| No one's mentioned getting a response so far, but I'm intrigued enough to give it a try. I've sent in a question about genetic engineering. Some notes about the process: 1. 21.co's signup form mandates an image, but the tool they use for file uploads breaks on PNGs (!) silently without any visible warning to the user (!!), you can click on the 'save' button many times with nothing happening and without any kind of error or warning in the web console (!!!), in both Firefox and Chromium with Noscript & Adblock disabled. Apparently even using an entire specialized file upload service, the second-most common image format in existence is just too exotic and confusing to support. 2. you have to confirm by email before you can do anything, which adds on another 10-15m to the process (amusingly, they spam you on signup to set up a public paid inbox - and that email arrived first, but you can't do anything unconfirmed) 3. it's not $100, it's actually $110, because 21co tacks on a $10 'service fee' (even though it's for charity). It's unclear if I have to pay this $10 regardless of whether Andreessen ever responds. I hope not. In any case this strikes me as a huge fee for such a trivial service, and I really hope it's a 10% fee rather than a fixed $10 fee... 4. the site is surprisingly slow despite being so barebones 5. browsing the interface, despite the prominence of Bitcoin, I'm not clear whether I am even allowed to deposit Bitcoin and pay that way; in any case I opted to use a credit card because the profile image bug wasted so much of my time and I was losing my patience. The cash out page indicates that should I ever earn anything via 21.co, I would need to jump through even more hoops, presumably even if I only wanted Bitcoin and not bank deposits or anything. I thought briefly about setting up a paid inbox because it's a fun concept but between a 10% (or worse) fee and all this invasiveness, I'm not interested. 6. signup form doesn't work with Lastpass, which failed to capture the username/password; always annoying to manually copy over generated passwords. So, I'm not impressed but we'll see how it works out... On a side note, how do people regard the expectation of privacy with these public inbox emails? I see someone has screenshotted a Horowitz response; are these responses considered 'commissioned' in a sense, rather than private emails with an expectation of privacy/confidentiality, and so it's OK to copy-paste any response publicly on HN or elsewhere? |
My message idn't make it in the first time and 21co notified me it has been canceled:
> Thanks for using 21 to contact Marc Andreessen and donate to Black Girls Code. Demand for Marc's time was extremely high and it was not feasible to respond to your message in 48 hours. As such, your credit card has not been charged. Marc still wants to hear from you though, so we encourage you to resubmit your message at 21.co/pmarca! The new estimated response time is one week given the high demand. We are working on adding code to dynamically update wait times in the presence of surges of demand, but in the interim we want to make sure you have a good experience. Thanks again for using 21 and supporting Black Girls Code!
I decided to try submitting again (I'm still curious and at least the price didn't increase).
I also mentioned my comments to 21.co. To summarize their response:
1. PNG: should be supported, they don't know why it didn't work 2. they'll check that the emails arrive in an actionable order 3. it's a flat 10%; it is to cover payment processing (so the user may be donating to charity but they're not) 4. performance is a known issue 5. you are not allowed to deposit Bitcoin, they have to be earned via the site; deposits may or may not be available in the future. Verification for withdrawals are required because of fear of abuse. 6. the responses are supposed to be private/confidential (I guess Horowitz simply doesn't mind or know about that one being passed around). So should I get an Andreessen response, I guess I will confine my comment to whether it was a good response or not and whether it might be worth the money.
(I don't entirely agree with some of the reasons.)