Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vczf 301 days ago
That's a very clear vision on how to solve this kind of funding/cooperation problem outside of government and mission-focused nonprofits. And incidentally would be an existential threat to surveillance capitalism should it reach critical mass.

BTW your password-based signup flow isn't working (on iOS Safari at least).
1 comments
positron26 301 days ago
:-) Yeah. Only SSO was working because while email would double my users, I was doing an experiment and looking for at least some signs of life. Doubling nothing would be useless.

Turns out, some new enrollments topped up their accounts and dropped off before the final step that makes it show up on the home page, so now I know it's something, and something is worth doubling.

> existential threat to surveillance capitalism

Should I buy a gun? I'm an American.

link
vczf 301 days ago
> Should I buy a gun? I'm an American.

No, that's unnecessary. Nobody will be taking you that seriously.

> some new enrollments topped up their accounts and dropped off before the final step that makes it show up on the home page

Did they actually put money in?

link
positron26 301 days ago
Yeah, there were two streams that I tried so far. Interestingly, PrizeForge itself initially got $105, a $100 and a $5 enrollment. The UI was even shittier. I took one look at that $100 and knew I've got to f&*#ing go.

So, for a second experiment, I was actually running a stream for Emacs (yeah, yeah, I know, I know). They managed to raise all of $10 for themselves. The premise was to pay out a weekly prize for whoever developed something cool. Super simple.

There's so little data, but it very clearly, very, very clearly seems to say the enthusiasm is for PrizeForge to get good more than it was to use PrizeForge for something else.

And I'm going to keep expanding in various directions because there's no way I'm oriented yet, but it's not nothing. It's terrible UX, terrible everything, but just clearly enough on top of something.

link
vczf 300 days ago
> ...stream for Emacs...

> ...terrible UX, terrible everything...

I think I accidentally enrolled for emacs and can't unenroll on the site. I guess I'll have to finally start using emacs now

link
positron26 300 days ago
Hey at least customer support is still pretty good when I can twiddle the database for each one. Shoot something to support@prizeforge.com.
link
positron26 300 days ago
Oh I see your username. You were over the subreddit. Welcome aboard.
link