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Open for everyone

blog.svbtle.com

51–60 of 281 posts

Re: Open for everyone

#51

I 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.

I did that once awhile back. I didn't know what the little bulls-eye was for. When I hovered over it, it said don't move. I was expecting some silly thing to happen (like when the bottom of a Kickstarter page gets cut off). There is no indication that what I was doing was "up-voting" a stupid blog post. Possibly one of the dumbest features ever.

Re: Open for everyone

#52

I 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.

It's interesting how much such an utterly irrelevant thing annoys me. There's really no reason why accidentally making a number increase by one should matter, but I suppose it's the fact that the site is falsely representing it as a deliberate action by me.

It's not irrelevant. It's a design decision that punishes curiosity with unwanted and nonundoable actions. What else is the site going to do on my behalf because of something as simple as parking my mouse on the wrong part of the screen or in this case hovered over a nonintuitive button expecting some hover text to tell me what it is?

Re: Open for everyone

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medium wants you to have a Twitter account.

Wouldn't most modern writers have a Twitter account anyway? If you're publishing your piece online wouldn't you want everyone to see it?

If you already have an audience, maybe, but if you don't, then it's just an avoidable restriction.

Re: Open for everyone

#56
Am 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?

Re: Open for everyone

#57
post #56

Am 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?

It 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.

Re: Open for everyone

#58
post #33
post #9

Open 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:…

It feels to me that they did build this for a certain type of person. One who likes writing without distractions. One who likes to brainstorm. One who appreciates simplicity. I assume that the initial product was built around the "seasoned and experienced authors" who initially populated the site. And the founder, Dustin Curtis. It seems that this was built for a very small group of people. But like many products tha…

I'll add that the original "selling" point of Svbtle was its "drafts first" approach (that I really appreciate).

There's also a few references in the announcement post today mentioning writers' identity (free custom domain support, full name on everything) that could appeal to some people turned off by Medium's "nice article you just read now here's something else by someone completely different" approach.

Basically, what I see today is a side project growing up. Hard to see that as a bad thing.

Re: Open for everyone

#59

I 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.

It's interesting how much such an utterly irrelevant thing annoys me. There's really no reason why accidentally making a number increase by one should matter, but I suppose it's the fact that the site is falsely representing it as a deliberate action by me.

There isn’t “really no reason” why it’s annoying; it’s exactly as you said: the site is falsely representing your upvote as a deliberate action. And your action changes a number, labeled “kudos”, seen by all future visitors to the page, so your action ends up implying endorsement of the page to future visitors. That’s why the kudos feature annoys me – it falsely represents the page to be popular, but rather than just completely making up a number of kudos like a normal liar, it ties the number of kudos to the actions of unwitting page visitors. That gives the author plausible deniability that it’s possible that that many people really did like the page, though in fact that is very unlikely.

Re: Open for everyone

#60
post #20

Svbtle’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: h…

Why does the copy drive you away from it? Serious question since I didn't think one way or the other about it.

I 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.

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