15 ms·
Open for everyone
- mcafee12 13y agoMy belief in humanity is restored now.
- minimaxir 13y agoSvbtle’s dashboard is designed to work the same way your brain works. It encourages you to dump ideas, links, and thoughts into a flow of draft posts, and then makes it easy to slowly sculpt those ideas into publishable articles. It just feels natural. This isn't the type of marketing copy that makes me want to use the product, and in-fact drives me away from it. Contrast with Medium's more neutral, objective copy: https://medium.com/p/8d615d86ac04 https://medium.com/p/8d615d86ac04
- danso 13y agoIf the copy is off-putting, it's because my natural cynicism that such text is used to polish up an otherwise mundane and common pattern...however, this copy gets a thumbs up from me for its relative lack of adjectives...e.g., none of this: "Svbtle's beautiful dashboard"..."It gracefully encourages"..."an amazing flow of beautiful draft posts"
- cshenoy 13y agoWhy does the copy drive you away from it? Serious question since I didn't think one way or the other about it.
- 650REDHAIR 13y agoI'm curious too. It wasn't really compelling copy (for me), but I don't see why Medium's would be better in this case.
- wpietri 13y agoI don't feel it as strongly as minimaxir apparently does, but the copy bugged me in the way a lot of products focused on the Apple core audience do. It's impressed with itself and encourages you to be impressed with yourself as well. Personally, I prefer a more matter-of-fact approach. The less bullshit I get in a marketing pitch, the less I worry that they need to bullshit me to cover up for issues I haven't yet discovered. But then, I'm not in Svbtle's target market; I'm very unlikely to use a hosted platform to publish.
- jessaustin 13y ago...the copy bugged me in the way a lot of products focused on the Apple core audience do. It's impressed with itself... Definitely! Having just got back from watching the X Games, the comparison that springs to mind is that this sort of thing bugs me the way any opinion column published in any Aspen CO newspaper bugs me. "When I think about how perceptive and fortunate I am to have chosen to live in such a wonderful community..."
- forgottenpass 13y ago"When I think about how perceptive and fortunate I am to have chosen to live in such a wonderful community..." I grew up in a ski town. I bet the locals fucking love him.
- hippee-lee 13y agoMaybe it's a Colorado thing? It reminds me of the same coffee shop conversation I used to overhear: 'I just love living in Boulder, it's so diverse.' Said by white person to other white person on a day I went only saw white people on the way to the office with all white people before I went home to a largely white community. I'm sure they were great people and I loved my neighborhood in the suburbs but it and Boulder were anything but diverse from an ethic or cultural point of view.
- buckbova 13y agoYes, hot-air balloons. Sign me up.
- resu_nimda 13y agoI also read that and thought "Oh, they know how my brain works? Seems a bit presumptuous..." I thought the next section of copy was even more off-putting. "It cares about your identity." Because your name appears on the article and you can use your own domain and avatar. How is that differentiated from any platform that allegedly doesn't care about your identity? Writers shouldn’t be defined by the brands of their publishers... And yet, every svtble blog I've seen is very clearly a svtble page first, text content second, and any consideration for personal identity a distant third. I don't really have an issue with that but why feature such a ridiculous claim?
- kgc 13y agoMy biggest issue with the competition (Medium) is that it does not allow you to use your own domain.
- baddox 13y ago> Oh, they know how my brain works? That seems like a rather bizarre idea to attribute to Svbtle. It seems clear to me that the "you" in their copy is someone who is likely to be interested in their product. That's an extremely common wording in marketing copy.
- orblivion 13y agoI did not mean to give you a Kudo. I don't care for that button interface. Unless I can undo it, then I like it.
- dabernathy89 13y agoSame here - I went looking because of your comment and then accidentally kudo'd it.
- bcbrown 13y agoWow, that's obnoxious. Just leaving your mouse over the "button" is enough to activate it.
- nfoz 13y agoSome blame goes to javascript and the DOM (mouseover should not an event IMO), but this is a truly obnoxious feature. I forgot why I don't click links to svbtle but thanks HN for reminding me why :)
- minimaxir 13y agoThat's an interesting UX decision since I'm pretty sure you could undo Kudos on the previous version of Svbtle years ago. Are non-undoable likes the logical progression to the likes-only-no-dislikes method of social media validation?
- aroman 13y agoI don't think they ever had an undo feature. I remember when the platform was first introduced... people complained about it then too. Plus I'm pretty sure it's only been around for ~<2 years.
- lccarrasco 13y agoI remember trying it when it was popular and after mistakenly giving a kudo I could "undo" it by clicking the same icon.
- lhnz 13y agoAnybody else get invited a few weeks back and now feel the pang of no longer being in an exclusive club? I need a hug. Aside: I think this is a great blogging platform that turns quite a few people away because of Dustin's bravado.
- minimaxir 13y agoIn my case, the "exclusive club" of "thought leaders" itself turned me away from Svbtle.
- antidaily 13y agoHaha. Yes.
- samweinberg 13y agoI got invited about a month ago. I think I'll try out ghost now instead.
- snirp 13y agogroup hug I got the invite some two weeks ago. The acceptance of my sloppy application already lead me to believe they were opening up the site pretty soon. Just working through the backlog.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- debt 13y agoI always thought the quality of the article was more important than the quality of the blogging engine.
- taterbase 13y agoIt is. That's why dcurtis kept it so exclusive for so long. Svbtle now has a reputation for quality and can offer you the halo effect (for the time being). Surprised he isn't charging anything for it though. Quality will surely go down and dilute the reputation of just being on Svbtle.
- AndyNemmity 13y agoI just signed up, and immediately considered the quality of svbtle. My first post on other platforms is usually a very weak test post. Considering it is svbtle, I decided to give a lot more thought to my post. If that's the effect it gives me, providing more effort and quality to my own thoughts, then it's worth it.
- sdegutis 13y agoI'm starting to think people like saying stuff far more than listening. Maybe we should stop encouraging products/software that promotes that attitude?
- mijustin 13y agoOpen for everyone My first question is: "who is this for?" The interface, and experience look great. But who needs this? Who is pulling out their hair looking for a new hosted publishing platform that they don't control? Maybe this is a "hair-on-fire" (Patio11) problem for some folks - but I couldn't tell from the blog post. I think this is a mistake a lot of us make when we're marketing, writing about our products: we go through the features, but don't identify who the product is for.
- minimaxir 13y agoIt's for the intersection of people a) who want a blog and b) who want a website with a good design. Medium beat Svbtle to the punch, though.
- cliveowen 13y agoMedium wants you to have a Twitter account.
- grinich 13y agoMedium expects you have a Twitter account.
- 650REDHAIR 13y agoWouldn't most modern writers have a Twitter account anyway? If you're publishing your piece online wouldn't you want everyone to see it?
- dsowers 13y agoIf svbtle isn't quite right for you, check out Silvrback: https://www.silvrback.com/ https://www.silvrback.com/ It's similar to svbtle in its simplicity.
- loteck 13y agoPretty happy Silvrback user here, but I do kind of miss the "quick idea" interface from svbtle (wp version in my case). How well has Silvrback held up under heavy load?
- dsowers 13y agoSilvrback performs well under stress. It's setup to autoscale when a traffic surge is detected so the platform can easily handle articles making the front page of HN. Unicorn and memcached also really help.
- noir_lord 13y agoI like the functionality, I'm ambiguous about the design, there where a few times where I had to stop and really think about the UI to figure out where I needed to go or what I wanted to get back to. I also (and this is purely a personal thing) find that much whitespace like staring into a lamp I suspect I'd be using something like stylish in short order (might be nice to have something like a night mode, readability does this really well see here.. http://i.imgur.com/dTMrqId.png http://i.imgur.com/dTMrqId.png ) That it handles zooming really all the way up to an insane level is great (I'm 34 this year and my eyes are crap..) and it looks really nice on my old Nexus 7 1st gen. Kudos :)
- quadrangle 13y ago"Open" for use but not for inspection / modification / sharing… It's like all sorts of SaaS: it's a lock-in, a jail, that is open for you to enter. Ok, that's a bit harsh. But still, we've got lots of good tools like this, we don't need another proprietary thing. It looks nice though, would be useful if it were fully FLOSS.
- debacle 13y agoDon't blame svbtle. It's the monetization strategy of the Internet, and has been for 20 years.
- Karunamon 13y agoI can and do blame them for (apparently) not having an export function.
- icebraining 13y agoThey do offer a way of exporting, and in a standard format: an Atom feed. Any blog engine worth its salt should allow you to import them.
- Karunamon 13y agoNot quite the same. The atom feed will represent the compiled and rendered end content. If I have, say, source code snippets, that leaves me in a position of needing to parse out the original code so I can redo it in whatever new highlighting syntax my new blog uses. I might end up with resized images instead of originals, etc etc etc. It's not a real substitute for a proper backend export. This is why I'm such a huge fan of Octopress and nothing has been able to pull me away from it. Everything's in a git repo. Backups are one command. All my original text is safe in Markdown format. It might not look as cool as Medium or Svbtle, or have all the features, but it's relatively easy to use, and more importantly immune to platform lock-in.
- 13y ago
- ForHackernews 13y agoOh thank god! Before this, I had nowhere to post all my brilliant thoughts except medium, blogger, wordpress, posthaven, quora, facebook, google+, livejournal and myspace.
- nathancahill 13y agoDon't forget Obtvse! [0] [0] https://github.com/natew/obtvse2 https://github.com/natew/obtvse2
- coherentpony 13y agoSo 'acvte' is still up for grabs? Also, did you really just index your citations by zero? :)
- jamesbritt 13y agoAlso, did you really just index your citations by zero? Doesn't everybody?
- henrik_w 13y agoCan't resist to add this: “Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
- coherentpony 13y agoRelevant: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831....
- 2mur 13y agoAnd everybody's favorite new band: Chvrches (Seriously they are pretty great though, impossible not to smile for the whole album).
- 13y ago
- javert 13y agoInstead of svbtle, they should have named it pretentiovs.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- vertex-four 13y agoI figure everyone's gone over Svtble's theme before, but... it's absolutely horrible. Grey (#4d4d4d) on bright white is painful to read.
- imwhimsical 13y agoI got "invited" to svbtle a year and a half ago, and I have ever since used and quit it. I hated (and still do) the fact that somebody else had absolute control over what my blog looked like, and what changes I made. Nothing so intriguing about it, really. Edit: Also, the sign up page itself has a confusing user interface.
- mgrouchy 13y agoKnew the writing was on the wall since I got an invite a couple of weeks ago :P
- glomph 13y agoSo was the elitism just clever marketing?
- gaius 13y agoNot that clever... svbtle is an anti-brand now, like Upworthy.
- aroman 13y agoHonestly, when Svbtle first came out, I thought it was really cool and I wanted to use it. Now I use Medium and I have no interest in it — and most people I know (who blog) do the same these days.
- mikeg8 13y agoI have been using svtble for a few months now and when asked by a friend how it is different from Medium, I created an account on Medium to see for myself. I personally prefer svbtle's dashboard as I feel it's much smoother than Medium with the flow of: idea > draft > published. Svbtle is also less focused on images and commenting. These small details are preferable to me but to each his own.
- snirp 13y agoWhen I checked out Medium, they had no Markdown support and very limited formatting options. Not good for code examples. Also no option to use your own domain. Also I think that the copyright is (better) protected on Svbtle. All in all it seems like a better option to me.
- aroman 13y ago>Also I think that the copyright is (better) protected on Svbtle. Why?
- aabalkan 13y agoToo late. Go get a medium.com account or install your own Jekyll/Pelican/Ghost in 5 mins.
- AznHisoka 13y agoI thought you were already open for everyone? Oops.. I was using wp-svbtle all this time. Ah well, same thing to me :)
- prezjordan 13y agoYou take pride in stolen design? That's strange.
- heywire 13y agoAm I the only one annoyed by the spelling of the site? I can't figure out if it is a misspelled "subtle" or Silicon Valley Beetle or something... How is it pronounced?
- jack-r-abbit 13y agoIt doesn't annoy me any more than the trend to remove a random vowel from the name. I believe that "v" is meant to act like a fancy "u". I've seen this in other places.
- lost_name 13y agoSeveral hundred years ago, V was both a consonant and a vowel. Over time it evolved into V being a consonant, U being the vowel, and the sound that was 'VV' became W, which is why it's pronounced 'Double U' but looks like two V's. That might not be entirely right, but I believe I'm close. You'd have to look up the evolution of the latin alphabet I suppose. Edit: So to answer your question, I believe it's pronounced 'subtle' :)
- BuffaloBagel 13y agoIn Danish 'w' is called double-v.
- nostromo 13y agoIn Latin they wrote V for what we today would pronounce U. During the American Renaissance, architects used the old latin alphabet, which had no U. That's why you see things like PVBLIC LIBRARY in old cities. Eg: http://i.imgur.com/p4RS9My.jpg http://i.imgur.com/p4RS9My.jpg So, "Svbtle" is "Subtle" and "Bvlgari" is "Bulgari" etc. U and V have a long complicated history. If you'd like to learn more: http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/letters/historyuv.htm http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/letters/historyuv....
- mmgutz 13y agoWhat would be the advantages of using this over static site generators?
- jamesgeck0 13y agoThe UX isn't an utterly terrible developer workflow? I write code all day. Git is awesome, and you can pry Vim from my cold dead hands. But Jekyll is fiddly and doesn't really match my preferred writing workflow. Ghost workflow: Visit URL, mash password manager (occasionally), click "new post" and start writing. Change the title whenever I feel like it. A live preview of the post appears on the left, and I click publish when I'm done. Click a little button in the UI to view the finished post on my site. Jekyll workflow: Open a terminal. Create a new file named with the current date and the post stub. Half the time I don't know what either of those are off the top of my head. Open Vim. Type out the post metadata block. Inevitably get something wrong. Type post. Tab to the terminal and start Jekyll's server. Navigate to local server URL in browser. Alt tab back and forth between browser and editor, hitting F5 every time I want a new preview. Rename file with new stub (optional). Git add, commit, and push. Navigate to my public site in browser to make sure everything came out OK. Mash F5 a few times because Github Sites hasn't compiled it yet. Delete the "We compiled your site!" email from my inbox. Note that Ghost requires much less prep; the majority of my time in Ghost is just editing my post's text. Jekyll has a larger lead in time to editing, and while editing I have to switch back and forth between my editor and the browser for a preview. Jekyll requires more effort doing busywork that isn't writing. I found my output dropped way off after I switched from Wordpress because the barrier to starting a post was higher.
- Skywing 13y agoIf you host your jekyll blog on github, then creating a new blog post is as simple as logging into github and going straight to your blog repo. You can create a new file and edit straight from there. The blog is rebuilt on each commit.
- jamesgeck0 13y agoOh, nice. iirc, I tried it when online editing first appeared on Github, and it was a bit finicky about rebuilding the page afterwards. Good to hear it works now. I used prose.io for a while, but ran into a few cases where the preview didn't match what Github generated. It looks like there's a whole new interface since the last time I used Prose, so perhaps that's not an issue anymore. It supports image uploads now, too.
- atko 13y agoMy only question - how did this reach #1 on hackernews? Bribed someone? :)
- jsnk 13y agoOver the weekend, I worked on a Chrome extension (Youtube.md: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtubemd/akjklakeodbdkmcligjlmaoihkfinegl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtubemd/akjklake...) that lets you embed Youtube video image easily in markdown format. The allows you to generate markdown code for Youtube video image and links it to Youtube video, when Youtube video URL is given. Note that this will not actually embed the video. Instead it will display an image from the video. I know Svbtle supports embedding Youtube videos, but I thought this would be a good thread to mention this extension in case some people use some other system.
- meerita 13y agoThe best thing I did in my life was to move out of these kind of blogging services. I preffer the freedom of my hosting machine, and the beauty of Octopress.
- vph 13y agoI hate blogs without dates. A good blog article is dated properly when it was created and revised. If you want to promote a new blog platform, better date your blogs properly.
- acangiano 13y agoI'd love to see blogs show a visually appealing diff when updates are made after the publishing date. Each diff linked by clicking on a timestamp.
- buttsex 13y agoThis would be cool. I wonder if you could easily hook in the Github diff. Though that would require a static blog version controlled in Github. And it wouldn't be too visually appealing.
- mikeg8 13y agoI emailed Dustin about providing more emphasis on dates just yesterday and this was the response I got. > We want to encourage people to write stuff that has lasting impact. I think dates can just add an extra piece of messy context for some articles. What kind of increased emphasis do you want to see? The more I though about it, the more I realized my desire to see dates is because that is what I know. In retrospect, the best writings I've read didn't need date information to make them impactful and I admire Svbtle more for standing out this way.
- buttsex 13y agoMaybe they should put the date at the bottom? So you still see it, just after you've read it?
- vph 13y agoI completely disagree with this point of view. I often feel that many blog articles intentionally leave out dates because they want to feel "fresh" or they pretend that they came up with some great ideas first or they want the convenience/unaccountability of fixing mistakes in previous revisions. And that is a cheating. If your ideas are fresh and timeless, they will speak for themselves. Further, even if you constantly have amazing ideas, not all of your blogs are timeless. Dating is not a messy context. Dates add to journalistic integrity.
- pbreit 13y agoThe form field design is crazy distracting!
- oh_sigh 13y agoThis would have been more welcome if there wasn't such jerkishness by Dustin at the launch/shortly after the launch of svbtle.
- state 13y agoWhat about this should compel me to give all my content to someone else? I understand the argument that they're entering in to a crowded space, and I see how they believe that they're the best. But really, I'm just going to put all my stuff on someone else's servers and wait for them to be acquired and shut down? It is 2014 after all. How many times has this happened?
- ianbicking 13y agoThe custom domain is probably the best escape hatch, and an advantage over Medium – ultimately you keep ownership of the pointer that is your brand, and that lets you really move your content (even if there is no export yet).
- joelrunyon 13y agoWasn't part of svbtle's appeal being one of the few people to "have a svbtle"? When it first came out - it was beautiful & part of the cache was that only a few people got in. It was super popular for a few months - then fell off completely. Seems strange that the one main differentiator for the network has now been removed.
- paulgb 13y agoFunny enough, s/svbtle/medium and this is still true
- GnarfGnarf 13y ago"catch" or "cachet"
- joelrunyon 13y agoSorry - caché
- coherentpony 13y agoIs the platform open source?
- r0s 13y agoI miss Posterous. R.I.P.
- prateek_mir 13y agoI am not much aware about posterous, how different was it as compared to posthaven ?
- r0s 13y agoWell it was free, but the killer feature for me was media handeling.. it would take just about anything you threw at it and form it into a blog post. Sound file? It would upload to soundcloud and drop the player right in your page. Video etc. You could email everything too, so a zip file full of images and a quick paragraph in email would get formatted as a nice blog post with photo gallery. Everything (mostly) just worked and was awesome.
- joelrunyon 13y agoHonest question: How does svbtle make money?
- Taek 13y agoOne thing that's bothering me about the svbtle interface is the crazy contrast. Especially all of the white on the background, when I'm thinking I prefer lots less noise in my environment. In svbtle, there is a lot of really bright and really dark areas, and I find this to be very distracting and annoying. Ideally for me, the whole website would be a lot darker and the text and boxes would be just bright enough to be visible, not full white but a more tame grey.
- shmerl 13y agoMarkdown only? That's not "getting out of the way", it's limiting the ways of expression. Getting out of the way is providing simple defaults, why not depraving those who need more tools (HTML/CSS) of richer features.
- matthiasv 13y agoHTML is part of the "specification" of Markdown. And you really want to "spice up" your markup with CSS? I'd rather spent the time on content.
- shmerl 13y agoI'd say you might want to spice up HTML with CSS if you want to achieve anything like font styling, positioning and so on. Spending time on content doesn't substitute spending time on presenting it the way you want. Blogger for example allows doing all that. A very simple and practical example where Markdown offers no help: how can you change rtl and ltr directions of the text without CSS?
- colinbartlett 13y agoThe signup UI is the worst: http://imgur.com/fD224S2 http://imgur.com/fD224S2
- DigitalSea 13y agoDustin is a little too late on this one. Medium came along and scooped up whatever chance Svbtle had of becoming accepted by the masses. It should have been open from the start, Dustin's elitist attitude got in the way and I think it's only a matter of time before Svbtle dies.
- pclark 13y agothis comment is unreal
- zem 13y agowhy? i completely lost interest in svbtle when it did the whole "invitation only" thing, and i'm pretty sure i'm not the only one. for a blogging platform, mindshare is reasonably important, and they threw a lot of it away. i'm not sure if medium is relevant, but svbtle's erratic start did hurt it.
- js2 13y agoBecause it stinks of haters gonna hate. The personal attack on Dustin is completely uncalled for. It makes me sad that it's the top-voted comment.
- soup10 13y agoI automatically hate people who say "haters gonna hate". Don't be sad, who cares, hn is just a peanut gallery anyway.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- zem 13y agothere is a little bit of that, perhaps, but consider: from the OP we have > Until now, we’ve been an exclusive platform open only to approved users. We took this initial approach because we wanted to ensure that the software worked, first of all, and that the platform was seeded with great content by seasoned and experienced authors. but if you remember the original svbtle announcement, that is disingenuous. dustin deliberately tried to build up some sense of exclusivity in the "cachet of belonging to a selective group" rather than in the "starting off small" sense. to me that came across as manipulative and a little sketchy (i always wonder, subconsciously, what is wrong with your product if it has to be sold on the premise that not everyone can get it). to a lot of other people, it came across as elitist (just read some of the other comments here). either way, he took a nice piece of software and gave it an unnecessarily blot, but since that blot was deliberately highlighted you can't blame people here for the conversation choosing to focus on it.
- jcutrell 13y agoReally kind of frustrated with this. Svbtle used to self-identify your work as selected to some extent. Now, what's the differentiator between your work and everything else? Don't say "content" please. That's obvious. But a link was more dependable to me if it was from Svbtle. Not anymore.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- DesaiAshu 13y agoAfter reading this post I completely understand the value in svtble. The key here is a super easy interface to thought dump, and an easy way to turn the thought dump into a published blog post. I have tons of these in my notes/sms/facebook etc, but they never get shared publicly because there's no natural transition / lack of time to thoroughly research. I'd encourage you to push an iPhone app soon, and it needs to open up and get me typing instantly like iOS notes
- redox_ 13y agoYou can follow this discussion using the new HN Search: http://hn.algolia.com/follow/7138444 http://hn.algolia.com/follow/7138444
- o0-0o 13y agoDo they still hold your post for around a month before it's published?
- Siecje 13y agoCan you earn add revenue from your content?
- anupj 13y agoSorry mate, don't care anymore! Cheers for thinking about us small people now.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- XERQ 13y agoThe level of dismissiveness I'm seeing in the comments here is really discouraging, and I'm disappointed to be a part of this community. In a community of startup founders fostering new ideas, I haven't seen such close-mindedness. I appreciate what dcurtis is trying to do, doesn't matter if I agree with it or not. The kudos concept is different, the fact that people are writing him emails and tweets about decrementing their counts for a meaningless number is petty. The "Elitism" invite-only being such an issue is silly. HN and reddit started with small groups of people that weren't connected to a larger social sphere, so they slowly grew organically with the content they wanted. Google does invite-only for their projects (Gmail, G+, etc) as a way to both fix issues early with minimal user impact and to scale properly. Medium did the same thing. To say the dcurtis should've made it open for everyone at the beginning is disingenuous. Curating a small community and taking feedback from them, along with having readers connected to a larger social sphere (HN) means it can grow slowly while focusing on its core users, especially as a side project. Appreciate what others are doing, even if you don't agree with it. Don't follow the herd. Just because Medium opened its gates doesn't mean they're the end-all be-all of blogging. I made a svbtle account because I want to see how they evolve and capture what Medium is missing.
- TylerE 13y agoI find it a welcome respite from the normal echo-chamber, personally. PS: Reddit didn't grow organically, it was heavily content and user seeded by the admins. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2 http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of...
- gone35 13y agoIt's conscientiousness, not close-mindedness. If you find petty that people complain about non-intended kudos, by the same logic you should also find petty to have introduced such a pointless anti-pattern in the first place. Besides, kudos are not that different from karma points or likes. Knowingly adulterating such a crucial signaling component of an online community is short-sighted and needlessly detrimental.
- Mz 13y agoHumans are social creatures and the dismissiveness might be in part due to Dustin Curtis having some rather negative PR on HN in his not too distant past and, being young and brash, he didn't exactly handle it with aplomb. I tangled with him at the time. It was a pretty not nice scene. I have not really followed him/his story since, but most people do a pretty poor job of recovering from such incidents, which tend to continue to haunt them. There are ways to live such things down but many people just do not know how. So perhaps the dismissiveness is primarily proof that HN is populated largely by humans, with all their usual tendencies, not 'bots nor aliens.
- rmcfeeley 13y agoHey, this is fantastic. Kudos
- read 13y agothe core of what writing is really about–sharing ideas, naturally This sentence might not be true. Writing is partly about sharing ideas and partly about discovering them. In an essay at least, most of the ideas reveal themselves after you start writing. And half of those you start with turn out to be wrong. So you want to keep writing until you bump onto the right ones. It's figuring out the truth you're after. Sharing something untrue isn't as valuable. If you had a writing tool good at getting you to share and one good at getting you to write, the latter could be a better tool. That's not to say Svbtle does a bad job at getting you to write. But the distinction is important enough for any writing tool to consider.
- johnchristopher 13y agoI am a little bit out of touch regarding the who's who in the web publishing business but this reminds me of Six Apart. Are the svbtle guys planning to release their Typepad code in the future for anyone wishing to install it on their own servers ?
- qthrul 13y agoI was a bit shocked that I got invited to Svbtle back in September of last year after not being 'worthy' of being in the early limited exclusive access. ;-) http://callthejury.com/so-many-blogs-so-little-impact http://callthejury.com/so-many-blogs-so-little-impact TLDR: If I was invited to Svbtle then it isn't a good sign.
- eberfreitas 13y agoSo, what should I use as my blogging platform? I mean, right now I'm using a platform that uses Dropbox and I fear it might go away anytime soon. There are a lot of options right now... Any ideas or suggestions?
- joshontheweb 13y agoJust trying this out now. So far I quite like they way they make it super easy to stub out ideas for blog posts. I just stubbed out 15 post I want to write and can now go back in and finish them when I have time.
- aen 13y agoSvbtle's great for some people and Medium's better in some ways. It's like comparing Blogger with WordPress. The future is in content-centricity and interface-simplicity. Let's appreciate these guys for leading the frontier. PS: This one is more in tune with how the brain works. Pretty radical idea for a writing interface. https://vimeo.com/66995098 https://vimeo.com/66995098
- mkaziz 13y agoI would use Medium, except that requires various nefarious looking permissions about my twitter account.
- btbuildem 13y agoWhat, another signup form to fill out? Give me a break..