The integrity of the founder to stay true to his mission, and not just chase the highest dollar has led to a consistently high quality product, that has real value.
I don't think the key is not to have advertising, but to be committed to an authentic vision.
I know some people doing data entry jobs at groupon.
1- they hate their jobs.
2- many are hired as temp, and given absolutely crappy wages
3- they are being hired to do something that could easily be accomplished with some programming (i.e., taking data from one system and copy/pasting it verbatim into another system)
That's actually fascinating. And it makes sense from my perspective of a) having been involved years ago in selling coupons to small businesses and b) dealing with small businesses for other things.
You need to give them a turnkey experience, hold their hand and make it easy for them. You show up with the "form" prefilled (I mean like a paper form) and say "sign here and I'll do the rest." And if you drop the paperwork off (say they are out to lunch) you put those little post-it arrows so they have nothing to think about. This is really big with that market. I'm not a fan of groupon but it impresses me that they are operating this way (and that Mason said that).
Only programmers advise throwing code at something that is easily performed by humans. In this case, the humans are 1) more readily available than engineers, 2) cheaper and 3) more flexible.
My point of writing this post was the illustrate that in the pursuit of ultimate convenience we sometimes loose sight of the importance doing committing to new behaviors or overcoming our own laziness.
And technology should not enable laziness, or replace effort, but rather elevate and extend and magnify existing effort.
It's worth doing some approximate cost/gain math now & again.... E.g., my core goal is to better communicate about important things with family/friends. To that end I have... spent about 30 hours of my spare time this month implementing a solution to save me 30 seconds per email, and about 1 hour actually writing 5 actual emails. QED.
Side note: in your message here (and twice in the blog post), you're using the verb "loose" (means "set free") when you mean "lose" (means "fail to retain").
Looking back, if I spent the same amount of time messaging and communicating with people that I spent building an app to facilitating future communication I would be much better off, thought more thoughts, and grown closer to more people.
(Also, thanks for keeping me honest with the "loose" typos, they've been corrected.
I started linkjs[1] so I could create an extensible inbox/social app that supports multiple services and interfaces. The idea is to build tool environments around communication, much like the environments we already have around processing (e.g. the unix shell).
Email will be one of the services the comm environment integrates, so it's more of an extension than a replacement.
For most users that just need to communicate regarding a specific item it is much quicker to comment on that and that alone with tools like http://postfrenzy.com.
Having to deal with threads and multiple topics in single email messages for most users often results in a degradation of the conversation, quickly.
I thought it was a cool idea to be able to present my work history in a more in-depth and interactive format. While it may be overkill for a first glance, I think it is a nice option for someone who is interested in learning more. It almost takes the place of a first/preliminary interview perhaps. What do you guys think?
I'm surprised you aren't getting more love on this one. I've already added the site to my bookmarks bar. I love reddit primarily for the images.
Usually my browsing of reddit is done like this.
1. Click homepage.
2. Determine which links are images.
3. Click image link
4. Chuckle, or shrug
5. Two finger swipe back on my trackpad on lion
6. Scroll
7. Repeat 2 - 6
Now its
1. Go to Mongout
2. Click right
3. Repeat 2 ... again and again
I'm also a big fan of the progress bar. If there was no bar I'd feel ungrounded in the infinite space of reddit. Additionally, because its so addicting to look at reddit images, I can say to myself "I'll look at enough images that fills one progress bar"
Its super simple, and really well executed. Big time props!
I think the progress bar is the most brilliant part of this whole thing. I don't read reddit, not because I don't think I would find it interesting but simply because I know it would suck so much time that I stay away. I did the same as the above poster and found the progress bar a really great and satisfying way to limit my time on the site (interesting that most sites have been pursuing the opposite goal in recent years).
I'm one of those that thinks 'gamification' is generally a bad philosophy, but to the extent that this partitioning into discrete consumption units could be called that I think it really works and adds a lot of value to the experience. My only problem with the site is that there's no clear indication anywhere that reddit is where the content is being pulled from, and it took me a bit to figure out how to get to the original page — maybe clicking the image could bring up the reddit panel from the bottom as well, but with some content-swapping to insert the full-size image into the reddit page above the comments?
I don't think the key is not to have advertising, but to be committed to an authentic vision.