connortomas

Who would you expect to receive a message from? Presumably this happens more often than you think, and the company protocol is to get legal to deal with it. I think you've misinterpreted this as in any way "aggressive" - this is just a company trying to tie things up as efficiently as possible. Sure, you'd like an informal response, but when a company is operating at the scale of Mailchimp, that doesn't seem realistic.

I was also quite impressed by the tone of the message from Mailchimp legal - probably the clearest, most polite takedown request I've seen.

I'm not sure "honest mistake" is really acceptable. This is a multi-million-dollar Triple A game. I think it's reasonable to expect their legal team should have double- and triple-check the rights to all arts assets. Ye, there are a lot of assets used in a game of TLoU's magnitude, but the subway map is so prominent I can't understand how it would have been skipped over. If they had time to include the asset, they should have had time to secure rights.

The screencap used to demonstrate the theft constitutes fair use, by the way. Cameron's using it to make a point to support his argument, which is totally legal.

I explored the possibility of using a bank safe as a replacement symbol in the original piece. A bank safe is very difficult to represent symbolically, particularly at the scale of a small icon, so I think we can probably rule that out. A folder symbol is an even worse candidate, as folders are already used to symbolically represent levels in a hierarchical file structure.

Any replacement for the floppy would need to be immediately recognisable and not already tied symbolically to another concept. My argument, simply, is that I don't think there's anything better. The floppy is a unique shape and conceptually tied only to "saving". The effort required to move away from a commonly-used symbol isn't trivial and I just don't think there's much to be gained.

I'd agree with that. But why couldn't the abstraction for "save" be the floppy disk symbol?

Just pretend the floppy disk never existed, and that the floppy-save symbol is just a completely abstract symbol. Doesn't it still work? As long as a symbol is unique, easy to identify, and easy to reproduce, it does its job. I'd argue that floppy symbol has stuck around because, on a purely visual level, it's hard to beat.

I'd argue that "better designed" is subjective here. Hacker News is optimised for high content density. Designer News has lower content density, but there's more space between posts (and visual signposts in the form of "badges") which makes the front-page easier to scan. I appreciate both approaches.

This seems to have a huge chicken-or-the-egg problem: the site is only valuable to consumers if they know their requests could have some influence, but companies will only listen to requests from Pvsh users if there's a critical mass (say, thousands or millions of votes for one feature).

Is there some way to re-jig the concept to get around this? Perhaps by focusing more directly on one particular product category and expanding outwards? Or by working with particular companies that are actively soliciting feature requests (in which case I'd know I'd be listened to)?

From the stats Kickstarter have released previously, situations like this (in which a project just barely doesn't reach its target) seem extremely rare. Kickstarter works because the model is simple: a hard deadline, a hard target, and go. It sucks that they were so close, but I don't think it would be in Kickstarter's interests to tweak the system to assist almost-made-it edge cases like this.

Agreed in general, though I'd dispute your point that hacking can't do permanent good. Sure, in fifty years, you likely won't care about the web app you built, but maybe that app helped somebody achieve their goals or inspired somebody else in some way, and that is what you'll remember. The work itself is never important in the long run... it's how that work helped others in some way.