[papeda]

Interesting, but today's prompt left me questioning the exercise. This is because the prompt doesn't spell out the main point of the text in its entirety. It doesn't even spell out what smaller goal the prompt is trying to accomplish. So I'm sure it's possible to reshape the prompt into something shorter and sweeter, but I don't know that it's better writing.

To me good writing is about communicating your point well. It's hard to tell what I'm supposed to communicate from a few isolated lines.

[anchpop]

I agree. I got this prompt:

> Cybercrime is viewed as a serious threat to the prosperity and security of developed states, prompting the adoption of cyber security strategies across a range of countries. Although some malicious cyber activities are carried out in the pursuit of military or political objectives, a high proportion of cybercrime is financially motivated. According to one report, this was the case for 76% of all data breaches in 2017.

I had to read it three times to understand it. I could try to make it present the information in a clearer way - maybe something like this?

> Many countries adopt cyber security strategies to mitigate threat from cyberattacks. Although some attacks are means to a political end, 76% of all data breaches are financially motivated.

(The algorithm didn't think this was a valid response, but I like it.)

But it feels hollow because I don't understand what the prompt is trying to communicate. The average person eats almost 1500 pounds of food a year. Is it trying to say that countries shouldn't worry about cyberattacks? Why does it conflate cyberattacks to data breaches? There is no thesis or argument, they seem like disconnected and soulless facts. In good writing, every sentence has a purpose, and they build to a conclusion. Wasn't it confusing when I mentioned how much food the average person eats when it had no clear relevance to anything? That's how I felt with all the prompts I got. This still seems like a cool site but I was a little let down.

[m52go]

You and parent comment are both right, but it's interesting because I haven't heard this feedback before.

Part of what makes these games so playable is that they're quick and don't require a whole lot of thought. It's a compromise. The intention is for players to focus more on improving the technical aspects of the writing presented instead of thinking too deeply about the message because more context and more text to edit might add too much friction to the experience (i.e., make the "game" into more of a "task").

I know it might not help a whole lot, but each game has a tiny bit of context to help...the context for the current game (shown right above the game-play box) is "Opening sentence of a research paper by a think tank."

Anyway, I'll think about ways to address this. Thanks for the feedback.

However I will also add that while these games are meant to be more fun than serious...the "courses", on the other hand, will take message, content, audience, etc into account and generally be much more thorough.

anchpop - your response wasn't considered valid because it did not include the term "cybercrime". In hindsight this was a bad decision on my part -- each game has a small set of strings that a response must include to be considered valid (to avoid spam responses from messing up scoring). "Cybercrime" probably shouldn't be one of them (sorry).

[anchpop]

I looked at more prompts. I think the three I checked out at random must have been an unlucky sample because most of the ones I looked at just now have had much more intention and clarity of purpose. I suspect you're getting this feedback now and not earlier because you happened to post it on HN at the same time as having an outlier prompt. Congrats on the site! It's really awesome.