moksha256

To me the biggest not-easily-replaceable value is the "Hub" part of GitHub. It's easy enough to stand up your own Gitea or Forgejo instance for mirroring personal Git repos, set up your own GitLab instance for more sophisticated collaboration and CI workflows, etc...but the discoverability GitHub provides in its current form, since the vast majority of repos are hosted there (or at least have some kind of mirror there) is unparalleled.

You're not wrong. But the door-holding example isn't really a good one because there's no such thing as a license for door-holding.

For FOSS, on the other hand, licenses are a well-established thing. And developers have free reign to pick a license for their code and they very commonly pick MIT...totally on their own volition. Which strips them of all privileges. It's like writing a book and explicitly setting it into the public domain. If that's what you want to do, that's great, but very commonly I don't think it's what developers actually want to do.

In the world of copyright, the long-standing legal default is for the author to own their work for a certain amount of time, whether or not the copyright is explicitly claimed. Because making public domain the legal default would be utterly insane.

I guess what I'm saying here is my beef isn't with entities that choose to be jerks—that's annoying and always gonna happen to some extent—it's more with the all-too-common decision to use the MIT License. And when I see people complain about it...I understand the sentiment but I also can't help but think that the folks complaining had it coming and it was totally avoidable.

Yeah I'm as big of a FOSS fan as the next guy on here but you really can't complain about how someone uses your code if you used the MIT License...one of the most permissive licenses in existence.

If someone wants attribution or something then they should use a license that requires that thing.

Could it be a browser extension interfering? Maybe try running in private browsing mode and see if you still get those quirks.

Gotcha, yeah this business model probably isn't final. I'll probably tweak a few things as I talk to users and figure things out.

Thanks for such thorough feedback!

> 3.

There's a "Show Required" button in the bottom-left of the gameplay screen (i.e., the screen with the timer) that shows the original text with the required terms underlined. Do you see that button?

> 4.

That's weird, because I only use Linux and mostly test in Firefox. If you happen to see any console errors or other clues, feel free to post them.

> 5.

Totally agree. I might establish a forum to make this more feasible, not sure yet.

> 6.

I can understand that notion from the consumer side, but as a maker, I've never had any luck with small voluntary payments. For this particular venture, a major component of the value-add is uncapped access to real human feedback, and this cannot be scaled. Because of that, I can't justify charging anything lower.

To come at it from another angle, I think $100 (or even $300) to learn a life skill that can drastically improve your personal and professional life is a great deal. Especially since the cost of many professional writing courses can be several times higher, in spite of being (in my opinion) much less effective.

If you're hesitant to spend the money, that's fair...consider joining the email list to stay in the loop. Or spend the money, and I'll just give it back to you if you have any regrets :D

> 7.

Interesting, haven't thought about such a thing. Maybe I'll consider it!

I put the site online just 1 day ago, and didn't really tell anyone about it until this HN post. I expect that the situation with search engines will change as the domain matures and becomes more known.

Thanks!

> From "Play" to the actual game is 6 clicks. I'd much prefer 2 or fewer.

I see what you're saying but...I'm not sure what's ideal. Fewer clicks with more info density, or more clicks with less info density. People have short attention spans. And a fewer-click-approach would probably not be mobile-friendly.

> Might be even more fun or game-like to work with text on the sentence level. Certainly much faster for a user to complete, and you have more options for assessment as well.

I try to vary it. Some games are longer and some are shorter...there are different lessons to be picked up from each.

> I'm curious about what other people have submitted, though I expect there's a lot of noise in that data.

Yeah I'd like to have some way to showcase user-submitted solutions at some point, because there are always multiple good ways to approach these challenges that a single human couldn't possibly devise. I don't save any data on the server-side for users who aren't logged in, but as more people sign up (hopefully), I'll have more submissions to play with.

> Human feedback would be most useful.

Yes, the games without a paid membership are fun but not really a learning tool. Paying users can get real human feedback whenever they like.

> brief-to-a--fault

Not sure if intentional, but either way, well done!

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback.

Yeah, the time limit doesn't serve much of a purpose beyond creating some playful pressure.

> It's not clear what other rules (AI?) are being used to judge whether a response is valid, so when you get marked invalid even though you're using all the required terms, it's not clear what you're supposed to do to make it valid.

> It would be nice to be able to review the Background section of the instructions while writing.

> After completion, you see your response compared to a target, but you can't see the original anymore to compare target vs original to see how the target improved on the original.

These are all good points that I will work on.

Sometimes I break grammar rules for effect...in that case, I like the rhythm of the single-syllable words "write well and write fast" better than "write well and write quickly".

But you're totally correct. Maybe that's not the best place to flex rule-breaking :D

I'm not sure why a mobile phone wouldn't show an on-screen keyboard with a textarea in focus. Doesn't sound like an issue with Brevity 500.

The site is visually designed to be responsive but it's really designed to be used with a non-mobile screen and a real keyboard.

I tried to make it responsive because I knew a lot of people would visit the site on their phone. In my testing, gameplay works on mobile...without an on-screen keyboard. When that keyboard pops up on the screen, there isn't much room for anything else.

If you think it's something other than your on-screen keyboard that's messing it up, feel free to link a screenshot and tell me your device, browser, etc so I can look into it.

Thanks for the feedback!

If you click the "i" button in the bottom-left during a game, you'll see the original text with required terms highlighted. Lots of people seem to miss that so I need to figure out a way to make it more clear.

In early testing, people seemed to enjoy the challenge the timer provides. But yeah to be honest, I personally don't like it...I'm a slow writer and hate to be rushed. Paid users can disable the timer.