Thinking about the idea of “ownership” bandied about by web3 proponents, and real ownership, and the “creator economy,” and my suite of products. What would monetization mean for us?
Remark.as points in an interesting new direction: community. Whether that’s someone’s “fans” or “followers,” or a group of like-minded people getting together for something.
Online, I’ve never liked the experience of buying a subscription to written content, even if I really want to read it. I can’t put my finger on why; maybe it feels too pushy? like there’s no context? like they’re drawing an arbitrary line in the sand on when to charge? like I’m getting bait-and-switched? like there’s no consistency or common understanding?
What I do enjoy is buying in an online shop. The purchase flows are often similar and easy to understand across sites, like the checkout counter at any brick-and-mortar store. If people could pay for things in our ecosystem of apps, I think they’d be presented in more of a store format, instead of hand-wavy “subscribe” thingies.
What could people sell? Maybe exclusive posts or access to their blog, sure. But what about things readers could “own” in the old sense of owning digital goods, i.e. downloading files? Maybe eBook downloads could require payment first, or you could download a single article as a PDF. Maybe you could curate a collection of your posts (say, I want to gather all my articles about the open web) that can then be downloaded in different file formats. Maybe a subscription to an author would give readers commenting access / community membership via Remark.as. Very interesting to think about, and probably in our future future.
(And of course, none of this would require or even be enhanced by any “web3” technology being pushed right now, like blockchain.)
#monetization #remarkas #web3 #digitalGoods
Thoughts? Discuss...
Writing a Twitter thread introducing Remark.as and poking fun at “web3,” and I think I’m actually going to build some of these things I’m talking about. Really follow the joke to completion, and it’ll actually be interesting to have an open, social collection of “Neat Fun Things” in the product.
Last night I made more progress on the app. I’m trying not to get too bogged down by a checklist of “blog commenting” functionality, and focus more on the experience of “hanging out around blogs.” That means things will be a little funky when you arrive, and maybe a little disorienting — but that’s kind of the point. I don’t want to build a sterile, Facebook-ish environment.
As of last night, instead of landing in a network-wide space (the “Café”), I have the app landing on your “Buddy List.” So instead of overwhelming you with a feed-reader-style inbox of content to read, you’ll only see the people you care about (that you’re following), and a hint at when they posted last. From there, you can consciously choose when and where to engage.
#dev #comments #remarkAs
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Continuing on some performance improvements after last week’s downtime. Today, I implemented some long-needed changes to reduce the number of UPDATEs happening on the database at any given moment.
Previously, every page load would immediately count the visitor and update the database. This worked perfectly fine when we were small, but now at normal traffic levels, and especially with spikes like the one we saw last week, this has become too much for the database to handle. Also since we use database replication, the issue has become visible to users, as (I believe) transactions pile up and things get out of sync between database servers.
With this change, many of those issues should go away. Some quick benchmarking showed that responses no longer pile up and gradually grind everything to a halt, as they would’ve before — even with high concurrency and sustained requests, the slowest response could be 600ms. In my tests, it seems now the application can handle at least three times as many concurrent visitors as it could before this change.
We generally see more traffic every day around 10-11am Eastern, so that should put this to the test tomorrow. But it’s looking good so far.
#dev #performance
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Saw a ton of traffic on Write.as this morning, around the same time we do most days, but a magnitude more than usual. It was concentrated on blogs hosted under the write.as domain, and it eventually affected the web application.
I realized that the bottleneck was most likely in the database — too many connections were being made, slowing down queries, causing the application servers to wait too long, causing the backlog of connections into the site to pile up.
To solve this, I added another database replica, and then dug into the application code. While requests were dragging, they were still being fulfilled by the server and database, even long after a visitor might’ve reasonably expected a response, or completely left the page. So I took advantage of Go’s context package to put some limitations on these database queries, particularly the ones on read-heavy pages, like blogs and posts. I tracked commits on T882. The traffic subsided by around noon, and I deployed these changes a bit after.
The changes won’t totally prevent this from happening again in the future, but they should reduce the likelihood (since database connections won’t pile up so much), and should give people a better experience — now they’ll see a clear message saying that we’re under heavy load, instead of a blank browser error.
Thoughts? Discuss...
Today I’ve been working on changes needed for closing Free account registrations at the end of the month. I’ve dragged my feet on this a bit, so decided to make the “close” date coincide with the new year.
The signup flow will change a bit. Marketing pages will start talking about the platform more in terms of everything it can do (with a paid account), instead of constantly mentioning how that differs from a free account. This change alone is making things so much easier from a marketing perspective — I’m finally seeing how much effort goes into catering to free users, and making sure they understand the limitations and differences.
Otherwise, I think we’ll let everyone use the “Invite” functionality to bring people in and give them free accounts, to make sure teachers and others aren’t left out of this transition.
#dev
Thoughts? Discuss...
Yesterday I started putting together an analysis of Web3, the apparent next stage of the web, for my personal baer.works site. When I got to the end, I realized I had only outlined my criticisms without proposing anything else. So today I started writing what I think a real “Web 3.0,” in the spirit of the original Web, should be. I ended up with 2,000 words after a few hours.
Hope to publish it tomorrow on write.as/matt.
#web #web3
Thoughts? Discuss...
Trying a new morning routine lately. Instead of immediately checking email, and social media, and then sitting down to work, I’m doing anything but those things — and then sitting down only when I’m ready.
This started two weeks ago, when I was camping in the North Carolina mountains. I would get up, take my dog Holden out, feel how the weather was, and then make a pot of coffee. I’d sit for a while outside in the quiet and breeze, and see if any thoughts came. Eventually, when I felt a natural lull, I’d head to a coffee shop to start working.
I’m generally trying to find my “center” again — something I feel I’ve lost not just through recent life changes, but over the last decade, if I think about it. (That’s a digression for another time.) But I know I’ve always found my center outside, or by creating things: words, music, drawings, paintings. So without very much nature around me now, I’m doing something pointlessly creative every morning, with no real purpose or goal, before I even think of work.
The results have been very good so far. New ideas — useful or not — are bubbling up that I don’t think would exist without this kind of mental space. I’m slowly feeling more like a whole person again. And when I do sit down to work, I’m feeling a little more focused on what needs to be done — honestly, because I’d love to have more open-ended creative time.
#routine
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New entry in my ongoing series on the merits of staying home, living in the metaverse, over seeing the world outside. Here I’m floating over Teotihuacán in Mexico, pretending to be unimpressed.
#shouldvestayedhome
Thoughts? Discuss...
Working on putting a better system in place for customer support. I’ve tried setting aside an “email hour” every day — literally scheduling it on my calendar. But the email inbox is too messy; I have a system for marking important requests but things get pushed down and out of sight; in the end it’s too overwhelming for me to sit down and get through everything in a consistent way.
I think we’ll get some kind of support ticket system in place, so there’s a dedicated area for people to go when they need help with something, and a single place I can log into every morning to go through and clear out. I’m not sure where we’ll send people that have questions before they use the product — I’ll need to figure out a sane channel for them that doesn’t get used for all kinds of other things. But my priority is keeping track of customer issues.
Today, all day, I worked on nothing but my backlog of requests — they piled up a bit after a mental break trip last week. There are still important requests and conversations I need to follow up on. It’s really not too much overall, if I took care of everything and then stayed on top of it going forward. Just need to get to that point. (If I haven’t answered your email, you should hear from me soon!)
#customerSupport
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I would very much like to write two or three new blog posts at once right now, and this might push me to hack together a Draft.as prototype soon. Does anyone else have this problem?
My usual solution is opening multiple Write.as tabs, but that keeps the anxiety high. If I ever accidentally close a tab before publishing, one draft gets lost, since the editor only ever saves to a single “latest” draft.
#writeas
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