Looks great! I've had the same issue as you with many projects - so many people leave the marketing till the end so don't beat yourself up about it now. (Hopefully you will have learned a lesson haha!)
Lets look at what you could do:
- Start in one local area - ideally one near you or one that you know. Make it work there and then expand.
- See if you can engage any local groups which might engage with the idea - I could see local city/town facebook groups liking this. Or maybe on nextdoor.com.
- Check out the book "The cold start problem" by Andrew Chen. He goes into many examples of lots of companies that had this issue and how they over came the issue and got their first customers - http://andrewchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ColdStartPr...
Meetup really could be a 10x better platform.
As someone who's run a group on it having to pay to then put in the work to run a group on top of that is just crazy.
They could have monetised the platform in so many other different ways which could have helped the community instead of just going for the easy pickings of charging the event organisers.
Why not charge a percentage on top of any payments take?
Create/integrate with a room booking system in cities to help organisers book? (and take a fee on this)
The only thing Meetup does well is discovery - the domain name is amazing for the type of site it is and it is easy enough to search for groups in your city and find what you want. Everything else is pretty terrible.
I don't know how you could justify having more than 3 dev's working on this site the way it is at the moment. It just screams lazy...
Travel between countries in Europe is improving every year too. Next week I'll be traveling from Bordeaux to Berlin (over 1,600km) - it's faster than the car (16 hours by car vs 12 hours by train), and cheaper than flying, in the summer at least (150 euro by train, vs 300 euro by plane - booking 6 weeks before).
That will improve next year too with the direct Paris Berlin train that should only take 7 hours.
What does one get for actually being nice and being an "ethical web scraper"?
I don't see many people bothering to be honest, developers who are out there scraping are mostly just doing a job, they want to be done as quick as possible and most don't care about things like this unless there are repercussions
It is this type of attitude that is why websites are becoming so aggressive in blocking web scrapers.
Being an "ethical web scraper" is about your own ethics, not abusing other peoples servers/data, and preserving the open internet for everyone.
Yes, if you slam someones website you will probably get the data you want but it will damage it for the collective. If everyone just slammed websites then:
1) the website owners will just get pissed off and either shut data behind logins or make it inaccessible. This is basically what happened with LinkedIn.
2) make it much harder and costlier to scrape by using more advanced anti-bots, requiring everyone to use more expensive residential proxies and headless browsers to get past them.
Web scraping can be a burden for websites, so everyone should approach it in as responsible and ethical way as possible.
I doubt many website owners feel they have an ethical responsibility to provide public APIs to their data so people wouldn't scrape their content. It is up to them what they want to do with it.
I just feel like the whole thing is a chicken and egg problem - both sides could be nicer to the other but no one wants to go first!
I do like the idea of identifying web scrapers in the user agent but I'm not sure how many websites would use it...
My only thought on their refunding process is that maybe they don't have a simple way to just click one button to refund everyone for that specific campaign?
We should probably not assume bad intent on their part!
HN also has moderators who can step in when things look like they're getting out of control which really helps. Or in some cases just point people to the rules and tell them to stop causing flamewars or get out.
It really makes a difference to the overall discourse. Something that is missing on most other places on the web!
HN moderation for those of us who have been here longer than some posters have been alive, this place is a lot different than it used to be, and moderation now tends to stifle conversations that in the past would have spawned great conversations that remained civil. Dang and friends do their best but for the most part the community is better off self censoring and exploring ideas and concepts without guidance and supervision. Unfortunately as more people flock to a gold rush a tragedy of the commons occurs and the site starts to see dang and team as absolutely necessary for each discussion when frankly they shouldn't be obviously seen guiding discussion.
I think it's interesting how they justify giving 1 million of the donation proceeds to the Organisers but then decide that the rest just doesn't make the cut.
It would be nice if they provided some evidence showing the organisers having anything to do with - "promotion of violence and harassment".
With any of these large scale protests there will be some bad eggs who appear to cause havoc...
> With any of these large scale protests there will be some bad eggs who appear to cause havoc...
Right, and there is the opportunity for the spin. A protest you like, it's a few isolated incidents, a protest you don't like, you focus nonstop on the few bad people that come out. From the coverage I've seen, if the absolute worse things they can find are what's been covered nonstop (a couple flags, dressing up a statue unoffensively, people peeing outside) I think it's hard to argue this is a violent or dangerous protest. But people on both sides have a political agenda and are hammering on that instead of having an actual dialog
> there will be some bad eggs who appear to cause havoc...
especially it's so easy to plant some people, and you have a whole league of people in modern democracies who are doing such kind of operations on a payroll.
Madness that they haven't gotten back to your access request in 6 months!
Why even bother having the API there - so much value can be added by people building on top of YouTube and other large sites, its a shame that most of these large sites do nothing to provide API access and people have to go out of their way to scrape them them...
That looks like a great resource! How often is the data set "updated"?
I'd imagine most people's use cases need data which can change from day to day or week to week but I do think that this is fantastic if I was to have a project which was looking at data across a longer timeframe.
Lets look at what you could do:
- Start in one local area - ideally one near you or one that you know. Make it work there and then expand.
- See if you can engage any local groups which might engage with the idea - I could see local city/town facebook groups liking this. Or maybe on nextdoor.com.
- Check out the book "The cold start problem" by Andrew Chen. He goes into many examples of lots of companies that had this issue and how they over came the issue and got their first customers - http://andrewchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ColdStartPr...