but not a city.
dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback and kind words yumraj. My thoughts: > once a day delivery is going to be problematic. Perhaps a once an hour, or once every 2-3 hours delivery could be supported. I've gone back and forth on this many times myself. To the point where the backend actually does support two deliveries already :). It's been a really tough call! Ultimately I decided to double down on sticking to the unique value proposition that this offers. I don't mean to sound too self serious but although this app tweaks one little parameter (instantaneity) the result is pretty dramatic. Lessening the impact of that result, as you observe, would defeat the point. I think traction/adoption will involve the people intuitively "get it" right away using it (fortunately such people do exist, which has been a really nice affirmation for me), and helping spread and explain the concept. > requests for delivery at the same time you will have very high peaks with mostly idle time in between. The infrastructure is described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29280539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29280539, but essentially I have not optimized yet for peaks etc. This will be a great problem to have, and should be solvable with telemetry, scaling, "pre-delivery" etc. > How about delivering the messages via email over SMTP, so that this becomes an email client and takes care of having person at the other end also having Pony. The first iteration of Pony was an email service. It turned out that breaking the cardinal rule of "Don't Fix Email" was, indeed, a bad idea. I didn't even try to properly launch it, because the very first piece of feedback I got was about how "wonderfully rebellious" Pony was—which was pretty sad for me because the last thing I wanted was for Pony to be perceived as anti-social by people. I wanted to make a platform that was pro-social. It turned out that established platforms like email have their own set of norms and expectations, and trying to unilaterally violate those norms is a big social no-no. That's why this version is a self-contained platform. It's less accessible, but with all parties on the platform, all the expectations are really clear.
- wanderingstan 5y ago
  My instinct is to go the other way: for communication with old friends, I’d enjoy a once-a-week or even once-a-month pace. I approximate that rhythm with many friends now, but there’s always a worry that I’ll drop the ball when life gets busy.

by yumraj 5y ago

floatingatoll 5y ago

There is one setting where once a day delivery is beyond acceptable: Any time you would be willing to send a written letter by postal mail. For content of that nature, once a day is well beyond what's expected of the postal service. About the fastest you can exchange letters with someone by post is one week round trip, assuming a letter and a reply. It is also well-proven that humanity is able to maintain human connection and relationships using mailed postal letters, so once a day is certainly no barrier in that regard.

dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
> There is one setting where once a day delivery is beyond acceptable: Any time you would be willing to send a written letter by postal mail. Yep, that is a good heuristic! I think it could be generalized by saying that anything that isn't time-bound or time-sensitive (i.e. making plans) is fine for once-daily delivery. Everything that is time-sensitive or perhaps just quick and low-effort should be kept in the instant realm, because that's why the Internet got so huge in the first place. The only problem was that absolutely everything became instant and no non-instant ways to communicate online were left, thereby making it pretty hard to have correspondence like people used to correspond. Which is the problem Pony tries to address.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  A fun anecdote: My grandmother says that before telephones, she used to make plans by post! At that time there were 4-5 postal deliveries per day, so she could exchange messages with friends while at work to make arrangements for that evening. Bu I agree that it’s nice to have that separation. I think email used to provide that long-form channel, but it’s too swamped by transactional rubbish these days.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    That is an awesome story.
  - yumraj 5y ago
    > At that time there were 4-5 postal deliveries per day, This was in the US? Urban or Rural area? Very curious since I've only seen once a day deliveries, between 2 countries I've lived in.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      In the UK in a decent sized town, but not a city.

dmitryminkovsky 5y ago

Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback and kind words yumraj. My thoughts: > once a day delivery is going to be problematic. Perhaps a once an hour, or once every 2-3 hours delivery could be supported. I've gone back and forth on this many times myself. To the point where the backend actually does support two deliveries already :). It's been a really tough call! Ultimately I decided to double down on sticking to the unique value proposition that this offers. I don't mean to sound too self serious but although this app tweaks one little parameter (instantaneity) the result is pretty dramatic. Lessening the impact of that result, as you observe, would defeat the point. I think traction/adoption will involve the people intuitively "get it" right away using it (fortunately such people do exist, which has been a really nice affirmation for me), and helping spread and explain the concept. > requests for delivery at the same time you will have very high peaks with mostly idle time in between. The infrastructure is described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29280539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29280539, but essentially I have not optimized yet for peaks etc. This will be a great problem to have, and should be solvable with telemetry, scaling, "pre-delivery" etc. > How about delivering the messages via email over SMTP, so that this becomes an email client and takes care of having person at the other end also having Pony. The first iteration of Pony was an email service. It turned out that breaking the cardinal rule of "Don't Fix Email" was, indeed, a bad idea. I didn't even try to properly launch it, because the very first piece of feedback I got was about how "wonderfully rebellious" Pony was—which was pretty sad for me because the last thing I wanted was for Pony to be perceived as anti-social by people. I wanted to make a platform that was pro-social. It turned out that established platforms like email have their own set of norms and expectations, and trying to unilaterally violate those norms is a big social no-no. That's why this version is a self-contained platform. It's less accessible, but with all parties on the platform, all the expectations are really clear.

wanderingstan 5y ago
My instinct is to go the other way: for communication with old friends, I’d enjoy a once-a-week or even once-a-month pace. I approximate that rhythm with many friends now, but there’s always a worry that I’ll drop the ball when life gets busy.