Dalton Caldwell: We Did It • Hacker News Board

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#51

Post by chalst » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 10:41 AM UTC

julian37 wrote: post #30

Congratulations from me, too! A very impressive result in such a short timeframe. In danger of asking a silly question, I do wonder about this bit though: In the very near future I will ask an impartial 3rd party take a look at our data (while preserving all privacy of our backers) and publicly verify that the join.app.net was operated in an honest manner. I might not be seeing the forest for the trees here, but how…

The 3rd party needs to be someone who is trustworthy in two senses:

1. They can be trusted not to misuse the authorisation they will be given to Dalton's Stripe account. The Stripe API (https://stripe.com/docs/api) does indeed give access to identifying information.

2. We can trust them not to misrepresent the facts on behalf of their client (i.e., Dalton).

I've no idea what kind of institutions Dalton is thinking of, but reputable accountants should fit the bill.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#52

Post by smackfu » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 1:05 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #27

>>There has been zero manipulation of numbers, or “stuffing of the ballot box” by App.net. Why would he even suggest that? I wouldn't have expected such behavior.

If you get full funding if you hit the goal number, and zero funding if you don't, then there is usually a point where it makes sense for the project itself to contribute enough money to meet the goal. Spend $10k to get $500k for instance. With Kickstarter, there is a third party that can monitor for that, where if you roll your own Kickstarter, no one will know.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#53

Post by shawndumas » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 1:27 PM UTC

walkon wrote: post #40

jenius wrote: post #38

I would like to publicly admit my total wrongness and congratulate Dalton on his success with this project. You have won my backing and I'll be there 'apping' with the rest of you guys. This was the somewhat popular but incorrect comment I made previously: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4278378 Much love. Props.

> I'll be there 'apping' Let's hope this doesn't become a verb. Tweeting is bad enough, but "apping"?

posting... they are calling it posting

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#54

Post by xwowsersx » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 3:39 PM UTC

quartus wrote: post #39

xwowsersx wrote: post #37

Just completed the sign-up, but still get "We don't recognize that username. This is probably because you haven't been invited to our alpha yet. To request an invitation, please email join@app.net." when I try logging in.

xwowsersx, please send an email to join@app.net and we'll get you set up with your login information. The backing process and the alpha.app.net access are not automated yet, we still need to grant your user access to the alpha.

Done, thanks.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#55

Post by j_s » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 4:41 PM UTC

Mission Accomplished!

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#56

Post by RandallBrown » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 6:03 PM UTC

ralfd wrote: post #16

RandallBrown wrote: post #14

I'm glad they're going to have someone verify it. It seemed really strange to me that they rolled their own crowd funding platform for one use. Why didn't they go with a third party like Kickstarter in the first place?

There is a FAQ on the site. It says: > Why aren't you using Kickstarter? > We wish we could, we <3 Kickstarter. Unfortunately, the Kickstarter Terms Of Service explicitly prohibits raising money for this kind of service.

Diaspora used Kickstarter to raise money. Lots of other similar software projects have. Just seems weird to me.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#57

Post by FireBeyond » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 10:52 PM UTC

nilliams wrote: post #7

dangrossman wrote: post #2

Did Svbtle change its font recently? The text looks terrible. It's blurry, poorly aliased and some of the letters have full-out gaps in the strokes. When viewed in Windows, of course.

I think they must have done, I also don't remember it looking so bad before. Seeing quite a few sites and blogs now getting a bit careless with CSS @font-face rules and seemingly not bothering to test their sites in Windows. More on it here: http://blog.webink.com/why-fonts-suck-windows-hinting

Yeah, so many of the Mac designers / evangelists who screamed the loudest about "Designed for IE" and other web evils have come full circle, and adopted a mantra of "Looks good on my MacBook with Safari, ship it!"

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#58

Post by FireBeyond » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 10:54 PM UTC

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #21

cheald wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of content in a community is always higher when the community is smaller. Twitter conversations in the early days were all high-quality, too. Social networks live and die by whether your friends are on them, though, and while I get the appeal of "keeping out the riff-raff", I'm having a really hard time swallowing the idea that you can reach critical mass (without which your product will fail) by charging…

App.net has 8,000 paying customers and $550,000 in annual revenue, so I think we can say it already hit critical mass. For App.net to succeed, it didn't need millions of users, because the company is not dependent on venture capital or advertising. I also don't see it as a typical social network, but more like a publishing platform for short posts — a mix of a micro blog, link log and photo album. I'd rather compare…

> App.net has 8,000 paying customers and $550,000 in annual revenue

Many of whom were backers who were sufficiently curious to pay to get access to / see the product. The real kicker will come at renewal time, and how many of those customers remain.

Re: Dalton Caldwell: We Did It

#59

Post by FireBeyond » Mon, Aug 13, 2012, 10:56 PM UTC

ch wrote: post #41

Well I admit it. I drank the Kool-Aid. Partly to grab my twitter handle, not that I think it was in any danger of being scooped, and partly to see just what is happening on the inside of the walled garden. I can't comment any further, my password I signed up with doesn't seem to work, and the password reset feature also appears broken :) I will reserve judgement for now.

You definitely did drink the Kool-Aid:

"I paid for a product, I can't login, and I can't fix things so I can login. But I'll meekly 'reserve judgment' rather than lambasting what should be a fairly important issue."