fredwu

I spent 3-4 months working on it whilst having a day job. It's a writing/reading/listening platform, kinda like a mix of Medium/Substack/Wordpress/Twitter/Reddit...

I wrote about the tech stack and how I built it here: https://persumi.com/c/persumi/u/fredwu/p/how-i-built-a-mostl...

Still got a long way to go, especially to tweak the user onboarding side of things to explain much better on the concepts.

Would love some feedback!

> Are these sign up links solely for writers?

No not really, anyone could (and should) sign up because I do believe that everyone is unique and has their "personas" to show for, whether it's their natural talent, or skills, knowledge, anecdotes, etc.

> Has anyone actually signed up yet?

I've only just soft launched it, mostly to gather feedback before I start doing the marketing side of things, so no not really, yet.

> I can't find any links to read or listen to anything. How do consumers use this?

My hope is that once I improved the product based on the feedback, it'll start attracting people who simply want to blog and don't want to (or don't have the skills to) set up their own blog. This way the content will be gradually built up.

> Does it require a login?

Absolutely not. This is actually one of my pet peeves for certain existing platforms. I hate login walls, I believe good content should be publicly visible to everyone.

> Do you have to subscribe to read?

Nope, it's entirely optional.

> Are all users treated the same with the assumption that anyone signing up wants to both publish and consume?

In short yes. The plan is to offer value-added functionalities such as the AI voice, as premium features so the platform can have a sustainable way of existing.

> the entire concept of "content creation" has become epistemically bankrupt and harmful to the world

You know what, I agree with your observation. And this is actually the primary driver behind creating Persumi. For that reason, I never positioned Persumi to be a competitor to the status quo social media platforms. I think the whole "content creation" space needs a bit of shake up.

> the content creators themselves have bad incentives

I agree with this part of the statement.

> regardless of how the platform funds itself

But not necessarily this part. If a platform isn't pressured into selling more ads, or introducing more user-hostle features, and instead focused more on the users and content, the vibe would be quite different, and I would hope that then it will attract content creators who either would naturally gravitate towards such platform, or would adjust their behaviours/content accordingly to serve their audience.

At this stage nobody knows how to solve this problem (otherwise it would've been solved already), but hey I'm still naive enough to give it a shot. :P

Re video, it's a great question/observation. I had considered it, but ultimately I decided that running/streaming videos will be prohibitively expensive, so I'll only investigate and invest in video if/when the platform can sustain itself.

Thank you so much for suggesting a guide tour feature - this will be the very next thing I build.

Totally agree with the minor things you've noticed. A lot of it are already on my backlog to fix/improve, so thanks for taking notice!

And thanks for the words of encouragement, it means a lot! Hopefully it won't be too long til I improved all the things raised here by yourself and others.

In terms of the confusing terminologies, I agree, and based yours and on a lot other people's feedback, I will prioritise a guide tour for better user onboarding.

With "slug" I'll double check and see how I can improve it, I think I did add some tooltips in to explain what it is, but perhaps it's still too hidden.

It's getting late here in Australia so I'm going to have to call it a night. I'll respond to the comments I haven't responded to over the weekend.

And I will for sure add some screenshots to the landing page, as many of you have suggested.

EDIT: Updated the landing page with some screenshots. Will try to perfect it more over the weekend...

Given the product won't work without JavaScript I didn't really think about the non-JS experience...

Even though Persumi is not meant to be a competitor to Twitter or Reddit, I can't help but think that a content creation platform without the VC drive and agenda, would probably grow into something quite different.

When I first thought of building this, I was thinking about people's different personalities (one for family, one for friends, one for work, etc) and their different interests (I'm a programmer, I'm a gamer, I'm a photograher, etc). So in short, the platform is built to allow one person to have multiple different versions of themselves. And people can choose to follow a user, or a user's specific personas.

Given it's a content platform, I struggled to capture the essence with one or two screenshots.

May I ask what made you think "this is some kind of scam"? I'm genuinely curious. Would love to fix that impression if possible.

I do want to eventually add Nostr and ActivityPub support. Ah, priorities... :P

Software engineering, design, photography and leadership topics.

- Technologies: Elixir, Ruby, React, JavaScript

- CV: https://fredwu.me/cv.pdf

- Email: ifredwu at gmail dot com

My name’s Fred Wu, I’m an experienced Elixir and Ruby developer who has worked on multiple commercial projects as well as having released multiple open source Hex packages and Rubygems.

I work at a fintech startup as CTO, leading a small team. During Covid I've been pumping out around 40 extra hours per week on freelancing work. My day job involves mostly the non-coding part of problem solving so it's a nice mix of pace for me to keep my coding skills sharp during the evenings and on weekends.

I’ve been using Elixir for half a decade, ruby for over a decade, lead and built multiple commercial B2B & B2C SaaS projects. I’ve always been very hands on, and have worked with multiple tech stacks in the past, including JS/React, PHP, Golang, and most recently Clojure at the startup I’m currently working at.

- My blog and talks: https://fredwu.me/

- My Github profile: https://github.com/fredwu

- My LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wufred/

As you probably noticed I have quite a few projects on Github. Some of the more interesting ones are:

- Crawler, a high performance web crawler built in Elixir: https://github.com/fredwu/crawler

- Simple Bayes, a naive bayes machine learning implementation in Elixir: https://github.com/fredwu/simple_bayes

- OPQ, a simple in-memory queue with worker pooling and rate limiting in Elixir: https://github.com/fredwu/opq

- And a few years ago when I was heavily involved in the ruby/rails community, I had done an experimental project building a "layer 0" ORM on top of ActiveRecord and Sequel: https://github.com/fredwu/datamappify

If you think my skills and experience could add value to the project I’d love to chat more. You could reach me at ifredwu at gmail dot com. Thanks!

It also helps if you have an established profile, e.g. an active Github profile with open source contributions.

I've gone through a few "redesigns" over the past decade or so. For the latest design I've tried to keep it relatively simple, but also with a bit of design flair so it doesn't look boring. :)

I blogged about my latest redesign effort here: https://fredwu.me/blog/2019-01-20-new-blog-with-new-design-a...

Now I'm on a 64GB M1 Max and things are super snappy again. (Monterey on the other hand is buggy as hell, simple things like tap to click and pinch to zoom are broken. [1])

[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/tap-to-click-issues-on-...

> The fact you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I take your point.

Interestingly, growing up in the late 80s, we were briefly taught Zhuyin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo), but not this. I don't believe my parents (both native Shanghainese) even know how to "spell" Shanghainese.

Ah, the lost art...

The confusing part for me as a Shanghainese speaker though is that we don't have a way to write Shanghainese, this "spelling" concept AFAIK simply doesn't exist. So I'm very curious to see who actually designed this functionality and what does it actually do.

Cantonese at least has a written form, but Shanghainese AFAIK has no written form, so what does "Shanghainese dialectal spelling" even mean? :\