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Each week Adam & Ste focus on a specific feature, idea or prototype in Hardcover and iterate on it together or with guests.
Adam (00:01.066)
Hey, hey, stay, how's it going?
Ste (00:03.621)
Hi Adam, I'm good. Here for another hardcover life, how about you?
Adam (00:10.414)
Pretty good, had a pretty relaxing weekend. I've been like, not, trying not to work on hardcover on weekends and try to like make that a Monday to Friday thing. Instead of what I normally do, which is kind of like let a side project take up all available space in my life. So that like separation has been good, I think.
Ste (00:30.182)
Yeah.
Ste (00:33.473)
Yeah, I mean, I feel you. I've been trying to do the same. It's really easy, you know, when you're in the startup life to let everything related to that take over. And I've been trying to do the same. Plus I had my parents over last week. They came to visit the grandson and yeah, it's been good just sitting with them throughout the weekend.
Adam (01:01.474)
Sounds nice. Is this the first time they've met him?
Ste (01:02.906)
Yeah.
Ste (01:07.169)
Yeah, yeah, actually it was the first time. So we had a few activities around London, went to a nice restaurant. I let them walk him around. Yeah. It was really, really good.
Adam (01:08.458)
I'm sorry.
Adam (01:21.137)
Sounds like fun.
Ste (01:22.901)
Yeah, it was. It was also intense because, you know, having the grandparents over is always, let's say, defining moment, I guess. Lots of role shuffling and lots of, like, stuff you, that needs to, like, be, I guess, organically, like, established to fall into place. But luckily it was good and, yeah.
Adam (01:34.978)
Yeah.
Adam (01:49.667)
Yeah, I can imagine. I haven't been through that, like parent, kids and parents meeting experience. But yeah, that sounds like one of those events in life where roles are shifted and you figure out where things land.
Ste (02:09.941)
Yeah, exactly. And you gotta really watch out for some stuff and enjoy others. But it's been going well. The little one is also really interactive right now, so he's been screaming at... Well, less at them and more at me and his mom, which is weird. But I guess it's like a habit thing.
Adam (02:20.574)
Nice.
Ste (02:39.957)
Yeah, that's been interesting. Yeah. And I'm finally glad that, uh, it's actually like a bit, uh, chiller in London had like a full day of rain today. And, uh, I actually liked that.
Adam (02:57.534)
and I just cooled everything down a bit. We've been mostly staying inside this entire weekend. I think we like, I left the apartment like once to go for a walk. So it's been kind of nice, like just relaxing after what was a busy month last month. But yeah.
Ste (02:59.712)
Yeah.
Ste (03:10.499)
Nice.
Ste (03:19.677)
Oh yeah, really busy. Well, we deserve it. And, you know, having a hardcover, you know, take up the five days of the week is sounds like settling into it's being like an official thing. So that's also works. You know, it's been helpful for us to treat it like a job that we have to do. At least for me, it's been like really, you know.
Adam (03:42.322)
Yeah.
Ste (03:49.168)
good to have that structure.
Adam (03:53.594)
Yeah, it's, yeah, it has felt nice for me too, like, because having like nothing during the day kind of makes it a little, I don't know, I feel like I need to have some like anchor things going on during the day, otherwise I just kind of float around. So lately, I've been like exercising every morning and going for a walk every night. And then kind of the time between that is like, you know, lunch, hardcover and then whatever other
Ste (04:17.03)
Nice.
Adam (04:23.507)
errands I need to do for the day.
Ste (04:25.793)
Yeah, that's a really good schedule. Yeah, I also found that when you live a couple of days without doing nothing, actually better ideas start to pop up because we're hooked in this anyway. So taking a break from it actually lets it settle, I always find. With other projects as well, but with Hardcover primarily, that...
when you just think about other stuff and go for a walk. And it just, at some point, you start thinking about, oh, discussions. What if we did this with that stuff or other ideas about? So that's always helpful to have that break.
Adam (05:18.415)
Yeah, it's one of those things I always hear on podcasts and other things. It's like, take some time that's completely unplugged. I struggle to do that because I normally love listening to audiobooks when I'm out for a walk or exercising. It's rare when I just completely disconnect from any kind of media.
Ste (05:43.237)
Yeah, it's amazing what the brain does when it's not exposed to stimuli, I guess. And I think the usual grind, startups have always been associated with the kind of grind, especially for founders, just go all in, you have to spend all nighters, everything you have to think about every moment of the day. I think that's kind of going away. I've seen more and more.
Even the really grindset focused founders encourage breaks, like total breaks to avoid burnout and to actually get better ideas. I think it's actually good for pivoting as well because you can easily get so entrenched in a train of thought or an approach that you pursue for days or weeks that you kind of forget about.
bigger picture and yeah it's very useful to disconnect so yeah that's one good takeaway.
Adam (06:50.062)
Yeah.
Adam (06:54.418)
Yeah, I can't imagine working for a startup again that has like a very high like burnout culture, you know, like, just, you know, trying to leverage every second out of people like I yeah, the thought of going back to that, like I would I would just quit.
Ste (07:15.573)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, same. I mean, definitely.
Adam (07:21.994)
It's five o'clock, but we need you to work for another two hours to get this done today. I'd be like, well, I'm going to get it done tomorrow. If you don't like that, then just let me go.
Ste (07:30.733)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, 100% with you on that. I think it's not healthy. I mean, there's also like that part of entrepreneurship, like the guys who love the grant, whatever, they can love it as much as they want, but I'm really glad to be part of the other group of, or the other founders who don't like value this approach. And yeah, more reason for us to actually make it with.
with hardcover because I guess we'll be proving the point that, you know, this can be done. I mean, I'm sure it can be done. I mean, look at us, two years in working on this and I think we've already got one of the better platforms out there. If not, I mean, way better than others and going for the, yeah.
Adam (08:18.382)
Hehehe
thing.
Adam (08:26.686)
Well, on the hard cover side, what have you been up to this past week?
Ste (08:34.029)
Well, we had the product launch scheduled and as everybody knows, we postponed that for a couple of technical reasons and for, I mean, the main reason being that we need to, we think that we need to prepare more for it to like gain the best visibility for hardcover, which is our goal right here. And the best week has been me focusing on the homepage, which I think is pretty important.
Because for us, you know, working on the product, we know what the product is, we know what it does. But for someone who has never seen hardcover, like at any point in their lives, just jumping in, seeing a landing page, that's like all that makes them decide whether, you know, okay, this is the thing I want to spend my time on or not. And it boils down to, you know...
every last word on that landing page or every last bit of impression that you make to convince them. And yeah, it's so easy to miss that, I guess. I mean, I've been trying to think, you know, there are some landing pages where I go on and it can be just like a phrase that actually convinces me to not like...
sign up or it can just be like an extra section that's added there that just makes me like leave the landing page and I kind of got scared thinking that that's what happens to us because yeah we got a really good like conversion rate on the landing page which is I guess because we're one of the few platforms like out there that actually wants to like take on
the big G like wants to be a good reads replacement. And I guess that's why people are eager to try it out and sign up and see what it does. But I guess like can always improve. And I think I'm worried more about like.
Ste (10:52.793)
the traffic that or the people that we don't see, you know, the people that we don't know visit the landing page and drop off and the people who like don't someone who doesn't like sees the landing page and they're like, they're not going to tell us why we don't know who they are. We don't know where they came from. Maybe we know where they came from, but we don't know anything about, you know, what triggered that. So
Yeah, we can only, I guess, use our intuition to anticipate what they need and what we can tell them so that we trigger that decision. So yeah, that's been my last week. And luckily, we have some extra time to actually get that page, or at least some updates for it out there before the launch.
Adam (11:42.446)
Hehehe
Ste (11:53.093)
How about you?
Adam (11:56.21)
Yeah. Yeah, I worked on a couple small tweaks that you did to the home page, just kind of getting those in. I really like how we now have the graphic that shows what the Book button does. Because I feel like that one graphic explains a lot of features in one feature.
Ste (12:25.433)
Yeah.
Adam (12:26.302)
It's about saving your books, it's about tracking your reads, it's about privacy, it's about organization. It kind of like, yeah, I don't feel like any other site has something like that, where it's like one button that kind of controls it all. It's kind of like across the site in different ways. So having it all like right there, I think it makes it easy to describe. And I think that the graphic you made does a good job of it.
Ste (12:52.716)
Uh huh.
Yeah, well, it's like your brainchild, the whole book button, and I think it's like at the heart of hardcover, because it's the way, you know, people actually mainly track their reading and there's so much you can do in that little like window. That's, that's like so powerful. And yeah, I'm glad we can actually show that. And it's one of the things, of course, that we missed. I mean, someone
who might be seeing that right now on the homepage might be, oh, okay, now I understand what I can do with hardcover. So there's all this stuff that I can do. And yeah, it's such a risky game of what do we show, what do we not show, and what have we missed? I think right now we're actually looking at the homepage and thinking, okay, what did we actually miss? And that's one of the big things.
It's good that's, yeah.
Adam (13:56.256)
Yeah.
Ste (14:00.249)
It's good that this is there.
Adam (14:00.39)
And I know like, yeah, like last week when we were looking at some stats, one of the things we were looking at was like conversion rate of like, uh, people who visit for the first time, how many of them sign up. And the more I looked into that number, like, you know, cause like we were getting something like 20% of people that were new users were signing up. I'm like, is this right? Like, let's, let's verify this. And.
One of the things I started noticing is that, so we were using Google Analytics, like the new one that's kind of like, they kind of retired Google Analytics in July or June and wrote out a new one that's more privacy focused. But the new one, it uses a cookie to kind of track if someone's been to the site before. And the, like that part works. So it's able to tell like, okay, this person, they're visiting for the first time. This person, they're not.
But there's a lot of visits that aren't even being tracked by it because, um, like Safari for iOS automatically blocks, uh, Google analytics from its, as a tracker. So like, for instance, we don't, we don't even see, uh, people that are using, like Safari on iOS. And I think there's other, um, browsers, like maybe Safari on, on Mac.
maybe some other privacy focused browsers like Brave might also just be like preventing that access altogether. So this weekend, I decided to move us over to plausible for tracking analytics, which isn't blocked by those trackers. And it's kind of like this small startup run by two people who built it up to 11,000 paid subscribers.
Ste (15:36.965)
Yeah.
Adam (15:57.546)
I sent you an invite to join the team to be able to check it out, but it's pretty nice so far.
Ste (16:01.269)
Okay, nice, thank you.
Ste (16:05.529)
Yeah, I think I heard about it, but yeah.
Adam (16:10.131)
And it's tiny. It's under 1K for the library. And it doesn't use any cookies to track. So that's one thing that we lose by this, is that we don't have an indicator of who's coming for the first time versus who's a return visitor in our analytics. But I think that's something we weren't really using much in the first place. So I think that's an acceptable loss.
Ste (16:36.845)
Yeah, plus I guess, I mean, we have a separate feed page, which is hardcover.home. So people who usually go to hardcover land on that page instead of the home page. I know because I always have to delete that part of the URL to actually see the home page. But yeah, that's great. I mean, that sounds amazing. And yeah, us using that kind of solution, especially because it's built like.
Adam (16:47.758)
Hmm. Yeah, true.
Ste (17:06.077)
a team similar to ours, that's great. Yeah, I think I've heard them mentioned about in the privacy minded parts of either like startup Twitter or maybe even Reddit, no, I think I saw it on Twitter. Yeah, that's great. And now that we have like, well, 20% seem like a lot. I'm guessing now that's still like solid, but on the other hand,
we have more traffic that we didn't know about. So, that's also good.
Adam (17:39.89)
Yeah, and it also does a good job of just collecting refers. So on any given day, we'll be able to really quickly see if someone's linking to us. And then there's alerts. So you can set up email alerts if there's a sudden amount of, like if there are more than 10 people on the site at one time, it'll send me an email. So I can look in and say, oh, did someone new link to us? Now we can go and...
participate in the conversation a little easier.
Ste (18:13.001)
Okay, now this is a good time to actually do some pushes to get hardcover referred to, right? I mean, if, yeah. Yeah, and I think we should be doing that. I mean, part of our efforts to push hardcover should include that. I'm wondering, I've been trying to find places which talk about books, like Book Riot or...
Adam (18:23.179)
Yep.
Ste (18:42.561)
Even like parts of newspapers that have a book section like The Guardian or any other like major newspaper that has that book section. It would be great for someone to who does these profiles on people who are building really cool stuff like Goodreads alternatives.
to actually ask us a few questions, but I'm trying to find a way to approach them. And yeah, it's been, I mean, it's a really interesting mission, I guess. You have to, yeah, first find them and then, you know, find common ground, I guess. I think all of these things are based on, like,
Adam (19:32.894)
Yeah.
Ste (19:40.161)
effort and finding a connection, like a real connection with someone. And now with this update, I think we're at that point where a few pushes and being a little bit more aggressive in that direction will get to a point where it's like...
Spreads out because I guess that's the mission here. We have a lot of people on Discord and on Twitter and on socials in general who are telling us, oh, I hope the platform blows up so that, you know, it's actually like a real contender to good reasons. And we're like, yeah, we hope so too. Now we actually got to do like moves in that direction.
Adam (20:10.442)
Yeah.
Ste (20:31.669)
I think we're ready after two years and some. I think we're at that moment where it's finally like a place where it's like serious stuff. So yeah, that'd be a good thing if you're like a journalist or a blogger or if you're part of something and want to ask us questions. I guess we're more than happy to share our story. As a-
Adam (20:37.666)
Yeah.
Ste (21:01.689)
like startup that operates like this, which I think is interesting. There are a few startups that build like in public that do like this kind of stuff. You know, you're on a solo take, I move on. There's, yeah.
Ste (21:20.761)
I guess it's interesting. We can say some interesting bits as well, I guess.
Adam (21:23.282)
Yeah. I, yeah, I think, like you said, I think we've like built all the foundations, like we've created this, this fun party. Now we just need to get people to it.
Ste (21:40.741)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Start handing out flyers. Yeah. I was actually thinking of like printing, you know, we have those bookmarks that we did. I was thinking of making some new ones and maybe leaving them. I have some local libraries. I know it's like a grassroots effort, but I think we got to do everything. I think we got to do like the high exposure stuff.
Adam (21:42.623)
and
Hehehe
Adam (22:02.583)
Yeah.
Ste (22:10.073)
like TikTok and posting on socials, but also like the grassroots stuff. And also like talking to people, like authors, which we've been doing. We've been doing. I mean, so far we have thousands of users just based on like our efforts, slowly, slowly talking to people and getting them excited, which is great. I mean, a few thousand people, it's a lot.
Adam (22:40.414)
I was thinking about that for, so in November, I'm going to Dragonsteel convention, which I guess has been going on for a couple years and I've never been to. It's basically the Brendan Sanderson Universe convention. So it's like, it's a whole convention just about like his.
Ste (23:00.932)
Mmm. Right.
Adam (23:06.178)
books, his universe, the Cosmere and all that. And it happens to be like three blocks from my apartment. And at the same time, I've read every single Brendan Sanderson book, except the one I'm currently reading, which is the most recent one that came out. So it works out pretty well for going to this convention. And it's a two-day convention, like 8 AM to like 10 PM with like a book launch party at the end of the day.
Ste (23:13.185)
Oh wow, okay.
Adam (23:37.578)
people in cosplay and cosplay competitions. There's panels about writing, but there's also panels about the myth and lore of the books. So it should be fun. I'm looking forward to it. But I was thinking that would be a fun one to give away some bookmarks or something too.
Ste (23:54.393)
Wow, that's at it? Yeah.
Ste (23:59.693)
Yeah, we should definitely do something themed and like we should do something Brandon Sanderson themed and I mean you'll have to guide me on that On that side, but I'm sure we can do something that's like is really relatable to his fan base and his reader base So yeah, definitely Huh? That sounds that sounds great. I mean
And it's so amazing that it happens like three blocks from your house. I know you're a big Brandon Sanderson fan, so yeah. I'm really hoping he at some point notices hardcover and yeah, who knows. But yeah, having that convention there, I'm going to think of some stuff. I'll ask you because I'm sure we can make some great designs, bookmarks, and maybe we can think of some other stuff that we can do.
Something smart. Marketing ideas are, yeah. Well, we're thinking of something.
Adam (24:57.834)
Yeah, I was thinking about at least printing out like a t-shirt for myself, but.
Ste (25:07.593)
nice okay yeah definitely
Adam (25:09.058)
Just for fun. I know you have much more experience than I in that department. Do you have any recommendations on how to get a t-shirt with the hardcover logo created?
Ste (25:21.653)
Oh yeah, definitely. And we should make it with the hardcover logo, but it should also have a graphic that's like, if someone who's a Brandon Sanderson fan sees that t-shirt, they should be like, whoa, okay. So either something funny or something. Let's think about that. Yeah, a fun hardcover Brandon Sanderson themed t-shirts.
Adam (25:41.902)
Hmm.
Ste (25:50.821)
that would drop that convention definitely. And yeah, I can like help you with that. There must be like printing services. I can like give you the graphics. It's pretty easy nowadays to print a t-shirt luckily. So yeah, we'll have no problems with that. Yeah, this is fun. Yeah, we should do more fun stuff. I'm like a big fan of like printed and promotional stuff. And apart from like that batch of stuff.
that we did for hardcover, we didn't do anything. So yeah, maybe we should look into that, and I'm sure we can squeeze, especially now that we're a lot more defined in our mission, like squeeze something really interesting.
Adam (26:41.354)
Yeah, I mean, we could have like a hardcover store with like, you know, t-shirt, bookmarks, stickers, you know, a couple of things if we could find a good like print on demand service that would do fulfillment for us, because I, I know like doing all the fulfillment for something myself would be taxing based on just like the giveaways we've done.
Ste (26:51.088)
Yeah!
Ste (27:07.727)
Well, yeah, I know all about that and you don't want to be at that end where you're shipping stuff out. So yeah, I have like a lot of both good and bad experiences with that. But yeah, there's definitely like, especially in the US, you should have like no problem. I even know some and there are some like really good people who have built stuff in that area from like...
camping mugs to a lot of things. Yeah, we're going to surf for a moment. Yeah, a high cover story would actually be amazing. And it would be another way to support us while getting something tangible and limited edition, of course, in exchange. So yeah, maybe we should think about that. We have the about page. So that's a good place to talk about us, but also put a link to a score.
Adam (28:05.298)
Yeah. I know like I, I bought, uh, when, when get launched their store, I remember buying like a T-shirt, some stickers that I put on my laptop and just, uh, just like it's, it's when you have like, uh, a brand that you're kind of like enjoying, it's, it feels fun to just like, at least get a little merch.
Ste (28:17.521)
Nice.
Ste (28:27.757)
Yeah, exactly. Plus now we've slightly rebranded. And we have jewels. We have our own little universe of stuff that we have to harness somehow. And yeah, we should maybe even later on, invite artists who we like to do featured stuff for us and put them in the store. That would be really nice. I feel like these kinds of conventions are like that.
the best place for people to participate in that whole universe. And yeah, definitely we should think of some fun stuff. So yeah, grassroots definitely is a thing that we should do more of.
Ste (29:19.749)
So that's in November on which date.
Adam (29:26.375)
I think it's November.
Ste (29:26.569)
Do you know? Is it? We should have. Okay, we should have in these two months. Yeah, we should be good. Yeah, that's nice because that's like, we'll probably like get started on discussions as well by that time. And yeah, it's gonna be like a good spot for someone to come in and, because I know Brandon Sanderson's books are like.
Adam (29:30.47)
20th Yeah
Ste (29:55.637)
some of the books that people talk about a lot. And having discussions when that happens, I think, is going to be a big part of this. Maybe even author profiles. If you have a kick-ass author profiles, well, not Brandon Anderson, because he's huge. But maybe other authors who are at the convention would consider signing up.
Adam (30:07.79)
Thanks for watching!
Ste (30:26.401)
I discovered a thing on Twitter, which is like, hashtag Indie... Wait, I forgot what the hashtag was. So it's Indie authors promoting their books. And there's a ton of Indie authors out there just pushing their books. So it would be a really good opportunity to have those Indie authors make a hardcover profile and...
Adam (30:26.84)
Yeah.
Ste (30:54.789)
their books on Car Cover and have them easily discovered. Again, when I see like authors like using that hashtag to try to promote their book on Twitter and so much noise, but there's still like some sort of like overlap with their audience. That's like the amazing thing. A medium like so wrong for that, but which actually like.
Adam (31:13.726)
Mm.
Ste (31:23.509)
facilitates some connection. I'm wondering how that would play out in a medium like hardcover where we're actually built for that. That would be really interesting.
Adam (31:32.486)
Yeah. I think like the, the part that I still, which was one of like our very first ideas was like being able to advertise to someone based on the match percentage where it's like, you know, they've a new authors written a book. Maybe they've gotten like three or four early readers on it to read it and rate it. And now we have like those readers ratings and all the books that they've also read.
to determine what the match percentage is going to be for that book to every other reader. So like all we need is a couple of people to read a book and we're able to generate that match score. It's gonna get better and better the more people read it. But at that point, like where, you know, an author's added the book, maybe three people have read it. Like we could already like potentially like showcase that book to people.
in different ways, either like free or paid, but there's some options there for like, you know, here are the people who are most likely going to love this book. But it is also conditional on the reviewers giving honest reviews and not just like marking it five stars because they were, you know, an early reader or a paid reader. So that's kind of, I think we might have to do some tweaking on the algorithm for like,
Ste (32:49.445)
in.
Ste (32:54.638)
Yeah.
Adam (33:02.274)
provided the book for free. Maybe we discount, we don't take something into account for a match percentage. Like I feel like that's gonna play a role in match percentage in a dangerous way that we need to figure out. But that's a math problem to be solved down the line.
Ste (33:14.926)
Yeah.
Ste (33:18.797)
Yeah, but it sounds great. I mean, yeah, you're right that you know, that's like one of the major use cases is exactly that and I guess like the way we tell if a reviewer is Actually by leaving an honest review will be like the important thing in this whole play
And there's like a few things we can do around that. I'm thinking about, you know, whether they left like a lot of reviews for other books or like if they have some sort of general track records of books that they reviewed. I'm not sure how we'll achieve that. But I think that what we built within discussions.
with the number of books someone read in a certain genre and what they reviewed can act like a score that improves their prestige or their credibility on the network. But that's great. If we at some point achieve this for small authors...
Adam (34:40.127)
Hmm.
Ste (34:45.805)
and give them the potential to sell their books to thousands of people, which wouldn't actually view it otherwise. I think that's great.
Adam (35:00.118)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (35:00.205)
Yeah, there are so many books out there and so much potential and so many authors. Yeah. At the same time, it's so easy to be an... Yeah.
Adam (35:08.493)
It's...
Yeah, yeah. How how?
Ste (35:16.975)
Now you go ahead.
Adam (35:17.118)
Yeah, how you break into the publishing world as a indie author sounds extremely intimidating. Like, that's something I want to talk to more like indie authors that have both succeeded and ones that have not. Because I want to know what the indie authors that have succeeded are doing differently. And that's something I'm still not really sure of, other than that they got good at marketing.
Ste (35:46.061)
Yeah. I guess that's it. Yeah. Unfortunately, I guess like socials, like they can help, but I'm wondering what the percentage of authors who actually like succeeded by becoming viral on Tik TOF or by becoming viral on Twitter or Instagram actually is because I think it's pretty low and it's giving people like.
Adam (36:02.872)
Yeah.
Ste (36:15.085)
if you have like a 1% chance of succeeding through those algorithms, that's like very, very slim. And unfortunately, you have to play those algorithms or to go to a major publisher and they know how they have the distribution channels. But yeah, it's so easy nowadays to become an author, but at the same time, it's so hard because you have the book.
Ste (36:47.049)
Big publishing houses still have that weight, because they still hold much of the distribution. But I guess, yeah.
Adam (36:58.902)
Yeah. Yeah, it's-
Yeah, it's, it's one of the same things in the like paid education space. It's that like, there's this small percentage in like the top 1% are like making enough to survive and like making, making a living in it. And then the other 99% are making not enough to survive. And it feels like in, in the authorship for authors, it's like that, but maybe even more than 99% because they're.
Ste (37:17.198)
Yeah.
Ste (37:22.883)
Yeah.
Ste (37:31.632)
Yeah.
Adam (37:34.585)
I don't know what the numbers are, but if it's not at least 99%, then I'd be amazed.
Ste (37:39.837)
Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah, I have a feeling it's less than like that, that 1% even.
Adam (37:48.752)
Yeah. For a, oh, go ahead.
Ste (37:50.865)
And yeah.
No, I was going to say that for a small author, it's a shot in the dark. If you want to promote your book by yourself, which I see a lot of authors on Twitter doing, or on TikTok, or everywhere actually on any social platform, you can't relate to the readers. You have like a hundred million people, but you don't know.
which one of those are even readers, not to mention whether they like a certain genre or they like a certain thing you're doing. And it's funny because the way, for instance, with the hashtag for indie authors that I saw on Twitter.
People, authors describe their book in so much detail. So it's not just like a fantasy book. It's a really specific like niche of fantasy that has like really specific things for really specific readers. And it's fun because they actually like put the book and then they put an image of maybe a drawing of some characters in the book or just the book itself with some arrows like saying.
what kind of strokes it has and what kind of people would actually like it. And I was amazed because I mean, half of the, for some certain genres, half of the words in there, I didn't even, I had to look up because it's like so niche and there's like a readership for that, but like throwing it out there. Doesn't work. Or maybe it works. I mean.
Ste (39:42.333)
Sometimes it's worse, but it can work way, way better if you're on hardcover. Hopefully.
Adam (39:48.502)
Yeah.
Adam (39:53.199)
for today, I was thinking about like a quick exercise around discussions if you're down for it with a mind map.
Ste (39:59.174)
Yes.
Yes, let's do that.
Adam (40:03.054)
And cool. Let me share my screen here. And.
Ste (40:06.545)
Yes.
Adam (40:14.654)
Okay, so we've been going like very deep on specific pages. I was thinking it would be interesting to go like really wide and see like all the different pages that we would potentially have impacted with discussions. And we don't have to think about it as like V1 or MVP. This is like, you know, pie in the sky, you know, discussions are done.
at our final release of it, V5, whatever it is, what that looks like. And so for instance, we're talking about a book discussion page.
Ste (40:47.245)
Oh yeah. Nice.
Ste (40:58.545)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (41:00.219)
And that might be like.
Adam (41:06.687)
and
Ste (41:07.099)
Yes.
Adam (41:10.674)
And then like I was thinking about like states for each page. So we have like filter by and then.
Or maybe like a new discussion page.
Adam (41:29.004)
Um, then we might have like a.
Discussion, quote, link, picture.
Were there other types of discussions that we were talking about?
Ste (41:48.749)
Let me check. So wait just a second. I'm looking at the Figma. So we have link, a poll. We have polls. Yeah, so it's a general discussion. Link, quote, poll, and picture. So I guess those would cover most of it.
Adam (41:49.559)
Um...
Adam (42:01.218)
reports.
Adam (42:20.174)
Cool.
Ste (42:21.841)
Can you mention tags? Like moods.
Adam (42:24.902)
Oh yeah, so we have like tags, which could be like,
Adam (42:38.086)
It doesn't like it when I use a hashtag in front of something.
Ste (42:42.525)
Here we go.
Adam (42:46.262)
And this could be a mood, it could be.
Ste (42:49.009)
content warnings or...
Adam (42:58.346)
It could be a character, it could be a location.
Adam (43:07.81)
could be a like event in the book.
Ste (43:10.765)
Yeah, maybe even a trope, but that would go under anything. Yeah, yeah, those are basically like anything, but yeah, they could be tied.
Adam (43:13.238)
Yeah.
Ste (43:25.633)
I guess.
for the new discussions page, there will also be like where you are in the book.
Adam (43:34.894)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (43:35.008)
So...
progress.
Adam (43:38.378)
So it's like progress.
Ste (43:42.737)
progress which can be like page, minutes.
Ste (43:50.862)
for audiobooks.
Yeah. Chapter? Yeah.
Adam (43:54.864)
Maybe chapter.
Adam (43:59.246)
And yeah, we would default it to where you are based on your progress, but you could also override it.
Ste (44:06.317)
Yeah. And for filtering, I guess there would be like the quick filters that we have, like, hot, which would be like the most discussed. What else do we have here? Let's see. So, we had hot, trending, new, and...
Ste (44:38.137)
Post from friends. So if you want to just see discussions from people in your network.
Maybe that's it. Also by MapScore, maybe.
Adam (44:49.234)
Yeah, and probably like.
Ste (44:54.509)
By tag, yeah, definitely.
Adam (44:54.53)
Probably tag.
and
Ste (44:59.057)
sorting by match score, would it be a thing? So it sorts like the readers who are most matched with you from like the whole like match score. Yeah, exactly.
Adam (45:07.13)
Mmm.
by reader. I'm not sure.
Ste (45:15.697)
by, so this would be like a binary filter between just these books, discussions that mention this book or this book and other books. So it would be like, yeah, just this book. Yeah. This book, this book plus other books. And maybe...
Adam (45:32.829)
So I see like...
Ste (45:45.942)
Um, what's it destroyed by?
Adam (46:04.607)
Yeah, we do need like a...
Adam (46:12.522)
Yeah, sort by is gonna be similar. I guess this one's more down here. Same for filter, this one's more of a new.
Ste (46:19.116)
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Adam (46:24.366)
and sort by, I guess, reader match score could be both.
Ste (46:25.861)
by a reader mask.
Adam (46:30.654)
I guess we wouldn't really need a filter by that.
Ste (46:31.054)
Yeah.
Yeah, true. Yeah.
Adam (46:35.97)
But sort by.
Ste (46:38.513)
Progress mentions, yeah. And replies would actually be popularity. So yeah, we got that covered. Let's see. So for most liked posts, that would be, I guess, popularity, right? And for the most commented. Okay, so we can separate it maybe.
Adam (47:04.231)
Yeah.
Yeah, we'll at least list it here and then we can like, yeah.
Ste (47:09.773)
most discussed on. Yeah. I guess, I mean, yeah. Maybe most liked isn't a good metric, but let's leave it there. Maybe we can decide because I guess if a post is commented, it will be liked as well.
Adam (47:33.931)
Yeah.
Adam (47:37.57)
Um, cool. So this seems like a good start for kind of the prototypes we've been doing so far. Um,
Ste (47:48.517)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think we covered like a lot of like this Then there would be that yeah
Adam (47:53.938)
Oh, we probably need a filter by, by type.
Ste (47:59.733)
Oh yeah, good spot. Yeah, exactly.
Adam (48:00.334)
So like, you know.
Adam (48:04.218)
link discussion, quote, pull, photo.
Ste (48:09.729)
Yeah, exactly. So if you want to just see like links, you can tap on links. Yeah. That's a very good one because some people might want to see just like the discussions. Some people might want to see like the pictures. Ah, why not? Uh, yeah.
Adam (48:27.863)
Yeah.
Ste (48:31.701)
Okay, this is good. Now the question is, how will discussions appear on other pages? Because we know, so this is on the book page. So we have the discussions related to that book. But do you think we're, we've covered like, actually let's spend a bit more time over here. What do you think would go in there? So we have the new discussion page. So they would.
post a new discussion and maybe there should be like an individual discussion page, but maybe that would be like.
Adam (49:04.123)
Yeah, we probably.
Ste (49:16.857)
That's the individual discussion page, right?
Adam (49:17.511)
Yeah, it's like a
Yeah. And this is like the subject kind of.
Adam (49:28.766)
Yeah, so we have like a.
Adam (49:35.272)
And this page we have like.
Adam (49:40.446)
I guess, at a high level, where we're showing the...
Ste (49:42.637)
Yeah, originating posts. So root post, yeah. If that post was a comment, there should also maybe be a link to the, so we have the root post. But if it's a comment to another post, would we allow that? Or should we do it more like Reddit does, where
there's just like that original post and you can see all the comments, not like Twitter does when you can like actually each tweet is a thread. I shouldn't call them tweets anymore.
Adam (50:22.782)
Yeah, I lean more towards like the Reddit style where it's like, like if we, um, like if someone does have a comment in that comment mentions another book or another thing that's not the, the root subject, then we could, we could show that comment on like the mentions page of the other book.
Ste (50:26.213)
Yeah.
Ste (50:45.957)
Hmm. Yeah. Okay. And that's where it would have like the link to the original, like, post, like, reply to, yada yada. And if they tap on reply to, they would actually go to the root discussion where the main discussion happened. But that would be a mention that appears on the book page of the book that was mentioned.
Adam (50:47.702)
or something like that.
Adam (50:56.095)
Yeah.
Adam (51:16.978)
Yeah, maybe as like, we'd have to differentiate, like this is a comment, not a top level thing. It's kind of like on, on a, on Reddit, when you go to someone's profile and you look at their post history, it differentiates like top level posts differently from comments. We could probably do something like that.
Ste (51:23.418)
Mm, yeah.
Ste (51:30.202)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (51:35.757)
Yeah, oh yeah, definitely. Yeah, that's a good approach. So we have the originating posts, we have the replies. Nasty comments.
Adam (51:49.642)
Yeah, whether we call them replies, comments.
Ste (51:53.613)
Yeah, maybe we apply since I guess that's more direct comment is I guess more. Yeah. Uh, how would you call it?
Adam (51:59.671)
Yeah.
Ste (52:08.752)
in direct.
Adam (52:10.95)
Yeah. And then, and each of these nested replies, I don't see them as being like, you know, you can select any of these as a reply. I don't see that as the way replies would work. I see replies as like a different type. That's like reply. And when with the reply, it's kind of like a discussion.
Ste (52:29.297)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ste (52:35.277)
Yeah, exactly. Those would be discussions. So I guess, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that would be a good way of describing it. So it's a discussion, but without a title. So you're just replying. Actually, even the discussion, the post itself. So the post itself is like a simple comment. It becomes a discussion when it has a title. So.
Adam (52:52.298)
Yeah, and...
Ste (53:05.529)
I guess that's like.
Ste (53:11.821)
right, one way to view it. So like the core, like the most simple thing that's in our architecture is like the posts, which is the description. It has to have like some sort of text attached to it, or maybe some media or something. But then because it has like a title, it becomes like a discussion or originating post.
Adam (53:15.456)
Yeah.
Adam (53:31.348)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (53:40.709)
because it has like a picture, it's like a picture post. Next reply would basically be like a post, but yeah, without the.
the title.
Adam (53:54.022)
And we'll probably need like a unique identifier for every one of them. So you can link to any individual post.
Ste (53:59.425)
Yeah, it's an idea for it, yeah.
Ste (54:06.814)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Adam (54:09.812)
and
Ste (54:14.169)
Where should we cover reporting? So the reporting dialogue.
Adam (54:14.862)
Cool.
Ste (54:21.485)
should that be, that should be independent, right? So I'm guessing the reporting should be for every bookslug discussion slash subject slash ID.
Right?
Adam (54:34.346)
Oh, yeah, so you can report either the post or the comment.
Ste (54:42.561)
Yeah, maybe anything. I mean, yeah, you could report, it has to report anything. Yeah, so reporting would just take that idea. And for reporting, wait, I have a, I actually have a few designs. Let me see what categories I had in there. So for reporting, I was thinking, if I can actually find it.
Adam (54:59.926)
Yeah.
Ste (55:11.373)
So definitely spam, I think, is a clear category. So
Ste (55:20.909)
Yeah, so I had this spam-obusive language.
reader might be a bot, but I guess this is spam. But would it help to like mark bots like separate from spam?
Adam (55:42.764)
Maybe we can at least like mark that here.
Ste (55:46.313)
Oh yeah, yeah. Spam, it can be spam or can, I mean, spam can be bots or it can be like some kind of promotion, which is unrelated to anything. So, uh, how should we call that? Unrelated. Yeah.
Adam (55:59.328)
Yeah.
Adam (56:03.958)
Cause cause we're, I think we can allow like self-promotion. Like that's one of those things that like every, every platform does a little bit differently, like to me, if it's self-promotion, but it's like. Relevant to the topic, like to the book that you're talking about, then that's fine.
Ste (56:21.869)
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I'm also a fan of that. And yeah, this is just, I guess, for people who want to advertise like, I'm selling whatever, t-shirts. I'm related, and they post this on every discussion. So for people to like, yeah, actually flag that, I guess we'll have like a lot of cases like that when we open up discussions.
So it can be abusive language. It can be, so yeah, it's spam, it's off topic. What else can it be? I guess there should be like something else thing in there. Like it can be.
Adam (57:01.77)
Yeah, I'm thinking of like abusive language is doing a lot of work here. But I guess that's kind of like anything from it's kind of like what we're saying is code of conduct violations.
Ste (57:07.92)
Yeah.
Ste (57:16.141)
Yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Adam (57:27.726)
Yeah, I think we'll probably figure out some more of these as well. But yeah, I like the idea that you're able to very quickly just say like, okay, this is flagged and this is the reason.
Ste (57:34.358)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (57:40.097)
Yeah, yeah. And for this, maybe we should also think of some kind of resolutions to these reports, but I'm not sure where we should put them. So ideally, I'm thinking, how would reporting work? I'm guessing first it would be like an admin thing that we'd have to take care of. But yeah.
Adam (58:09.706)
Right? It's like.
Ste (58:10.818)
Yeah.
Adam (58:14.602)
It's kind of like a moderation dashboard. And this is at like the admin level, but we probably need like a moderation dashboard. How about like a, yeah, so it's like. So it's like,
Ste (58:20.448)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (58:28.773)
for moderators on the front end, right?
Adam (58:34.342)
Yeah, so we probably need something that's like.
Adam (58:40.31)
Let's just call this moderation. And then we have like moderators.
Ste (58:49.593)
Yeah, and for instance, for books, it can, like the author should be like a moderator on their books. They should be able to like delete anything or like flag anything that's like not.
Adam (58:49.598)
And then we have like.
Adam (59:01.592)
Yeah.
Ste (59:04.429)
Yeah, this is where I mean, I think maybe if we use that middle...
Ste (59:17.509)
let's say middleware of like having open AI categorize some of those reports. I think it could be helpful. I'm not sure how that would work, but I'm wondering if we can actually like prompt it to, so we have like a comment. It's been reporting by someone reported by someone. And we have a prompt which includes like our reporting reasons. And.
the reported comment and we get like a resolution that can be approved or disproved. So it kind of like offers us that decision and we just have to approve it or disprove it.
Adam (01:00:05.118)
Yeah, I think that makes sense. And there's probably.
Like one of the things that we can use is like a Kismet, which is the thing used on WordPress blogs, which she had, so, you know, we basically just send it the same information. You would send a comment on WordPress and it determines if it's a spam or not.
Ste (01:00:18.947)
Oh yeah.
Ste (01:00:28.103)
Nice. Yeah.
Adam (01:00:30.422)
And another way I've been reading about, which is what Pixel Fed is using, which is like a Mastodon Instagram. And like they do this thing where they do, where they basically like, every time someone marks something as spam, it feeds that as input into their.
Ste (01:00:44.404)
Okay.
Adam (01:00:58.166)
their algorithm and then they're using like a, it was like a very popular algorithm. I figured what it was maybe like a Bayes system or something like that. And it's, it's able to determine for future things, like did they match something that was previously marked as spam? If so, then it says it's probably going to be spam as well.
Ste (01:01:19.375)
Okay, kind of like a captcha or something like that
Adam (01:01:24.83)
It's kind of like...
Ste (01:01:26.749)
Okay, so it's a Bayesian system, yeah.
Adam (01:01:30.498)
Yeah.
Ste (01:01:31.213)
Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.
Adam (01:01:33.251)
So it's probably doing something similar.
Ste (01:01:36.005)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, because I think we need that from some point and it's better to plan for it. Not like, yeah. V1 is probably gonna be very easy for us, but V5 is gonna be like, okay, let's deal with the massive influx of realistic bots, which are AI powered and can bypass most spam filters. So.
Adam (01:02:11.206)
Yeah. And then we need to figure out what happens to a user when something's marked as bad. Like.
Ste (01:02:11.685)
Yeah.
Ste (01:02:15.169)
Yes. Yeah. So we should have like some levels like a warning, temporary ban, extended ban or permanent.
Maybe.
Adam (01:02:33.911)
Yeah.
Ste (01:02:37.425)
Temporary permanent, yeah.
Adam (01:02:41.846)
And it'll also just depend on what happened. Like it could go straight to permanent ban. It all, it all depends on what's, what's going on.
Ste (01:02:49.433)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we could give us a severity score maybe to the whole thing or yeah, I was thinking actually like prompted to GPT and this was one of the things I asked about if we could have a prompt that gives us a severity score based on the comment and I actually tried it with some comments and I think it could be, yeah, pretty accurate for most of the stuff. I think...
OpenAI already does a lot of moderation because if you ask it for a lot of things, it knows how to interpret that result. That's why I was thinking in these cases, it could do a lot of interpreting for us based on the prompt. Of course, we'd have to see how much it would actually cost to prompt it for every, but it could work. This could actually be a good startup, like OpenAI powered.
Adam (01:03:44.535)
Yeah.
Ste (01:03:47.249)
content moderation.
Adam (01:03:50.88)
Let me just accidentally create that as a subsystem.
Ste (01:03:55.118)
Yeah, exactly. And then outsource it. Well, if we do that. Yeah.
Adam (01:04:03.794)
I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already like starting it up. And if there is, then we might be able to use an existing new startup. That's already a wrapper around it. But.
Ste (01:04:04.357)
Yeah.
Ste (01:04:12.513)
Yeah, I'll actually look it up. It shouldn't be like that hard. It's just like a special prompt where you have that data fed and yeah.
Adam (01:04:25.39)
They're like a.
No, I thought I could do like a note. OK. To comment. This is nice.
Ste (01:04:34.098)
I think we'll remember it. Yeah.
Ste (01:04:40.493)
Yeah, because it might get, at some point it might get really, really tough and the whole moderation, but yeah, at least we plan for it.
Adam (01:04:49.678)
Yeah. So yeah. So we have like a dashboard for moderators, authors, and admins with the idea that moderators, we need some form of...
Adam (01:05:08.694)
We need some form for admins to grant moderation.
Ste (01:05:16.206)
Yeah.
Adam (01:05:16.266)
I'm assuming they'll probably do it, but authors will probably also want to grant moderation.
Ste (01:05:23.975)
Yeah, exactly.
Adam (01:05:28.104)
or I guess it's more like manage moderators.
Ste (01:05:32.969)
Oh yeah, this could be like a thing on the settings page where, yeah.
Adam (01:05:43.334)
Yeah. And I was thinking that for moderators, we'll probably need some ways to like auto, um, add moderators and maybe like apply.
I'm thinking like there's like how moderate moderators become the moderators of different books or series. Like, I was thinking one way that we could do that is kind of the same way four square does like mayor ships where it's like, you're, you're constantly there, so you're the mayor of it. It's kind of like, you're constantly there for that book. So you might like become the moderator, but then there would obviously be. Like, um,
Ste (01:05:59.575)
Yeah.
Ste (01:06:05.022)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ste (01:06:12.837)
Hmm
Ste (01:06:24.933)
Yeah, that sounds great, yeah.
Adam (01:06:29.526)
like balances to prevent someone from just taking over an area.
Ste (01:06:34.953)
Yeah, I'm guessing we could make it community led. So if your comments on the book, kind of like a karma on Reddit. So if your discussions have a combined like and score comments of above a certain threshold, you could be a moderator. And maybe we could couple it with a few other things. So if you have like.
lots of reviews or lots of book reads, lots of actually reviews, yeah, because you can mark like a lot of books read that you haven't actually read. So yeah, if you have a lot of reviews in the genre of that book or if your reviews have a lot of likes, yeah, just a general like score, I guess.
Adam (01:07:21.196)
Yeah.
Adam (01:07:29.088)
Yeah.
Adam (01:07:34.478)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (01:07:40.126)
So as like a quick...
Adam (01:07:46.158)
thing. Can I move this over here? Let's see.
Ste (01:07:52.565)
Yeah, then there should be like, I mean, what I'm seeing apart from this, so the discussions should be on the book page, but you as a reader should have like a track of your own discussion. So that could be like a discussions tab. Yeah. Or you can go to some readers profile and view like their discussion. So it can be like both a thing that.
Adam (01:07:52.918)
Okay.
Ste (01:08:22.289)
that's, yeah, I guess, like if you go on your profile or if you go on somebody else's profile, yeah, exactly. You can see their discussions. And that's one place where they should be. Maybe for the author pages, we could have the discussions about the books that author has. So that's like.
maybe all the combined discussions from all the books maybe and yeah we'll just list them there.
Adam (01:08:59.118)
Hmm. Yeah, that's an interesting one. Because we want to show, like, it's kind of the same as, it's kind of the same as this mentions one, where it's like the mentions of that book. It's like all of the mentions are almost like author mentions by like one degree away.
Ste (01:09:04.708)
Yeah.
Ste (01:09:08.461)
We could do something different. Yeah.
Ste (01:09:13.662)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (01:09:26.989)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Adam (01:09:29.878)
Um, so it's maybe, maybe we just have like one that that's about the, like, um, it's like a board for the author. And then there's like another one that's for like, um, all of their books. And it's kind of an aggregate or did these two, or are these two just one?
Ste (01:09:51.289)
Yeah, exactly.
Ste (01:09:56.333)
Yeah, that's an interesting question. So there can be like an extra layer of filtering. You can see all the discussions from all the books or you could just see the books and have some numbers. So this author has this book and this book has 200 discussions or 200 posts on it. And you can go to that book and see the discussion and you can see all of the books in the list.
So that filter would actually be probably like an image of the book and some sort of badge that mentions how many discussions they each book has. But I guess I'm leaning towards more of having like a continuous feed and then you can maybe filter by book. Yeah.
Ste (01:10:51.321)
So you have the latest discussions from all the books. Yeah.
Adam (01:10:51.334)
Yeah, yeah, because if you're filtering, yeah, because if you're filtering by book, then you're pretty much just going to this book discussion page.
Ste (01:11:02.478)
Oh yeah, exactly.
Adam (01:11:05.514)
So it makes me think like one of the things that jumped out as you were describing that was like, this discussions page was basically this, but for the author. But then there was like another page that showed like, here are all the books for this author that have current discussions.
But then it's like, if you don't see your book there, then it might be a little disorienting.
Ste (01:11:32.122)
Yeah, exactly.
Ste (01:11:39.192)
Yeah, true.
Adam (01:11:42.006)
We can figure this out later, but I think that's.
Ste (01:11:46.137)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's a tough one. Yeah, that's a pretty meta one, two.
Adam (01:11:57.17)
Yeah, and but we need the same for series.
Ste (01:11:57.425)
to handle, but yeah, I mean, when you go to an author, yeah, exactly, oh yeah, we need the same for series. So for a series, I guess, yeah, you could either go to each book in that series and view their separate discussions, or you could view all the discussions from all the series, in which case you wouldn't like have.
filters, like the progress filters and that kind of stuff. You would just like see the posts one after the other, but you maybe would want to see like what books they mention. I mean, you will see what book they mention because it has like that book attached as a subject. But yeah, that's interesting. Maybe there's like a special view where we show like the...
Adam (01:12:47.104)
Yeah.
Ste (01:12:53.989)
book or some kind of mention that this post was posted under this book. Because I'm guessing that's what we'll have to do in the feed as well. So apart from these, there's the feed. So whatever happens on in your network, it will be a feed item. So right now, when you change your state, the summer book or when you add a book to a list.
Adam (01:13:08.75)
Hmm.
Ste (01:13:23.205)
the peers in the feed, but whenever you comment or post a discussion in any book and it gets posted to the feed, everyone, if you post it for everyone to see it, yeah, and replies, it instantly like gets added to your feed. And I'm guessing that's similar because on the book page, you know what book you're on. So you don't need to see like your see now in the feed.
uh, someone wants to read, uh, this certain book and you see the book for discussions, it could be the, I mean, it should be the same. So you have that post, but you also have to see what book it's, uh, it's on. That's my next like task for design figuring out, maybe we can do this together and like see a few options of how that's, uh,
Adam (01:14:14.894)
Hmm.
Ste (01:14:20.845)
can appear in the feed. I mean, I think I know how to do it, but yeah, we'll have to go through a couple of options because it's...
Ste (01:14:34.913)
I've seen it done. I mean, other networks like HeyBo just listed as a.
Adam (01:14:36.322)
Yeah.
Ste (01:14:42.841)
part of the status. So a certain reader posted this and it's about this book. But they only show the title of the book. Maybe we can show more details. I wanted to see if we can even show the cover. So you see the cover, the title, the author, so you know which book it is, and you can go to that book page from the feed and you see the discussion.
Post, post and some of the replies maybe. And if you want, you can like tap on that, like you do on Reddit and you can see the full thing. Or maybe you can't even see any reply, you just see the discussion and you can see that it has like 200 replies. We can decide there. I'd like explore and design how we can surface like most popular replies. So if...
Adam (01:15:32.098)
Hmm, right. Yeah.
Ste (01:15:40.501)
discussion post has 200 replies and two of those replies have 100 likes each. Maybe we show those. So top likes replies or top replies in terms of likes and comments.
Adam (01:16:02.24)
Yeah.
I think this captures everything you were talking about. Does that look right? Okay, cool.
Ste (01:16:07.745)
Yeah. That's more than perfect. Okay. That's yeah.
Adam (01:16:14.406)
And this is making me think that one of the other things that, so like one other, like we've talked a lot about like discussions that are centered around like a series, an author, maybe we have, we were also talking about like character discussions, which are kind of like, they're kind of be the same as these other ones where it's like a
Ste (01:16:34.635)
Yes.
Ste (01:16:39.149)
Yeah.
Adam (01:16:45.386)
something like that. And maybe we can filter by.
Adam (01:16:56.11)
Discussions for this character.
Ste (01:17:01.401)
Yeah, I'm wondering if we can treat the characters as tags. So for any tag or for any... So that we do a universal thing that works for moods, for content warnings, for characters, where, you know, like on Twitter, if you click a hashtag, you see all the posts from that hashtag.
Adam (01:17:11.285)
Hmm.
Ste (01:17:29.597)
So basically it searches, I'm wondering if you can actually like use Algolya to like do this. So it's a search for all the mentions of that character. And yeah, I don't know if it actually like generates like a separate page for it or it's actually like just a query and you see it in the URL.
But maybe, I mean, the decision is if we do something special for characters, which might be interesting, or if it's part of the universal way we treat, like if you click on a mood, you see all the posts that mention that mode. If you click on a character, you see all the posts that mention that character. But maybe it's not like their page. It's just like a.
Adam (01:18:16.437)
Mm.
I.
Ste (01:18:23.702)
URL...
Ste (01:18:27.153)
thing where, yeah, you actually search for, yeah.
Adam (01:18:29.586)
Yeah, I've been trying to think about that. And one thing that gets tricky with characters is you have the same character name across different books and different universes. But if you go to a character's page, you just want to see the references of this character in a specific universe, which makes our tagging set up a little tricky for it because you would see the same. You would see Harry Potter as
Ste (01:18:49.646)
Okay.
Adam (01:18:56.002)
by J.K. Rowling, but also in like fan fiction and by other authors that mention them in their books. So you might see a whole bunch of non-fiction books that mention Harry Potter.
Ste (01:19:01.231)
Okay.
Ste (01:19:06.105)
Oh, okay, yeah, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I mean, I have no problem treating my characters as a separate thing. Are there any other things which are like this?
Adam (01:19:23.526)
Um, some of the other data that we can get from open library includes like the, the time that the book takes place, like the time period, um, the location. And locations are a bit tricky because you can have imaginary locations that are reused. Like wonderland might exist in different universes. Um, but I think characters is a, probably the best one to start with because
Ste (01:19:38.457)
Yeah.
Ste (01:19:42.075)
Yeah.
Ste (01:19:53.593)
Yeah.
Adam (01:19:54.638)
If we create a character model in our database and associate that with specific books, and say, like, this character exists in these books, and then we have a different character where they exist in those books, but maybe that connection between them, it's not like an existent. It's a references connection. So we can define the type of connection between the character and the book with additional data. Kind of the same way we define the connection between an author and a book.
Ste (01:20:02.981)
Yeah.
Ste (01:20:15.876)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (01:20:19.556)
Nice.
Adam (01:20:23.422)
as like they're an editor, they're a illustrator, they're a translator. So we can use that for our character to book connections.
Ste (01:20:23.725)
Yes, exactly. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Nice, yeah, I love that. I mean, I would love to like see people, because if we do this, it would be basically like more specific to that character. So you'd be able to find like people cosplaying as the character or people writing fanfic about that character or like various, see how that character appears in the books, but also see...
community-made materials about that character, I'm thinking.
Adam (01:21:05.77)
Yeah.
Adam (01:21:10.283)
Yeah, it's like.
Ste (01:21:10.661)
Yeah, I think it kind of makes sense. And having a character page means we also get to do some cool stuff with it, maybe make a custom cover image or give it a profile pic like authors and do that kind of stuff. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it would be, like, really interesting, yeah, to exactly define that model and apply it throughout.
Adam (01:21:28.959)
That would be really neat.
Ste (01:21:40.309)
So actually have the same layout for a character as we do for an author, even on the front end. So you'd see like this character and it would appear exactly like an author that would be like really, really interesting. And it will help us like normalize the layouts. It would be like amazing to find something that works for everything basically, like just one universal layout, like a profile picker cover image.
a description and then, you know, stuff specific to, that's what I've been like trying to do with the author page, trying to find like that kind of stuff, which is common with the regular readers profile so that maybe we can like do similar layouts so that the author is just like a type of reader or user on hardcover, but who has books, who has like
Adam (01:22:24.874)
Mm.
Ste (01:22:38.985)
all of these like extra things that define an author.
Adam (01:22:48.79)
I had like two other places for discussions that came to mind so far. One is activity feed items.
Ste (01:22:59.527)
Mm. Yeah.
Adam (01:23:00.39)
if each activity feed item was able to be commented on.
So like, you post something on your activity feed, maybe you say like, you finished a book, people can reply to that in a threaded. So it's like the subject of the whole thread is your activity feed item. And at the same time, we would probably have things like a new activity feed item for like,
Ste (01:23:10.826)
Mmm.
Ste (01:23:14.894)
Yeah, exactly.
Adam (01:23:35.886)
progress with info. So it's like, you know, I just updated my progress on this book from zero to 20%. And then I give a write-up of like how I'm feeling about the book at 20%. And then people could reply to that.
Ste (01:23:44.219)
Yeah.
Ste (01:23:50.587)
Nice.
Yeah, yeah, that's great. Yeah, sharing progress is definitely gonna help, especially if we update the way, like people updates progress as well. And I guess, yeah, there's like some stuff we've been like designing in that area and yeah, it's gonna be neat.
Adam (01:24:09.068)
Yeah.
Adam (01:24:18.478)
And the other one was kind of an all discussions page, where maybe it's like every topic and then like.
every discussion maybe like for you discussions which is kind of like discussions for books you've read.
Ste (01:24:43.906)
Yes.
Ste (01:24:49.851)
Nice.
Adam (01:24:51.439)
or saved.
Ste (01:24:52.293)
So this is outside your feed. This is like people who have been reading the same books, but yeah, I guess this one is the most important because you would be able to surface the people who read the same books as you, but we don't have in your network.
Adam (01:25:17.554)
Yeah, this is like seeing like you know you don't know what books have discussions that are active on and across all of hardcover.
Ste (01:25:28.249)
Yeah, this could also be like we have now, tab in the feed. So it's the feed for like your network and then the for you feed where we actually like insert the recommendations. Yeah, maybe the all discussions pages, separate page because I wouldn't put it there. We had that all like the three tabs on top of the feed. So it was...
Adam (01:25:39.425)
Hmm
Adam (01:25:56.546)
Hmm, I see.
Ste (01:25:56.793)
your network, it was for you, and then it was all activity, and we removed all activity. But yeah, if we have that for discussions on a separate page but have the tabs, so it's for you and your network, or like we have now.
Adam (01:26:21.343)
Yeah, the.
Adam (01:26:25.739)
your network discussions. I just like mark that to.
Ste (01:26:27.533)
Yeah, yeah. I think right now we call it. That's interesting.
Adam (01:26:35.974)
That's the equivalent of like home. And then this would be the equivalent of like home slash all. These would be, these would be the, these would be the three equivalents of our current activity feed. But yeah, the question is, do we, do we combine them into the activity feed and have all the discussions to show up there or do we create a separate page for them? And then the activity feed is like book activity versus discussion activity to be determined, I think.
Ste (01:26:38.413)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Ste (01:26:46.949)
Yeah.
Ste (01:27:03.437)
Yeah. We could.
Adam (01:27:07.126)
Or maybe it's a filter on the feed where you can filter by what type you want to see. And you can filter and include discussions or exclude them.
Ste (01:27:17.805)
Yeah, that could actually be, it could even be under preferences if you don't wanna see, I mean, I guess this is, I mean, I think in the first version, we should just like default to, I wanna see discussions because we want people to see discussions, but yeah, maybe even in version three, if that's easy, we can set the filter in your settings for the feed. So if you go into preferences, feed preferences, you can decide.
what to show and what not to show. So some people might want to not see like picture posts and they can tap and they won't see any picture posts. Some people might want to not see like discussions at all. And then you might check, uncheck discussions, but yeah. I mean, the default should be like for our own sake, I guess, see discussions.
Adam (01:28:14.967)
Yeah.
Adam (01:28:19.086)
Is there anything else on your mind right now for discussions that we haven't encapsulated here? I'm just gonna create a general one.
Ste (01:28:26.357)
Well, nah, I think we're in a pretty... I think it's in a pretty good place.
Adam (01:28:34.226)
Yeah, like...
Ste (01:28:35.779)
Yeah.
Adam (01:28:39.154)
notifications, bookmarks.
Ste (01:28:40.429)
Yeah, the notifications, bookmarks, groups, like book clubs.
Adam (01:28:50.158)
clubs, probably just like, probably like.
Adam (01:29:02.226)
If we do like shadow banning or things like that, like kind of moderation.
Ste (01:29:06.305)
Mm, yes. Yeah.
Ste (01:29:13.817)
What if in the feed there's like an algorithm where we push discussions in the for you feeds, discussions that are more relevant to you first. So we don't just show them as they happen. And it's not just about filtering, but we have
Adam (01:29:27.969)
Yeah.
Ste (01:29:42.265)
serving an algorithm that serves the most interesting posts that you're likely to interact with based on like a formula.
Adam (01:29:55.874)
Yeah.
Ste (01:29:56.271)
Um...
Ste (01:29:59.393)
Yeah, and book ads. So if you want to, if you're an author, the thing we talked about earlier, advertising for books, like how do we show those? If you maybe want to advertise a discussion, maybe that's like a way to do it. Yeah, what form those can, can those take? I mean, we'll show them as promoted, but...
Adam (01:30:05.335)
What is it?
Ste (01:30:29.777)
in what way.
Adam (01:30:32.814)
Yeah, and one other thing on my mind is posts where the user is the topic. So what I mean by this is like, when you select your subject of like a book or an author or a character, if you were able to also create one where you're the topic and that shows up on like your feed, it would kind of be like on Reddit, you can...
Ste (01:30:33.773)
Yeah.
Adam (01:31:02.418)
reply to things, or you also have your own personal thing, which very few people use. It's kind of like, it's, it's basically like recreating Twitter on Reddit, where like you have your own stream that you can post to.
Ste (01:31:08.165)
Yeah, I didn't even know about that. What?
Ste (01:31:17.705)
Oh yeah, that would basically be like any, you would insert something in the feed without it having like a reference to a book. Is that similar, is it similar to that? Because this would be, yeah, basically be like a normal post. It would be a post in the feed. So posting directly to the feeds.
Adam (01:31:31.232)
Yeah.
Ste (01:31:41.645)
Yeah, for your network. If you want like a book recommendation and you don't want to mention any book, you're just like, uh, I want to read books about whatever, whatever.
Adam (01:31:42.751)
Yeah.
Adam (01:31:58.922)
Yeah, exactly.
Ste (01:32:01.389)
Yes, definitely. And one more thing that we talked about, posting by authors, like how do we single that out, if we single that out. So if an author posts an update, do you have to follow them? Would you be able to see any updates that an author posts for any book you've read or would you...
Adam (01:32:13.275)
Mm.
Ste (01:32:29.477)
have to actually follow them before so you see their updates. There's a thing on Bandcamp, which is where you buy music, where you can buy something and you can get subscribed to both the record label and both to the artists. And they let you choose, so it's separate. And it's just like a simple model that tells you
Do you want to also, do you want to subscribe to the record label or the record label and the artist and you just click a button and that's it. That's pretty.
Ste (01:33:14.607)
Yeah.
Adam (01:33:14.83)
Cool. Well, I think this is starting to encapsulate everything that I have been thinking about for discussions. Yeah, this is good.
Ste (01:33:16.929)
nice yeah that's a lot of stuff yeah
Ste (01:33:27.661)
Yeah, yeah, this is a whole thing. And it's, yeah, we made significant progress on it. I can't wait to get all those and synthesize them into some designs. That's really interesting to see.
Adam (01:33:46.546)
Yeah. I, I kind of think about this from a technical standpoint, almost like how air tables can be installed on like any place we show a, a list of, uh, a list of books, we want to be able to insert a discussion anywhere we have kind of something to anchor that discussion to.
Ste (01:34:07.417)
Yeah, exactly. And this is good because it allows us to think flexibly about discussions. Because if we didn't do this, we'd probably be, many months from now, doing like, oh, OK, we'll do discussions. But yeah, we wanted them to actually do this. And yeah, I think this covers all the ground. I think we should do this for author pages as well at some point and profile pages.
Adam (01:34:33.91)
Yeah.
Ste (01:34:36.333)
Maybe next time, maybe on the next Hardcover Live, as we're building discussions as well. But yeah, this has been great.
Adam (01:34:44.302)
Cool. Yeah. Thanks for being up for that, even though we went way over.
Ste (01:34:45.915)
Nice.
Ste (01:34:51.841)
Nah, that's fine. Yeah, it's worth it. We're building this huge thing. That's perfect. Well, I think we can wrap it up with that progress.
Adam (01:35:06.048)
Sounds good. I'm going to go and probably chip away at some just general bugs today and just clean up what I can and then start preparing for the product launch release probably soon after.
Ste (01:35:20.533)
Oh yeah, really soon. Perfect. Well, thanks everyone. And yeah, see you next time.
Adam (01:35:26.766)
Cool.
Adam (01:35:31.622)
Bye, have a good one.
Ste (01:35:32.005)
Bye bye. See ya.