I 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.
All 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.
This is a general lesson: whenever someone criticizes something you've built, be extremely polite and you'll deflate their ill-conceived anger at you. Several times I've received angry emails about a (free) web site I run, like "your site is sh*t", or "I give you a D", and I look for whatever's legitimate about their complaints. If there's nothing worth doing based on their complaints, then I just thank them for their feedback and say I'm sorry it didn't do what they wanted. None of those people has ever written me a second time.
So bravo to mbs348 for ignoring mikemarotti's use of "bullshit" and "lazy" and just getting out of his comments that you could improve your captions.
"Just" being able to freely place them, choosing alignment (left, center, right, justify?), various fonts, selectable font color and maybe even an outline color and width (you can simulate that with a bunch of text-shadows) would go a long way :)
The fridge thingy could also do with several fonts, but I actually quite like it as is. Though here a selectable background and font color would also be nice, or the option to put the caption above the image.
How do good defaults and options exclude each other?
Also, we're talking about creativity here: you cannot be very creative without a toolbox and some options. And frankly, I think you're grossly underestimating "real people" (and good user interfaces).
I appreciate that you don't discount me as a hater.
That being said, it does feel quite off your core mission. What is your indication/evidence that people care more about ownership about the stuff they create than their actual identity online?
Actually, I don't think its far from our core mission at all. I'll give people credit that its not entirely obvious, but our core mission has always been "give people ownership over their data". Along the way, we got associated with a set of tools that help us do that, but at our core, that is the problem we wanted to solve all along. We have worked long and hard to trying to crack that nut. After working on the 'bits' side of the problem, we saw again and again that people don't know what it really means to own your data. Even people who claim to know have wildly different definitions, and many self defined advocates of the cause have radically different and sometimes even conflicting notions of what that means.
We started D* because wanted to make a the internet a place we didn't have to worry about all the bullshit that comes with doing stuff we feel comes naturally. While media ran with us being serious business™, we wanted to scratch and itch and make the world a better place. So in the interest of making progress, we are solving something we think is a total blocker to ANY network that is trying to focus on the contrary. If you look at Makr and just see a meme generator, then I guess you are missing the point and the power of what it could be, which is a simple way to let people create things together, which builds off of what came before, but lets them be unique and original at the same time. If that makes sense to you, great!
If it doesn't, your going to have to excuse us because our work here is not finished :)
(Also worth nothing, the features in Makr started INSIDE D, and we got (good) advice to let it blossom and spin it out into its own thing, as lots of people in the d community like D* the way it is. )
Comments
I 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.
All 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.
thanks, we will work on improving our captions!
It's hard to rage against you when you respond so nicely!
This is a general lesson: whenever someone criticizes something you've built, be extremely polite and you'll deflate their ill-conceived anger at you. Several times I've received angry emails about a (free) web site I run, like "your site is sh*t", or "I give you a D", and I look for whatever's legitimate about their complaints. If there's nothing worth doing based on their complaints, then I just thank them for their feedback and say I'm sorry it didn't do what they wanted. None of those people has ever written me a second time.
So bravo to mbs348 for ignoring mikemarotti's use of "bullshit" and "lazy" and just getting out of his comments that you could improve your captions.
"Just" being able to freely place them, choosing alignment (left, center, right, justify?), various fonts, selectable font color and maybe even an outline color and width (you can simulate that with a bunch of text-shadows) would go a long way :)
The fridge thingy could also do with several fonts, but I actually quite like it as is. Though here a selectable background and font color would also be nice, or the option to put the caption above the image.
Happy coding!
Don't do this. Pick good defaults. Options are for nerds, simplicity is for real people.
How do good defaults and options exclude each other?
Also, we're talking about creativity here: you cannot be very creative without a toolbox and some options. And frankly, I think you're grossly underestimating "real people" (and good user interfaces).
I appreciate that you don't discount me as a hater.
That being said, it does feel quite off your core mission. What is your indication/evidence that people care more about ownership about the stuff they create than their actual identity online?
Actually, I don't think its far from our core mission at all. I'll give people credit that its not entirely obvious, but our core mission has always been "give people ownership over their data". Along the way, we got associated with a set of tools that help us do that, but at our core, that is the problem we wanted to solve all along. We have worked long and hard to trying to crack that nut. After working on the 'bits' side of the problem, we saw again and again that people don't know what it really means to own your data. Even people who claim to know have wildly different definitions, and many self defined advocates of the cause have radically different and sometimes even conflicting notions of what that means.
We started D* because wanted to make a the internet a place we didn't have to worry about all the bullshit that comes with doing stuff we feel comes naturally. While media ran with us being serious business™, we wanted to scratch and itch and make the world a better place. So in the interest of making progress, we are solving something we think is a total blocker to ANY network that is trying to focus on the contrary. If you look at Makr and just see a meme generator, then I guess you are missing the point and the power of what it could be, which is a simple way to let people create things together, which builds off of what came before, but lets them be unique and original at the same time. If that makes sense to you, great!
If it doesn't, your going to have to excuse us because our work here is not finished :)
(Also worth nothing, the features in Makr started INSIDE D, and we got (good) advice to let it blossom and spin it out into its own thing, as lots of people in the d community like D* the way it is. )