Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45680672

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44707963

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Props to the Fellows who are keeping these releases running on time and getting better every year. Boring software FTW!

I called it when I wrote it, they are just burning their goodwill to the ground.

I will note that one of the main startups in the space worked with us directly, refunded our costs, and fixed the bug in their crawler. Facebook never replied to our emails, the link in their User Agent led to a 404 -- an engineer at the company saw our post and reached out, giving me the right email -- which I then emailed 3x and never got a reply.

There’s a lot of “paper reading” clubs which might also be interesting to look in to.

Picking a book was often the hardest part though, so this tool having recommendations and voting seems like a really nice solution.

The view from the industry is basically that STC was a bit behind the times, and was slowly dwindling in terms of reach and value. They still had some active chapters, magazine, and academic journal that provided value for folks, but membership wasn't as valuable as it had been.

They have been around a long time, and had a wider purview that WTD, focusing on many different types of technical writing. They had members in industries like Automotive, Engineering, and Aerospace, as well as Software.

The best way to think about them is something like the ACM in the software industry. They have been taken over by more current community approaches in various areas (eg. Pycon), but also still doing some more traditional stuff that adds value but isn't as relevant to day-to-day practitioners.

Given that customers often want to avoid lock-in on any purchasing decision, it seems hard to build a service that has a larger up front psychological and legal commitment. I love the idea of getting bonus points in life for building structures with collaborative ownership, but realistically most people and businesses only want a simple “buy a service that I can cancel” relationship.

That said, I'd love to see someone try it! I think it could work well in a niche environment, or something like a Kickstarter where people feel they helped bring something into being.

Glad you're still doing cool things :)

Read the Docs is pretty much all open source, including the billing code (https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs.org/blob/main/rea...), but we are structured like a normal company, with some custom bylaws that protect the OSS codebase if ownership changes hands. We haven't found anyone else setting up a competing instance or anything, but that might also be because the product is kind of niche.

I kinda love the idea of having people in the community that use the service have some kind of ownership over the platform. It would likely lead to longer term loyalty of the userbase, which would help keep the project sustainable and avoid the enshittification cycle.

We've played around with sharing ad revenue that we generate on documentation pages split with the projects, which is partially a win/win way of sharing in the upside of success.

Anyway, I don't have a great answer here, but wanted to say hi, and give a bit of context from our place in the world.

PS: You might also talk with the folks here: https://zebrasunite.coop/ -- they are structured like a co-op and mostly come from the tech/design community.

https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse...

They really are trying to burn all their goodwill to the ground with this stuff.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42019568

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

That is mostly just that we don’t want folks going up and doing a 30 minute demo of Sphinx or something :-)

https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2024/04/using-embeddings-in-p...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620086

Points: 26

# Comments: 11