
The Svbtle Promise - sp332
http://dcurt.is/svbtle-promise
======
palakchokshi
This feels a bit like a marketing gimmick, especially when you read the fine
print. If forever means "till Svbtle becomes financially insolvent", that is
no different from any other company that shuts down because they don't have
money. The only thing that this promise promises is that if Svbtle gets
acquired then as part of the purchase agreement the buyer will be required to
keep Svbtle "alive". But what guarantees the buyer from selling again and not
including that in that agreement and the new purchaser from shutting it down?
And don't make a promise where your fine print says these policies are subject
to change. That's not a promise that's a promise with your fingers crossed
behind your back.

~~~
dcurtis
It's not a marketing gimmick--it's a promise. It's how I want my own blog to
be treated.

We announced this publicly so that you now know: if you write on Svbtle, your
content is vastly more likely to survive for a long time than if you used your
own server (probably) or if you used another publishing startup.

~~~
palakchokshi
Ok I understand your motivation, I really do. However announcing something
publicly with fine print that says you can't be held liable for that
announcement basically negates that announcement. Either you promise and stick
to it (no fine print) or you announce something that catches someone's eye
because they wish there was something out there that worked this way and you
get them as a paying member but has a way for you to go back on your promise
(thus making it a marketing gimmick).

------
bsimpson
Nobody starts a company going "and if we fail, fuck the users." The problem is
that maintaining service takes resources that cease to be available when you
fail. This "Promise" does very little to allay those concerns.

What's your plan to maintain those links and user data if you get
acquired/shut down?

~~~
dcurtis
As I mentioned elsewhere, there are certain things that can be done to keep
the service running for at least your lifetime--I'm working on a trust that
will be created in the event of my death (or the company's death) that can
keep the servers running for a very long time to come, even with no paying
customers. We will make that public when it's finished.

~~~
DanBC
I feel sorry for you whenever you post. I was an asshole about your forks
post, (and I'm sorry for that, (EDIT: I should have apologised before now)),
and people are kind of being assholes now.

I mean, here you're saying "I'm thinking of the users in case I FREAKING DIE"
and even that isn't good enough for some people.

~~~
camillomiller
Are you kidding us? We all need to feel a bit better by criticizing everyone
as long as they're actually doing something. Next time they'll think twice
before making us feel bad for not really being able to be proactive and tackle
even the smaller projects.

------
Smudge
In addition to keeping the permanent URLs live, why not pledge to release the
source code? Seems to me that this would be the easiest way for users to take
control of both the data _and_ the platform, in the event the company becomes
financially insolvent.

~~~
dcurtis
Good idea--we'll add that.

~~~
jaxomlotus
I'd also add to that - build in a simple way to export your data (maybe it
already exists). That kind of trust and confidence in your product being so
good that you give people the keys to leave at any time would remove any
hesitation at all.

------
kawsper
I am a paying Svbtle user. I like the interface, and I like that platform.

I sent Svbtle some comments about their platform last year. I wanted links on
the blogposts to use target="_blank", and a way to tweak which image gets
shown when you share a post on social media. There was also a few issues with
images you couldn't get back to thumbnail-mode after having click-zoomed in on
it. I didn't hear back, but a "No we don't want to do that" or "We read the
mail" would have been appreciated.

But I guess my priorities aren't aligned with Svbtle, which is sad. I care
less about how long my posts live in their infrastructure (and beyond), and
more about how my data is consumed and shared today.

~~~
baby
If you want to customize tiny details like that, you should have made a blog
yourself. It's really not that hard. For me the point of paying for a service
like Svbtle is not having to care about these details and only on the content.

------
pdog
This looks similar to Posthaven's pledge[1] to "last forever". There was a
similar discussion on establishing a non-profit trust or foundation[2] to
carry out this objective. What happened?

[1]: [https://posthaven.com/our_pledge](https://posthaven.com/our_pledge)

[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230137](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230137)

~~~
garry
I've literally written Posthaven into my estate plan to make sure there is
funding for it, if that helps. There's pretty considerable paperwork involved
in a nonprofit and it's been trickier than I had hoped to get it there.

~~~
pdog
Awesome!

------
sdegutis
You know, there are a lot of blogging and micro-blogging sites popping up in
the last 10 years (Wordpress, Blogger, Medium, Svbtle, Octopress, etc), but I
can't help but feel that nobody cares what most people have to say. Twitter
has devolved into this weird sort of micro-marketing medium, Medium and Svbtle
have devolved into Wordpress, Facebook has devolved into Yahoo's old front
page. Any given person's software blog is probably only used as knowledge-
portfolios on resumes, and are almost always abandoned for _anything else_
more worthy of that person's time. The whole social aspect of blogs and micro-
blogs seems completely useless compared to more transient services like
snapchat or whatever. I just keep wondering when all these tons of mass-
communication services are going to go the way of our old geocities pages.

~~~
duderific
I tend to agree, but with the following qualification: I don't really read any
particular person's blog regularly, but I do end up reading a range of blog
entries when they are linked from some sort of aggregator (HN, Twitter etc).

Additionally, as a software developer I often find myself on the blog entry of
another developer who has blogged a solution to just the exact problem I am
facing, which is extraordinarily helpful.

For those reasons I feel that these blogging sites should and will continue to
exist in some shape or form.

------
orf
There's a lot of hate in these comments, and I think a bit unnecessary.

The fineprint says of financial insolvency: "In the event that one of these
extreme cases comes to fruition, the founder of Svbtle currently intends to
take additional actions in order to continue honoring the above promises".
Surely the meat behind Svbtle is the user accounts, the kudos, the database.
That's expensive. If Svbtle were to shut down couldn't the owners just create
a snapshot as a bunch of static files, wack it on a $10p/m VPS behind nginx
and a free cloudflare plan? They could even release it for anyone to mirror.

The idea is noble and seems great. Stop jumping to conclusions, this guarantee
is still better than any other shaky blogging startup without one.

------
jakub_g
While I like both Svbtle and Medium, I'd still prefer to have the blog fully
controlled by myself. I'm thinking about git(github pages)+jekyll because I
don't want to pay for a server.

Having said that, Svbtle's kudos are a nice thing. Is there any simple,
trusted upvote-as-a-service thing out there so that I can embed it in my blog
and don't have to maintain a server+DB myself?

Everyone and their dog offers free advanced analytics, but I want a simple
upvote button API :) Edit: nope, FB is not what I want.

~~~
drinchev
Since you are using "git" & "Jekyll" I would say you are a technical person,
so you should just do it.

A couple of days scripting, designing and configuring I managed to have a
decent blog [1], without paying a dollar.

I'm using a combination of metalsmith, Amazon s3 & gulp.

1: [http://www.drinchev.com/blog](http://www.drinchev.com/blog)

~~~
Fogest
Is your sidebar suppose to have a vertical and horizontal scroll bar on it?

------
sp332
Man, this is such a breath of fresh air after seeing the startup scene in
general treating user data as trash when the service folds. That's not your
data; your users just let you hold it for them.

~~~
minimaxir
Note that not all user data (e.g settings, drafts, etc) is being saved; only
the published content.

~~~
dcurtis
Actually, we do save all user data right now and don't plan to change that--
but it's hard to promise to keep that stuff forever.

~~~
minimaxir
That's not immediately clear from the verbiage (both places about the promise
only mention "content you publish"), so that might be something worth adding.

~~~
dyladan
He actually addressed that. He said its hard to promise to keep that stuff
forever, implying that limiting the promise only to published content was an
intentional decision in order to make it feasible to make the promise at all.
Notice also that he did mention that they save that stuff right now, despite
not promising. Better to promise to save what you can than to not save
anything at all. I thought his response was quite adequate.

------
softinio
What I read into this is that a lot of people have moved from Svbtle to
medium.com so hence they are looking at giving reasons for people to stay.

Guess a complement to how successful medium.com is becoming.

------
InclinedPlane
Is it legally binding in some way? Is there a funded trust set aside with a
charter and instructions on how to handle caretaking services once svbtle
itself has shut down? No? Well then these are just words, which will be
meaningless when the shit hits the fan.

You can have all the best intentions in the world, when the walls close in and
you need to think about your mortgage, paying the light bill, and keeping food
in your stomach I can guarantee you that keeping someone else's blog running
will be so far down the list of priorities it'll get trampled underfoot.

This isn't rocket science, lots of human beings have figured out how to set up
organizations and funds to continue doing work after they are long dead.
Alfred Nobel died over a hundred years ago, for example. But it requires
setting aside money _now_ to make that guarantee, not just some nice sounding
words on the internet.

------
mintplant
You mention design customization in this post, and the Svbtle homepage claims
"the best reading experience".

Have you considered offering a toggleable dark mode to readers? The glaring
white background of every Svbtle post, combined with the large amounts of
blank space, agitates my eyes.

------
colemannerd
this skips the entire point - it says within their power. Servers cost money.
How is it going to be "within their power" if they have no money?

~~~
dcurtis
I'm working on a trust that will be created in the event of my death (or the
company's death) that can keep the servers running for a very long time to
come, even with no paying customers. Will make that public when it's finished.

~~~
benaiah
Perhaps it would have been better not to make the promise until you had the
backing for it. I think that's what's causing most of the negative reactions
here.

------
ceejayoz
Having just seen Mandrill's "free forever!" tier turn into a $240/year minimum
spend, color me a bit skeptical.

~~~
vinceguidry
Pardon my language, but fuck free. I don't want to rely on anything that's
free. It's a perversion of market principles. I don't take any startup
offering seriously that starts with free. Charge money and make the value
proposition clear. Yes that means you can't compete with Amazon or the big
boys on price. Differentiate with better service or find a better idea.

Free is for entertainment.

~~~
ceejayoz
Fuck free, but fuck forever too. _Neither_ one is realistic.

------
hooande
Why not just open source the code and make the data easy to import/export? My
thought is that Svbtle is two things: 1) a website 2) a company/brand. This
promise seems to be mostly about the website. As long as I can export the
data, keep the domain name and use the same code/design/theme options then it
doesn't matter to me if my Svtble branded blog is hosted on their website or
$2.99/mo shared hosting. It'll look the same to my readers and function the
same to me as a writer. I don't need a promise, just let me export/import
everything or at least pay someone to do that for me.

What I think is more interesting is the question of what will happen to the
brand and culture of Svbtle, and Posthaven as well. Would it even be the same
company if it was run by the executor of the founder's will? And if so, then
why not just hire an executor now? I've always been intrigued by the idea of
Autonomous Corporations, and it seems like something kind of similar would be
an interesting way to solve this problem. It really comes down to, can a brand
and style be maintained into perpetuity without daily human effort and upkeep,
or will it lose its haecceity over time? I guess we'll have to wait a long
time to find out.

------
Mizza
I know it's usually frowned up to reply with media references here, but this
is such a preposterous claim that I couldn't help but think of this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yaTCXcvTGY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yaTCXcvTGY)

------
toomuchtodo
Any plans on using IPFS and Archive.org to accomplish this?

~~~
dcurtis
No, we want to do it ourselves.

Only in the case of something horribly catastrophic would we resort to using
an external service like Archive.org--but unlike other startups, we would work
very closely with them to archive all data. And perhaps even give them the
domain name.

~~~
bsg75
Does a feature such as making account content a git clonable repo in the
background ? Then all changes and revisions are easily maintained where ever a
user wants.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Thats essentially what IPFS is (content addressable by its hash).

[http://ipfs.io/](http://ipfs.io/)

------
baby
That is a bold promise that they will have to break at some point. Everything
is ephemeral in this world, especially applications on internet.

There is one thing they could have done: commit an amount on money in an
official bank account, or with a contract, etc... that will serve as the back
up plan to keep the content online if only they were to shut down.

Keeping static text online is actually pretty cheap.

But then if you want your content down one day you would have to have some
sort of dynamic back end, maybe even a support if a bug comes around, etc...
Another problem.

------
zorpner
Anyone wondering how this is going to end up should read the story of
TextDrive's "lifetime hosting":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextDrive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextDrive)

------
mbrock
When I hear "forever," my ears perk up because... that's a long time.

Will my content be on Svbtle for, say, 200 years? I'm very curious about how
you can honestly promise that.

------
deegles
There's a lot of negativity and people poking holes in the promise in this
thread. I'm glad that Svbtle is taking steps and thinking about the (really)
long term. So kudos for that.

