161 karma · joined March 29, 2014
That episode mentions Gary Wolf's 2008 Wired article [Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm](http://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/), which I think is what inspired me to create Hibou.
As I wrote below, updating the Firefox version really depends on how successful the Chrome version becomes and how many people request this.
If you write me an email (will@gethibou.com), I can keep you up to date with my plans to update the Firefox extension.
I'd love to implement cloze deletions. My thought is that if there is a note associated with a highlight, the user could click an eye icon to toggle the highlight's visibility. Cloze deletions would then be achieved by copy-pasting the highlight and removing the portion that you want hidden.
If you're familiar with the Hibou UI and have other ideas on how I could smoothly integrate cloze deletion, let me know.
It really depends on how successful the Chrome version becomes and how many people request this.
If you write me an email (will@gethibou.com), I can keep you up to date with my plans to update the Firefox extension.
>Click the Hibou highlight button. It will be saved here until you make a highlight.
Here refers to the Reading list. If you click the highlight button, but don't make any highlights, Hibou will save that page in the reading list (the left-most icon in app.hibou.com). That way, you can go back and highlight it later. You won't get any reminders or notifications until you create your first highlight on that page, at which point it goes from your reading list to your queue (middle clock icon), and of course the highlights are saved. I'll make that clearer.
Thanks for pointing out the disabling bug. If you only use the keyboard shortcut, enabling and disabling should work fine. If you use the popup, disabling seems broken. I'll fix that today.
Logging in allows you to * see your highlights on another device (which means another computer right now, but will soon mean your phone) by going to app.gethibou.com and logging in with the same gmail account. * Store an unlimited number of highlights. Everything is saved locally if you don't log in, and you're limited to 5mb of local storage in an extension, so eventually you'll run out of space (you'll get a warning if you're running out of space). * Sort all highlights by tags. As I roll out features, sometimes things need to be coded on the server and within the extension. In those cases, I'll write the code on the server first, so by logging in you'll get access to newer features. Sorting by tag is the first of those features.
I'll add this to the guide.
Thanks for trying it out. Hope you like it.
I'd love to hear the thoughts of the HN community
Will
Also: end up, they're, response, rating, thing
Blendle is doing the latter and I would only argue for micro-payments in this context.
> If your domicile had the ability to charge every time you go to the restroom, I guarantee they would just raise the rates
Going to the bathroom is something you need to do, not something you choose to do, and the friction of finding another bathroom every time you want to is quite high. Reading articles is by no means a need and free alternatives are a button tap away. You're comparing one of the most demand inelastic services with an incredibly elastic one. They will never be able to extract unfair prices because readers will simply stop reading.
So I agree that micro-payments have their place, and that place is the digital world where we consume many small things that we could do without if we thought that they were too expensive. The world that most of HN lives and breathes. But to write off micro-payments entirely is short-sighted.
As for your original question, the reason a lot of people think that micro-payments are something that people want is probably because of Jaron Lanier's book, Who Owns the Future. It's a good read.
When I tell my future robot to go get my coffee mug, I don't want it coming back with the PS5 controller.
I believe that should be the other way around.
Hi, I was thinking about something like this after reading Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future (which I recommend simply for his view on how a capitalist economy could subsist on micropayments, if you haven't read it).
The world needs something like this, if only because the concept of post-payment, if successful, would align expenditure and value to a degree that is impossible if you've paid for a good before you can consume it. If this got big, it would change the quality of music that is produced as musicians would strive to make music that lasts. It requires a very moral user base, but I think you can find one.
I saw in another comment that you might use analytics as a future premium feature. If you think of the donor's psychology, tipping an artist comes from a desire to benefit the person who has provided them with an enjoyable experience, but also as an indication that of all the artist's material, that song/album/video is the direction that the band should continue to go in. If a donor thinks he can influence a band's decisions, then I am convinced that he would be likely to give more (remember, we're dealing with a fairly well-educated morally inclined user base. Not all people think this way, but they do). If analytics is locked behind a paywall, then donors might not feel the same incentive to give. This is obviously problematic, since you seem to be leaning freemium rather than charging fees as a source of revenue, and need to think of good premium features that the free user base won't miss.
If you truly view this as tipping, as a means to correct the fact that musicians receive far too little of their music's sales, then the payment model makes sens. If users start to use your website as a moral justification to steal music (as I certainly would) then you're effectively cutting into the labels' revenue. Though I applaud that initially, if this starts to gain scale, I would consider allowing users to give the labels a small percentage of their donation, as the labels do play an important role in producing, marketing… though not as big a role as their current compensation would suggest. I doubt that labels would ever accept these donations, as it would be an admission to the inadequacy of today's music distribution model, but you would gain a reputation of being a fair player rather than a pirate.
Though it sounds like this is already the case, I would highlight to your users that what they are giving is a pledge: it's not guaranteed that artists will agree to accept these donations. The pledging mentality, like with kickstarter and co, makes people give more as expected expenditure = pledge x probability of acceptance. An economically inclined user might give $15 instead of $10 if he only thinks that there's a 2/3 chance of that
Finally, you should allow for users to supply and request content associated with artists, tracks, albums… Hey, I'm looking for guitar tabs for this song and am willing to pay x for it. First person pays the fee, other downloaders can tip the guy who made the tabs if they choose. Or, I'll make tabs for this song for $20, people can leave little tips, and once it hits $20, it gets sent over to them and is available to the rest of the community. If there's too much content being generated, use a reputation system to only show the best and keep the UI clean.
I may be thinking a little too niche because I play guitar, but this could extend into all sorts of other spaces like merchandise, though competing with ebay/amazon on that front probably isn't where you want to go with this. If you did get into selling physical goods, you could keep it pretty indie by only allowing user created content (a poster a user drew). Because you would be creating a market that doesn't really exist, you would be more justified in charging small fees for user to user interactions than for user to artist tips.
I'll stop rambling.
I look forward to following your progress.
As for getting the money to them, that's the question I want answered. I had conceived it as pledges rather than donations. I think people are more likely to pledge than they are to donate, which would get the service started a lot faster (and not problematic as long as you provide cc/banking/bitcoin details so that pledges are automatically deducted). Artists could then be contacted and told to claim their pledged donations.
The optimal reading environment on a responsive website is usually the tablet view. Narrow enough to make jumping lines easy, narrow enough to prevent big ads on the side columns. I'd love to see a tool that could force media queries on bigger displays and simply center the text. You'd still get a feel for what the web designer was going for, but it's much cleaner. On none responsive sites, it could use the same metrics as this tool to determine which elements are article elements and simply center them and remove the rest, while maintaining the fonts, colors... The medium is the message and all that jazz.