8 ms·
Diaspora’s (YC S12) Next Act: Social Remixing Site Makr.io
- adam-_- 14y agoSlightly weird that they didn't actually link to http://makr.io http://makr.io once in the whole article?
- mbs348 14y agoI know, I emailed the author :/
- DodgyEggplant 14y agoThey have Login with Facebook. What can we say.
- mbs348 14y agofeel free to use login with email.
- k-mcgrady 14y agoI think his point is that we can login with Facebook or email but there is no Diaspora option. In other words you support your competitor but not your own company.
- mbs348 14y agothere is no login with Diaspora.
- k-mcgrady 14y agoSorry, didn't know that. I still think it's a bit strange to support a competing social network when it's not necessary (people could just sign up with email).
- tubbo 14y agoDiaspora interfaces with Facebook and wasn't designed as a "competitor" to Facebook, but rather an alternative to how we think about social networking. The only way we're gonna get a social network not controlled by a large corporation that everyone wants to use is if it's distributed, free and open-source.
- nchuhoai 14y agoI know we had this discussion a lot, but I can't be the only one to find this trend a little disturbing. I seriously admired (and still do) the Diaspora guys for tackling probably the hardest problem there is, replacing facebook with a distributed alternative. And things have probably been a lot tougher than any of us can imagine. However, how do you go from the ambitious Facebook-Killer to an quickmeme/pinterest mashup, especially from the godfather YC? I know all the big things start small somewhere, but something just doesnt feel right to me. There must be some secret sauce that only pg et al. know.
- mbs348 14y agoI appreciate your thoughts. Makr actually comes out of a lot of learnings of building something really hard. At some level we realized that even the most perfect centralized system only solves part of the problem. People won't use it just because its decentralized, or built on open standards/software, except the people who already understand the intrinsic value of such things. We feel like people need to feel like they have investment in the stuff they create. It is kinda like when Betty Crocker re-jigged instant cake mix in the 50s to add eggs, and then people felt like they were cooking with love™. We hope that Makr gets people to be creative, and thus care more about the stuff they have online. It a different direction than the distributed bits problem (and D* continues to exist to solve this problem), but making people care about their stuff online might actually be a harder one in practice.
- mikemarotti 14y agoAll of these bullshit attempts to legitimize your idea aside - if you're really sticking to your mission of making this work, you should work on not making your text captions look so lazy. It honestly looks like someone screencapping Pinterest posts and writing text captions over them in MSPaint.
- mbs348 14y agothanks, we will work on improving our captions!
- casca 14y agoSo does that mean that Diaspora dream of replacing Facebook is dead? A Facebook login option and .io domain points strongly in that direction.
- nnash 14y agoThis is still there http://diasporaproject.org/ http://diasporaproject.org/
- mbs348 14y agomakr actually came out of D... we started by trying some completely different features, but figured it was best for both to try them as separate things. Lots of people like D the way it is, so we spun it out into it's own thing.
- shmerl 14y agoLot's of people feel that D* is unpolished and lacks advertised features like moving from pod to pod, real solid federation and so on. D* developers said they didn't abandon those, but they surely look distracted with too much UI stuff in Mark.
- seagreen 14y agoThat was kind of a badass decision, by the way. It can't have been easy to sacrifice a pre existing user base for Makr.
- vandershraaf 14y agoI think they are delegating the task to app.net
- mcantelon 14y agoExcept app.net is neither distributed nor open source.
- 14y ago
- human_error 14y agoWhat's the point of this? Why would you even write an article on this?
- bhughes 14y agoVisiting the home page gives the impression of someone's not-quite-technical mother trying to "do a meme."
- felipebueno 14y agoLogin with Facebook, Pinterest + 9Gag clone, meme... What the hell??? Hmm, it smells like April Fools to me but... it's not even April =/
- mikemarotti 14y agoThis is exactly what the internet needs less of. Sad to see the diaspora guys reduced to overlaying unfunny text captions over jpgs.
- dmix 14y agoIndeed, I tend to agree with 4chan (in their tirade against http://9gag.com http://9gag.com) that this type of stuff has become the "cancer" of internet culture. Even though they are responsible for spawning it.
- JamesLeonis 14y agoOddly enough, 4chan's creator moot went on to make Canv.as, which this seemingly rips off.
- runn1ng 14y agoHm, this is kind of sad. On one hand, I understand that the original concept wasn't as successful as everyone thought, so the best thing to do is try to do something else. On the other hand, "meme creation" is so overdone at this point that I am surprised that this is the "next big thing" that they try to build
- TylerE 14y agoActually, the prevailing attitude when Diaspora was announced was that it had as much chance as a bumblebee's fart in a hurricane.
- seagreen 14y agoBut it didn't actually have to take over, right? It just had to build up a decent user base. Then it could be linked with identi.ca, and they would be linked to whatever came along next . . .
- unoti 14y agoMeme creation isn't fully overdone until someone creates meta-meme creation: Where you fill in a few blanks, and the meme meta-creator gives you a website where people can create new memes tailored to some specific parameters.
- buster 14y agoWow.. that's soooo much like https://canv.as/x/everything https://canv.as/x/everything (aka the site built by 4chan moot). Besides there is so many of such sites already, it makes me sad to think that resources are wasted there instead of on Diaspora (or other "usefull" stuff).
- rrbrambley 14y agoYeah... that was my first thought – looks like a canv.as competitor. However, I do not think it's sad in any way. In my book, entertainment is is useful.
- thinkingisfun 14y agoAs a big diaspora fan I was confused and dismayed by this at first. Then I realized they simply made another app based on what they learned/coded for diaspora, not "going into a new direction" or anything. THEN I tried it out, and remember that I'm a hobby photographer and started uploading some with captions. Now it's actually growing on me. Sure, it's not any "new big thing", but it's fine, and light-hearted and simple. It's always good to make more than just one app, right? You never know what you'll learn. Also, all work and no play makes people poopyheads. I just wish it had a way to link it with diaspora profiles, so diaspora could gain some users through it :)
- mnicole 14y agoCanvas is a lot more fun because it adds a level of playful interaction (stickers) and brings along a known-for-lulz community (4chan and by proxy Reddit) that Makr.io doesn't. My problem with Makr is that if it's trying to create memes, not only is the audience terrible at choosing photos, but the design isn't even using Impact (which may seem silly on the surface, but ensures the content is read to be funny/sarcastic). In this sense, it reminds me more of an LJSecret's Pinterest, and these two audience types don't blend well together at a social level, so I'm not sure how a a platform catering to both of them will do over time.
- brador 14y ago
- countessa 14y agoso bunch of youngsters abandon ideals and create yet another photo with a caption sharing site? color me disappointed
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- shmerl 14y agoThey should better focus on cleaning up D* code, solid federation and security (such as end to end encryption and etc.). Flashy UI is really secondary.
- woah 14y agoFlashy UI and solid backend code are almost always done by different people. The designer may be writing markup or some JS, but they won't be hacking on end to end encryption. The alternative then, would be to fire the designer and hire another backend guy. Except they're not going to just not have any UI design at all, and hiring contractors for a whole project would probably end up being more expensive than a full time person anyway. Other members of the team could do it (probably not as well as a specialist), but then they would actually be spending time on design that they would have spent on the back end, which was your original criticism. Also, the "flashiness" of the interface has a lot more to do with the talent of the designer than anything else. A talented designer may charge more, but probably not that much more, especially on a feel-good open source kickstarter project.
- shmerl 14y agoIn general yes, but in D* case the team is so small, that core devs do all work including UI and backend. Unless I misunderstood their situation.
- debacle 14y agoWhile I don't mean to come down on Diaspora specifically, I feel like YC S12 is a decidedly weak class (at least what we've seen of it so far). When the online interior design site is one of the strongest offerings of the bunch, what can you really say?
- zio99 14y agoI'd say S12's their best one yet, with Coco Controller, Double Robotics, Flight Fox far ahead in monetization (and business model development) stages than was previously seen.
- AznHisoka 14y agoThey say it's hard, yet nobody is gonna pay anything for this. That's the worst of both worlds. These guys still haven't learned their lesson from making Diaspora.
- timkeller 14y agoYet another Pinteresting UI. Disappointing.
- chasing 14y agoWhat the internet truly needs right now is more image macros.
- zio99 14y agoQuestions on ownership: 1. Does Y Combinator then own a stake in their product Makr, or in Disapora? 2. When Allerta went from Waterloo Velocity's incubator to inPulse (at Y Combinator) and then Pebble (with Kickstarter's help), which pivot does Y Combinator have an ownership in? The parent company, or the new product? 3. Did everyday.me get accepted into the YC class, or Noodle Labs (makers of everyday.me) receive funding? 4. If you start an unrelated side project while you're there, is it seen as a pivot? And does YC have a claim in that?
- state 14y agoThe most confusing part about this is that they don't seem to acknowledge the disappointment that the public might have after reading this. Diaspora did such a good job of capturing people's imaginations, but did a terrible job of communicating about its shortcomings. This just seems to be a continuation of that.
- jasonwilk 14y agoIf its a remixing place for memes, why not make them look like original memes? I don't like the font you chose to overlay since I'm so used to the ones currently on all the meme generators.
- cmcewen 14y agoTo me, this just demonstrates the problems that arise when you say you're trying to tackle this huge gigantic problem. There's a ton of building hype, and then people are disappointed/scornful when you can't deliver. It reminds me a bit of the Thiel Fellowship. Maybe this YC class is just a result of many lessons learned. It does seem the problems they tackle are, for lack of a better word, lame, but that doesn't mean they can't grow into something really big. I guess time will tell, but best of luck to Makr.io. My only wish is that they share everything they must have learned through the process of Diaspora.
- yumraj 14y agoJust curious, if any of the funds raised via Kickstarter for Diaspora were used in the development of Makr.io, including founders/developers salaries/expenses/etc.? If yes, that is the biggest flaw of Kickstarter, no accountability. I can dream something really great, raise tons of cash via Kickstarter, and use that to do something else.
- fyita 14y agoWhat a complete waste of a slot in YC.
- timjahn 14y agoWhen I look at companies like SpotHero, who are trying to help people have a better (and cheaper) parking experience, I'm happy they're trying to help real people by solving real problems. When I look at companies like Makr, I simply just wonder "why"? I'm unconvinced many people in "the real world" will use this or need to use this. Am I missing something?
- kmholderbein 14y ago'Real people' use the Internet, and you spend almost as much time online as you do in the "real world." You're right - not everyone will use this or need this, but it's our way of making the Internet - the place we now spend so much time - a better place, in a different way.
- webwanderings 14y agoThis is a duplicate. Makr.io has been discussed here not too long ago and heavily criticized.
- mirsadm 14y agoWow some of the comments here are brutal. Granted that the more recent YC graduates are not the most exciting it seems unnecessary to react with so much anger.
- mmanfrin 14y agoThe irony of this site using a facebook login is so thick you could swim in it.
- siculars 14y agoMore insular, inward, bubble-bound myopic nonsense.
- haroldp 14y agoWhy is distributed social apparently so hard that we couldn't buy it with $150,000? Is sharing status really a lot more complicated than an RSS feed with public key encryption?
- r4vik 14y agoI guess all the hate stays here but judging by the explosion of programming memes, some hacker news people are having fun over there.
- kirillzubovsky 14y agoQuick note to all the people who ask: "How is this site different from XYZ?" Makrio may or may not be different from 4chan (some thoughts on that here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4393668 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4393668), but regardless, for many of us it might be the first service that actually works! I don't like memes, I think they are stupid, and that's why I've never used 4chan or 9gag or cared much for the Cheeseburger network. But, with Makrio I actually have fun; something about it is different and it draws me in. Before you dismiss the site as "just another X", give it a try for a few days, you just might like it!
- jenntoda 14y agoWow.. I guess I am late to this thread. But have any haters here actually tried to use Makr at all? I second Koji - when you're not just passively watching, but contributing is when the real fun begins! You become part of a conversation, almost a little competitive fun to outdo your friends. Not something you will find in random cat picture sites.