
Show HN: I made wits.chat – A way to read everyday and share what you learned - zaheerbaloch
https://www.wits.chat
======
nstart
Congrats on getting something out there into the world. Quick thoughts:

A. I love the MVP. A telegram based cms almost. Really low effort. I'm not
entirely sure how one would browse lessons across the community since I can
only see your contributions so far.

B. Which brings me to the second observation. I noticed that you could post
any number of lessons on the same book for a single day. At this stage I
suppose it's ok. But in the future at least you'll need some form of collation
to keep that data under control.

C. This isn't an observation. Just a thought. I feel like you'd be able to
create this community better by onboardibg people individually rather than
through a blast adoption on sites like hacker news or product hunt. You run
the risk of people coming in to see what this is about, not seeing activity
and leaving. Ideally there should have been a community of 10-20 people you
personally onboard before you pushed this. But never too late :).

Just my 2 cents throughout. Good luck with the future of this.

~~~
zaheerbaloch
Thanks for amazing suggestions.

For A, there is currently contributions by me and I am trying to get more
people in. I just wanted to get some feedback and potentially get some users
in the community to get started.

For B, you make a very good point and I have been trying to see how one can
best solve this problem. I am thinking of combination of user's lessons
shared, likes etc that will give collated contributions. Plus, I am thinking
of involving AI later in the stage to vote down contributions that are repeats
and keep uniques on the top. But, currently I got no idea about how to do that
with AI.

For C, I felt it too. But I was trying hard to get some people to do just
that. I think I will try to onboard people more personally now.

Thanks and this has been very helpful.

Follow up question. Do you think its a good idea to gamify this such that you
read/share everyday to keep a streak and if you dont share for one day your
streak will go back to 0?

~~~
brudgers
To me, there's nothing wrong with adding some fictional accounts to illustrate
how you envision the site working and to create vibranancy in hope of
attracting more users. It is what Reddit did and if Reddit is a good thing
then that's what it took to make that good thing.

I'd put it this way, if faking users makes a better experience for actual
users and actual users are your priority then this is a case where the ends
ethically justify the means. It might even be the case at this stage that
prioritizing a singular representation of yourself on the platform is putting
your interests above those of the users. In any event, even if it doesn't
work, fictionalizing users moves you out of your comfort zone and that's a
good thing to inform your future decisions and projects.

Good luck.

