[notJim]

This was my initial reaction as well. Actually, as I find myself scrolling down the page, I thought the ideas were compelling. It was like this:

  [Facebook part     ]      Hmm… ok…

  [GO SLOWER         ]      Yeah!
  |-----   .... ---- |      YEAh!
  |.. ..... ------- .|      YEAH!
  
  [Make it meaningful]      Yeah!
  |.. ..... ---- .. .|      YEAH!
  
  [Join              ]      Wait… what? Join… your app?

I thought this was about hand-crafting. This is just another ad for a service that will be acquihired in 2 months?

FUCK.THAT.

[kateray]

these are the ideas behind scroll kit and i'm glad you agree with them. but we'd be some pretty shitty hackers if we just talked about them and weren't trying to actually DO something to change things.

[notJim]

Absolutely. We seek to solve the problems we see in the world through technology.

I feel your message would be more honest if you went for an approach like WordPress did: with an open-source tool. You make money by providing a hosting platform for the less technically inclined.

And think about it. Wordpress actually did revolutionize publishing.

[mcantor]

What's wrong with making money by providing a service to someone happy to pay for it?

[notJim]

Nothing, but calling it a movement aimed to fix broken publishing when it's just another walled garden that will disappear at the first buyout offer is disingenuous.

To clarify a bit: I am annoyed not by what the product is, but by the way it's marketed.

[codybrown]

The editor produces vanilla html/css that can be transfered and hosted anywhere.

And I'm glad that you think its worth buying but we're not for sale.

[codybrown]

what do you mean by honest?

[oinksoft]

How does having a "Join" form make somebody a better "hacker"?

[notJim]

If you sign up, they've got a pretty rad system behind that join form.

[nbashaw]

Not everyone knows (or wants to learn) HTML & CSS. I can see this service being valuable for those people

[alttag]

I didn't even make it that far. [EDIT:Although, wanting to comment, I did go back and read the whole thing.]

"make them scroll" ... um, no. The increasing number of pages that are requiring vertical scroll to be useful loses the great usability/accessibility of the "above the fold" method of pages. Even with the improvements in scrolling over the past decade (scroll wheel mice and scrolling gestures), it's still a chore that makes the "cost" tradeoff of some sites (including, I'll admit, this one) to be "not worth the effort."

[olliesaunders]

I thought that view was discredited some time ago. First result in Google for "people like to scroll": http://uxmyths.com/post/654047943/myth-people-dont-scroll

[alttag]

That's nice. I don't like to scroll. Surely there's someone else in the world like me.

From the article you linked: "[P]eople used the scrollbar on 76% of the pages, with 22% being scrolled all the way to the bottom

That's a low enough conversion rate for certain page types that it may not always be worth the effort. If I want something, I'm happy to scroll, but if I'm browsing, there had better be a good value proposition in doing so.

  "Another eye-tracking study conducted by CX Partners 
   confirms that people do scroll if certain design 
   guidelines are followed"

... So, the article says (several times) people scroll, but only under certain design conditions. Is a long form article worth scrolling for? Usually; it's better than ad-ridden pagination, I think we'll both agree. Where the OP went wrong, I think, was that the scrolling was a design gimmick, not a content opportunity. It came across, to me, like the purpose of scrolling was to be "artsy" and "design-minded", rather than to convey content. Perhaps what I'm attributing to the scrolling design was really a lack of editing for length.

Jakob Neilsen (who was mentioned in the article you linked) also comments on why scrolling might be less of a good idea [1]:

   "scrolling ... can be difficult for users with motor skill impairments."
   "Low-literacy users can't easily reacquire their position in the text
    after it moves.
   "Elderly users often have trouble getting to the right spot in scrolling
    menus and other small scrolling items.

Not everything you read on the Internet is wholly true.

1: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050711.html

[batista]

>That's nice. I don't like to scroll. Surely there's someone else in the world like me.

Hmm. You might want to check the notions of:

1) opportunity cost 2) outlier