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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 (00:01.266)
Hey, hey, stay. How's it going?
Ste (00:03.807)
Hiya, going good. Enjoying another London evening. A long day of parenting.
Adam (00:13.638)
Yeah, what a... Do you have like a set bedtime or does it kind of vary day to day?
Ste (00:20.915)
Yeah, actually we have quite a routine. It's Bath time at 9 or 10 p.m. Depending on the day and then with a few Intermittent waking ups in the middle of the night Yeah waking up at around 8
So that's kind of it. It's not much of a routine, but it's good.
Adam (00:53.639)
Yeah, I mean, that's at least like some set times. That's good.
Ste (00:58.047)
Yeah, yeah, it helps a lot to have those in place. It makes a huge difference to have some predictability.
Ste (01:11.851)
How about you? Yeah.
Adam (01:11.906)
the
Let's see, what have I been up to the last week? I was watching a lot of the CrossFit games this weekend, even though I did CrossFit for like 10 years until I tore my ACL, but I still like, I think it's a fun sport outing, fitness, exercise. So that was fun this weekend. Yeah.
Ste (01:22.283)
Okay.
Ste (01:38.571)
Okay, nice. I didn't know we were into CrossFit. I knew you were into hiking, but CrossFit, it's the one with the whole range of really tough exercises like the ropes, the rubber tires and all that, right?
Adam (01:53.178)
Yeah, yeah. Over the years, I've done all of that in some form. Normally not the form that you see on ESPN, more of the baby version of it with a small tire. Yeah. And it's fun. It feels like field day as a kid when you would do just fun things. And it was also fun just being able to show up at a gym.
Ste (02:07.531)
Wow, that's still a crossfit.
Adam (02:22.59)
And say like, here's what we're doing today and not have to ever worry about making any decisions about like what you were going to do because it was all already all, all chosen for you.
Ste (02:34.347)
Oh, that's good. Okay. Yeah. I thought it was way more chaotic, I guess. So you didn't choose like, ah, I'm going to do ropes. I'm going to do like jumping, whatever's.
Adam (02:44.894)
Yeah. Every, every CrossFit class I've been to has the same structure. You walk in, they usually do like five minutes of like warm up and that kind of thing. And then normally like the first half is like the skills portion where you do, where you do like one exercise slowly with like rest in between reps. Maybe that's like back squat. Maybe that's, uh,
like something with a lot of weight, or it could be something with a lot of skill where you're doing a lot of practice. Like, we're going to practice how to do rope climbs today. We're going to practice how to, you know, do muscle ups or something like that. And then the last, you know, it could be five minutes, it could be 20 minutes or longer of the workouts. Usually the workout of the day, which is the fast paced workout where it's like, you have this much time to do all this stuff in some form. And maybe that's
You do it and it takes you as long as it takes you. Or maybe it's like you have 10 minutes and whether you're super fit or just starting out, everyone's gonna work for 10 minutes and then we're all gonna stop together. And I really like those kinds of workouts because everyone's kind of going at their own pace and everyone starts at the same time and ends at the same time.
Ste (03:56.921)
Okay, nice.
Ste (04:05.679)
Okay, yeah, I think that's a lot of the crossfit I've seen. It seems like really intense, but rope climbing. That sounds good, I can get into that. Rope climbing, okay. Yeah.
Adam (04:17.464)
Yeah, rope climbing, as soon as it clicked for me and had to put my feet in the right way over the rope, it became one of my favorite exercises.
Ste (04:26.735)
Oh, okay. So you know really well how to climb ropes now. That's like a useful skill, I guess.
Adam (04:35.651)
Yeah, I can see it.
Ste (04:38.043)
Yeah, nice. Yeah. And how's Salt Lake? Any interesting things happening around?
Adam (04:41.023)
I am.
Adam (04:48.775)
I think we had like some crazy thunderstorms this past week, which have been interesting. But luckily, they didn't mess up our Smashing Pumpkins concert we went to last week. So that was fun.
Ste (05:02.455)
Oh wow, okay, Smashing Pumpkins fan, okay. Learning new stuff, yeah, I love Smashing Pumpkins. Yeah, they're great.
Adam (05:07.993)
Oh yeah? Nice. Yeah, you're like a couple years younger than me, so you would have been like listening to him in high school, middle school, college?
Ste (05:10.154)
Uh huh.
Ste (05:21.527)
Uh, yeah, yeah. High school, around seven, no, no. Eighteen, yeah. Eighteen, nineteen, maybe. Yeah. I think I was late to the party though. I mean, uh, they were like, they were kind of like already at past the peak or like they're at the peak now they've always been at the, I guess, but past like the initial peak. Yeah.
Adam (05:43.15)
I'm sorry.
Adam (05:47.714)
Yeah.
Ste (05:48.635)
Yeah, they're great. Billy Corbyn. I mean, how's Billy Corbyn? Is he still, what is it, like 60 now?
Adam (05:55.021)
He's still doing great. He was still killing it on stage.
Ste (05:58.547)
Wow, okay, that's crazy. I didn't even know they still toured. Yeah, I was watching a movie and there was this cover of Tonight, I think or something. Yeah, it was not by them, but some. Oh, I think it was, was it The Bear? Yeah, I've been watching The Bear.
Adam (06:10.53)
tonight.
Adam (06:19.123)
Oh, yeah. You know, I think I remember that.
Ste (06:21.103)
Yeah. Oh yeah, exactly. The point where they do no spoilers, but someone does karaoke.
Adam (06:30.391)
Okay, okay.
Ste (06:31.379)
Yeah, that was the part I was like, ah, smashing pumpkins. My youth.
Adam (06:36.602)
And The Bear was also, like, season two is, like, amazing. Like, season one was great, but season two was amazing.
Ste (06:41.831)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'm still at episode, I think five and I've heard like lots of mixed reviews about it mainly because I think it's a slightly different style than the first season, I guess. First season was a bit more intense, more aggressive, I guess with that whole atmosphere of like chefs. I mean, yeah, they really like did the...
great job of catching that whole chef vibe, which is like something else. I think you'd have to have a certain type of personality to do it.
Adam (07:14.798)
Yeah.
Adam (07:23.432)
It feels like what Anthony O'Birdain described in his first book, just about the chaos of being a restaurant worker and how it just takes over all parts of your life.
Ste (07:27.743)
Yeah.
Ste (07:34.251)
Yeah, yeah, the chaos and the cocaine. Uh-huh, yeah, exactly. The chaos and the cocaine and the heroin occasionally. Crack, I guess. Pretty intense stuff. Yeah.
Adam (07:46.322)
Yeah, it's just like, it sounds like just people trying to do anything to stay awake for long periods of time and trying to be on for that long. I, yeah, I've never worked in restaurant or food industry. Um, but I've, I've only heard stories and I'm, I'm not missing that I didn't get the chance.
Ste (08:07.907)
Yeah, it's a very tough business. I mean, lots of respect for servers, for chefs. It's something else. Yeah, but I really like The Bear. I think it's one of my favorite shows. And the whole way it's film directed, I really liked season two, even though it had a slower vibe, I guess, in the first episodes and more character driven, I guess.
Adam (08:18.942)
Yeah.
Ste (08:37.131)
or like moment driven. But yeah, it was really, so far really nice looking forward. I think I'm gonna put it tonight after we give Jonah the bath, like little parents series watching time. That's the routine, at least for the past two days. So not much of a routine yet, but we're kind of like making it a routine. Yeah.
Nice. And on the hardcover front, lots of things happening.
Adam (09:11.786)
Yeah, then I've been like, one thing that's really, I think, helped me kind of focus the last week or so is kind of at night when I'm tired, kind of too tired to do any work, just kind of wanting to relax, but also do something a little bit productive, is I've been just pulling up hardcover on staging on my phone and just using it for fun, for like...
a little while and then just taking notes of anything I see that I wanna change. And so now I have this huge Obsidian doc with things from tiny, tiny little pixel changes to add a mini version of the book header that changes when you go to other pages of the book section. Or what's another big one? The ability to buy a book.
You know, things like that.
Ste (10:08.251)
Oh yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I have been doing the same, and I think it's the first time I actually got like really excited on staging of like the stuff I'm seeing there, which is like, I mean, we're building it for, we've been building it for the past two years with like, yeah, and to actually have that moment after two years. I mean, I think we've been.
Adam (10:19.854)
Yeah.
Adam (10:32.108)
Hehehe
Ste (10:40.363)
having, we've been trying out higher cover a lot. But yeah, it felt like kind of different when I saw this version on staging, I think it's really gonna be like, fun to use, let's just say that.
Adam (10:55.966)
Yeah, that it's funny you say that because I feel like I had that same moment like this past week when I was using it on staging as well, where it's like, Oh, I think, I think this is going to work.
Ste (11:07.143)
Yeah, yeah, same.
Adam (11:10.474)
Yeah, that's exciting.
Ste (11:12.263)
Uh huh. Yeah, definitely. If we have any listeners and you want to like try it on staging, please do. That's like a preview into what's to, what's to come. And it's looking pretty good. Pretty darn good. Starting to pay off.
Adam (11:14.718)
And it...
Adam (11:27.87)
Yeah, I'm trying to like curb myself from adding any new features and just like polishing now and just, just to get it. Yeah. Aside from the profile section, which I think I'll probably, you know, convert to using the new book groups where it shows like lists and things like that, but I guess that's polished too.
Ste (11:34.835)
Wow, that's always a hard mission.
Ste (11:45.239)
Yeah. At least it's easy. I mean, now that we have the components, not easy, but easy that, you know, it's do-able in the whole batch. So that's, that's good. Yeah. I'm starting to find this way more organized and things are starting to make sense, fall into place. At least that's my, uh, like feeling of, uh, of it.
Adam (11:56.735)
Yeah.
Adam (12:01.61)
Yeah, I was.
Adam (12:12.498)
Yeah, I was, I was kind of realizing that I think we got a lot of the information architecture right, but then we hadn't had time to like update the UI to match the, you know, all the prototypes that you've, you've made and just getting it to that, it enables the information architecture to flow in a way that we, we had in our heads, but we hadn't really like gotten it out yet.
Ste (12:35.219)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'd say the same thing. I mean, it takes a lot of time and we're a really small team. So I guess now is the time when it comes into fruition, I guess.
Adam (12:51.294)
Yeah. As I, as I've been playing it with it on staging, I was thinking there's like one other part that I'm not going to try to get into this release, but I think would be a fun, pretty quick project. And it might even replace the, I could see it replacing Ask Jules in the NavBar. And you would still be able to get to Ask Jules from explore, but in the, in the NavBar, what if we had like trending? And that was just like, you know, the books that are currently
Ste (13:11.763)
Uh huh. Yeah.
Adam (13:19.41)
most popular on hardcover by genre, you know, something like that, some way of exploring like what's currently hot, what people are currently reading, what they're looking forward to in the future, split up by genre.
Ste (13:32.339)
Yeah, I can see that. I think that'll work. I think we should, yeah, test it out, see how it works. I mean, you can ask Jules from the explore section and trending definitely seems like a good thing to have, especially because we're planning discussions and they're also my trending discussions, you know, about books that people are really talking about.
Adam (13:56.257)
Hmm.
Ste (14:01.755)
And that might be interesting to show there. So it's books, but maybe when discussions are in, we can use that to also push those maybe.
Adam (14:13.818)
Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Yeah, it could be like under trending, there could be different reasons that something's trending. It could be from most looked forward to, most read, most discussed, and how we do that could be interesting. But it could end up making almost like a leaderboard for like, here are the most discussed books on hardcover. If you wanna go have a discussion, go to one of these books.
Ste (14:39.13)
Oh yeah.
Ste (14:42.979)
Oh yeah, some of the topics might be pretty hard. I mean, I can imagine like for new releases, if you're an author and you're releasing a book and it's like highly anticipated and talked about, you'd wanna like see that. You really wanna like be there and see it, see what people are talking about on high cover. So yeah, definitely. That's, yeah, let's implement that. We're gonna need to find the icon. So for trending, maybe like thunder or something.
Adam (15:08.63)
I was a, the one that came to mind for me was that like up into the right, like diagonal arrow.
Ste (15:18.785)
Okay, okay. Yeah, that's trending. Yeah. Yeah
Adam (15:22.002)
Yeah, actually, when I search for trending, it's a arrow trend up. It's a
Ste (15:28.247)
Okay, arrow turned up. Yeah. I'm not gonna search for it. It looks right. Sounds.
Adam (15:30.786)
This, yeah, I'll show my screen just to show it here too. Yeah.
is like the
Ste (15:41.199)
Oh yeah, here we go. Yep, that's trending, all right.
Adam (15:45.542)
And yeah, when I went to a trend.
Ste (15:51.591)
Here we go. Lots of financially stuff in there. There's a shovel. Okay, there's a shovel. How is a shovel trending? Yeah.
Adam (15:59.938)
Yeah. Shovel trend. Sometimes I try to figure out like why did this show up in search for me on Font Awesome? And I wonder. Trend.
Ste (16:11.243)
That's a mystery. Shovel. Well, you're digging a hole, so the hole is trending, I guess. I mean, you're trend, yeah.
Adam (16:18.499)
Hehehe
It's, it's trenching.
Ste (16:24.791)
See, maybe that was it. Yeah, I know some of these, they're really surprising. Oh, trench. Okay. That's true. Okay. You're trenching. We're trenching. Okay. That's good. Yeah. But the icon is good. Let's yeah, we can, we can stick to that.
Adam (16:27.355)
Hehehehe
Yeah, yeah, that's how for change.
Adam (16:36.95)
Yeah.
Adam (16:44.818)
Yeah, I'm thinking, you know, not going to push back the release to get that in, but we can, we can probably drop that in as kind of a quick, a quick one after, but before, like while we're researching and planning discussions, that can be one of the small like things we work on.
Ste (16:50.353)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (17:02.639)
Yeah, definitely. That sounds good. Yeah. It's gonna be a nice thing to change in that navbar. It's interesting to change stuff in there and see how people react. So, yeah, if you're watching this and you have feedback on the stuff you see in the navbar and the stuff you're gonna see in the navbar, I think definitely tell us.
Adam (17:31.086)
Thanks for watching!
Do you have any deep dive topics you were thinking about for today?
Ste (17:38.331)
Well, we got some feedback for discussion, so I was hoping maybe to talk about that for a bit and maybe even take a quick look at the prototypes and see based on the feedback we received so far, which things stand out and sort of talk about our early conclusions or not conclusions, but early impressions. Hypoth, yeah, that's the word, yeah.
Adam (18:02.606)
Hypothesis.
Ste (18:05.855)
Did you have anything you wanted to talk or was it around this topic as well? Okay. Yeah. In sync trending.
Adam (18:05.94)
Yeah.
Adam (18:09.98)
It was that exact thing. See, we're on the same page.
Adam (18:16.35)
Yep, discussions are trending. As is all this jasmine tea. So do you want to do this with a screen shot or do you want to just chat about things in general first?
Ste (18:18.883)
Oh yeah. Okay. Oh yeah.
Ste (18:28.687)
Yeah, we can do this with the screen share to have that backdrop of the actual, should we show the actual prototypes as a backdrop and talk over the, talk about the feedback we got and what we're thinking to do next based on that feedback? Okay. Let me share my screen. So I'm going to share my entire screen. You're going to see a lot of open tabs and then.
Adam (18:44.704)
Yeah, I'm down for it.
Ste (18:55.495)
We're gonna see this. Whoop, this is the new prompt. It's looking great by the way. And the way it got iterated on the feedback channel with this chords, that's like something else. I really liked the...
Adam (19:01.308)
Oh, nice.
Adam (19:07.366)
Yeah, and for that, do you want me to change the vote icon to this one? I'm down for it if you want to.
Ste (19:17.831)
Uh, I just put this one, I don't know why, but yeah, I think it might, uh, it might look better than, uh, let's make this yellow. So someone voted, you voted for this. If you're like, seeing this, um,
Adam (19:32.31)
And I had it using the, what is it, the solid version. That way, if they're colorblind, it would be inverted, even though it's, so it's yellow and inverted.
Ste (19:44.416)
Okay
Okay, I think this is the solid version. Oh, okay. So is this Okay. Yeah. This looks good. This looks good. I think it might look better than the arrow I don't know why I like this one in a circle What do you think?
Adam (20:01.11)
I'd be down for it. Do you have a thought on what the, like the hover state should be? Like when they're hovering over that, that area.
Ste (20:02.469)
Okay. Yeah.
Ste (20:08.939)
Hmm. Well, maybe like this one, right? Or which one?
Adam (20:19.078)
Yeah, like right now, right now it does this like thing where it surrounds the entire um entire like box with the border. It was just the quick thing I threw together but uh it could be overkill.
Ste (20:20.206)
Um...
Ste (20:34.175)
Oh, yeah. Maybe I, what if it's like this? If it's like just slightly maybe, let's push it up a notch so people can see it. So it's like this when, or maybe slightly less. It's like this when it's inactive and when you hover it becomes like white. Just.
Adam (20:40.002)
Hmm
Adam (21:01.206)
Hmm. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I like that because or should it be the inverse one like if it hasn't been selected? like
Ste (21:03.143)
Play with the color. Yeah.
Ste (21:13.313)
So if it hasn't been selected, have it be like this.
Adam (21:18.564)
I think I liked the gray you had it before, but like the... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Ste (21:19.943)
Oh, wait. Oh yeah, definitely. Okay, yeah, that would mean switching up the icon, but I think we can do that, right? Yeah.
Adam (21:29.438)
Yeah, yeah. So if it's, so that way there's gray regular when it's normal, white regular when it's hovered and then yellow solid when it's voted. Yeah, I'm done for that.
Ste (21:34.911)
Yep. Yeah.
Ste (21:40.895)
Yeah. Solid.
Yep.
Okay, cool, great.
Adam (21:49.642)
Yeah, that fixes a problem I had where like I was changing it yellow on hover. So it always kind of looked like it was active even after you clicked on it. So yeah, changing it, changing it to white helps.
Ste (22:00.735)
Oh, okay, gotcha. Yeah. Yeah, I think, like, I might have used it for other pieces of UI. So when we don't have, when we have UI that's not selected, it's slightly grayish, then it goes up a notch, but in the same tone when it's hovered, and then it changes to the accent color when it's selected. Kind of like, yeah.
Adam (22:26.71)
Hmm. Yeah.
I like that.
Ste (22:30.843)
I mean, that's what I always use. So that makes like a noticeable difference. Okay, so let's jump in the discussions. So.
Ste (22:49.279)
These are the things we put out for feedback. And you can see there are a lot of designs. We're at the phase where there's a lot of iteration and there are a lot of things that we're exploring. So you are gonna see a lot of, let's say, alternatives both for like how a post can look like, like we make this bigger. And...
how replies can look like. And there are a lot of possibilities. So now we're taking the time to see which ones would make sense. And of course, in the first version, you're not probably not going to see many of these. But some of these things will be what we'll be working up to for discussions. So we can go through them.
Uh, maybe, or we can just, uh, I mean, these are, uh, sent in the newsletter. So I think you can take a look at them and see for yourselves. What do you think Adam would, I think that would be like interesting because there's a lot of like stuff to cover and.
Adam (24:01.036)
Yeah.
Adam (24:05.458)
Yeah, maybe, maybe we could talk about like what our current hypothesis is for, uh, maybe hypothesis are for, uh, discussions right now. Um, I, I did some brainstorming, like when I was in Tahoe about this and I was like, had a list of like all the things that, like, I, I thought like, these are the things people could talk about here, here are the things that you could discuss from, you know, um,
Ste (24:13.503)
Thank you.
Ste (24:16.983)
Mm-hmm. Sounds good.
Adam (24:34.414)
books to characters to series to your progress on a book to someone else's progress to authors to links to other sites to just general questions about the book industry to questions about being an author kind of like just trying to just brain dump everything that someone could talk about. And after I got to there, I tried to like prioritize them. Like this is what
my hypothesis is, is the most important thing that I think our readers today would want to talk about. And when I, when I got to that point, that top thing was they want to talk about a book they've just read or are reading with other people who are also like interested in that book. That was number one. And so that kind of led me to this prototype up here.
Adam (25:35.567)
I think this is, yeah, this is the one that I made. You can tell because the colors are very different than everything else. Hence that little red, like I read the book. The idea was like to show like the person who created this discussion thread about this book also read this book.
Ste (25:43.498)
They're good, they're good at them. You got a good color sense.
Adam (26:02.282)
and they've also read 234 other books. That was kind of what I was going for there, is like how do we, how do we get some, oh, go ahead.
Ste (26:07.519)
Okay. Yeah. I thought that... Sorry about that.
I thought 234 was the actual page they were on for this book. Yeah, for Interruption. But yeah, I was convinced that was the page number.
Adam (26:17.778)
Mm. I could see that too.
Adam (26:26.19)
That would be another neat thing to show, because potentially we'll have that if they have been updating their progress. So we'll know exactly how far they are.
Ste (26:37.523)
Yeah, I mean, wait, I think at some point, oh yeah, over here. So one of the prototypes, it was like this, but I saw this and I was like, oh, look at that. I mean, a better way to show the page number. So they not only read this book or are reading this book, but yeah, the page number.
Adam (26:45.049)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (27:01.918)
Yeah. And that I was thinking that the part that says red would change to page number if they haven't completed the book.
Ste (27:10.068)
Okay, yeah, that's smart too. I mean, that's, yeah, that's maybe even better. That's how, yeah.
Adam (27:16.83)
Yeah, this one, yeah.
Yeah, this one makes it more clear, like for sure.
Adam (27:27.952)
Um...
Ste (27:28.723)
Yeah, this is a really nice prototype. And I think that's like one of the pieces of feedback we got that were very, very useful. So thanks, you know who you are. About what they would ask and what they would do after reading a book with discussions was, yeah, exactly validating this hypothesis.
that readers want to dive more in the universe of that book, or they have questions about the characters, or they have questions about the plot twist, or they're not like really sure about why a character did something or how they might be perceived based on the story. Well, in any case, things that are related to a certain book.
and that they'd want to discuss with people who read the books. So this is like really smart because it shows that people read that book. It shows the number of books they have read. So sort of like we talked about that prestige. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's the validation. Yeah. I put in this like spoiler thing.
Adam (28:46.35)
Social validation, prestige, yeah.
Ste (28:55.967)
that blurs the text. I don't know if you liked it or not, Adam, but might be a good, I know now we're kind of like doing the CIA thing, so I think after I did this, I liked that whole, what's it called? When you redact something, slightly better, but I don't know.
Adam (29:15.018)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (29:19.582)
Oh yeah, yeah. Because we have, we have another way of showing spoilers where it's like, just, it just yellows it out and, and you have to click and then it shows the text in yellow, but it removes the yellow background. And, but, but I guess there's also two ways of having spoilers. It's that the entire thing could be a spoiler or only like a part of it could be a spoiler, like just a word in a sentence.
Um, but yeah, for, for the topics themselves, like if we have, if we do something like Reddit where every post has a post title in a, a text, then it's possible for the title to be a spoiler or the text to be a spoiler or both, and it's possible for it to be a spoiler in its entirety or partially. So.
Ste (30:00.199)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (30:06.673)
Yeah.
Ste (30:11.947)
Yeah.
I think I like the redacting part better after I made this because I just realized, you know, maybe you wanna have, so let's try to actually like, so we're moving the layer blur, and this I was thinking maybe we would turn into something like this, and maybe it's like, yeah, this is kind of like what we have now, right?
but without the spoiler step to show. Text.
Adam (30:58.206)
Oh yeah, I see. So if it's like partial spoilers.
Ste (31:03.22)
Yeah.
Adam (31:06.207)
Yeah.
Ste (31:06.523)
Well, it could be like the story could be the way we do it is, uh, I was thinking that it's better the way, uh, you first implemented it because you want to have a glimpse of what it's about, but if there are any spoilers, like, uh, someone kills someone else, maybe you just want like, uh, Mark that name as a spoiler and you'd want to like read the rest.
Adam (31:36.966)
Yeah. And you might want to, yeah, spoiler out killed as well. Yeah, yeah, I get what you mean. You can kind of get that someone's asking a question about the book and yeah. Or another option is like, one of the things I was thinking for this view is that like, if you're viewing this page,
Ste (31:37.233)
Yeah.
Ste (31:43.549)
Yeah. Right.
Ste (31:48.752)
Uh huh. Yeah.
Ste (31:55.035)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Adam (32:06.238)
and you're logged in, we potentially know if you've read this book or not. So there's no reason to hide spoilers if you've already read the book. And so, and, and so it would really be for like, if you haven't read the book or if you're currently reading it, then you would want to see those spoiler tags. So there might even be something we could add. That's like, uh, you know, show spoilers because at that point you don't care anymore.
Ste (32:14.707)
Oh yeah, true. Yeah.
Ste (32:34.403)
Yeah, true. Are you thinking to have it as a profile option or an option for like each piece of discussion? Like show spoilers if I read the book, maybe a toggle or something like that.
Adam (32:45.71)
Hmm.
Yeah, I was thinking it could just be the default that we always show spoilers if you've marked the book as read.
Ste (32:55.587)
Okay, yeah, that works.
Adam (32:56.542)
And then we could toggle that in profile, but I think most people wouldn't even need to toggle it. I suspect that could be a good default.
Ste (33:02.929)
Yeah.
Ste (33:06.983)
Yeah, definitely. We could make it the default. Yeah. And another point that's been like really interesting is the way the posts are liked, voted or somehow pushed in importance. And there are a lot of like things we tried. So there are just the hearts like we have now in the feed.
Uh, there's the, wait, where the hell is that? Uh, the full heart broken hearts. That's kind of like up vote, down vote, but using the hearts as a, like, I really like this or I don't like this. Um, there's thumbs up and thumbs down and, uh, there's the voting, uh, which is like vote, uh, and one piece of feedback.
Adam (33:46.736)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (34:06.067)
that I kind of agreed with when I saw the point being made is that downvotes can be weaponized, I guess, or used in a malicious way. So if someone wanted to downvote, like on Reddit, because that's the biggest example of things that can go wrong with up and downvoting, someone can...
downvotes your posts in mass, and it can hurt that score for each post. At the same time, just having positive votes or likes means that someone, I mean, we can push posts up in priority based on...
Adam (34:47.085)
Yeah.
Ste (35:03.711)
just that one metric. The reason for downvotes, for which downvotes could be good is that they might do some sort of moderation for us. So if someone posted something bad and it receives a lot of downvotes, we could hide it or we could investigate that somehow. We could like moderate it. But on the other hand,
I think reporting something and just having the likes could potentially just solve all of our issues. And then some extra controls. So what we worried about is trolls and bots, I guess. Is there anything else?
Adam (35:55.19)
I, uh...
I think those are the big things we've been worried about. But one of the things that I, this morning on Mastodon, I saw this cool link to this paper towards intersectional moderation, an alternative model to moderation built on care and power. It's a white paper research paper by someone who's a moderator at the Ask Historian subreddit. And that subreddit gets a lot of
drama because it has everything from Holocaust deniers to school kids asking questions about their middle school papers. So it needs a broad section of moderation concerns in order to get things right. I'm only a quarter of the way through the paper, but it's already been really fascinating. But one of the
And like, so it talks about all these different moderation methods and even like structures of the teams that end up moderating this from like moderators to Reddit mods to users and how these different roles like play off each other. And, uh, one of the things that. That I've liked so far, I think my opinion will probably iterate over time as I read more of this paper. Um, but one of the topics that I really liked is the concept of having like
only an up vote and then under reporting, having like different reasons for reporting, like didn't mark spoiler, attacking the questioner, racist, different reasons for reporting something. And then we can use those reasons both to determine if that comment shows up or if we ban that person or what happens next. And we could even, we could probably do something where like people that are reported
Adam (37:51.87)
end up in like a reporting queue or something. I think that part I still need to figure out, but it stops people from piling on. And depending on if that reporting queue is automated or manually processed, it could work as a good solution that doesn't automatically ban people, but like highlights the bad actors fast.
Ste (38:18.311)
nice. Yeah, that's totally agree. That sounds fascinating. Definitely lead me to that paper. That sounds great. And I get like the real sensitive issues that might arise on that forum. So it's great that someone already thought about it. I agree. I mean, upvotes and reporting, but with like actually relevant motives. I think that'll work for us as well.
Um, mainly because the, I think if we cover much of the things that could be wrong with, uh, with the posts, uh, like you mentioned, you know, stuff that's relevant to discussions on the hardcover, uh, I think we'd nail many of the cases and with that cue.
Maybe we can spend a bit of time because that's really interesting on how that could be done. I was thinking, how would it look like if we actually had moderators like Brailleans, like have moderator volunteers and what might be a good incentive for people to help us moderate? Because...
Okay, when we have like 10,000 users, we might be able to get through that queue, but when you have 100,000 users, that's gonna definitely be impossible. So the options are like, go to a support team or have a team of volunteers. And even though having a team of volunteers might be significantly harder to vouch, I think that would be like,
the way to do it, what do you think? Just like as an initial feeling about this.
Adam (40:12.398)
Yeah, I think, I think, uh, probably as we grow, it'll probably go from, um, yeah, we can moderate this ourselves. And then as more people join, we'll probably need a lot of community. We'll need to get community moderation right from the start, or at least like something in from the start. Like that's, that's kind of a given. Like we're not, we're not going to be able to moderate every post on every book at day one.
build it so that it is at some level self-moderating or at least give tools for the people that are most interacting with the book to be the ones that are moderating it. So whatever that looks like. And then later on I think probably like allowing authors to moderate some of their own books or you know people within the author's sphere like maybe the author can
Ste (40:55.358)
Yeah. That's it.
Ste (41:03.989)
Mm.
Adam (41:09.546)
approve moderators, like maybe they can select people. And then, but I also think we probably need like a community manager at Hardcover who's kind of responsible for like, I guess like the things that fall between the cracks, like, you know, cause we're not gonna allow, you know, a moderator to ban a person from Hardcover altogether.
Ste (41:12.555)
Hmm. Okay. Perfect. Yeah.
Adam (41:38.67)
So we're going to probably need those decisions to be made by someone on our team or, or an algorithm, but I'm worried about doing that with an algorithm because that's how you get, you know, people that are posting really nice things on Tik TOK, but then they get mass reported by, you know, uh, another sector of Tik TOK who hates them. So how, how do we prevent against that happening as well, which kind of leads me more towards like.
Ste (42:00.308)
Yes.
Adam (42:06.422)
the reporting sends it to a real person, the real person makes that final decision. But then you still have the real person who's kind of the authority in charge of it. So it still is gonna be someone's responsibility and someone's problem at the end of the day.
Ste (42:10.965)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (42:24.787)
Yeah. And we know how that can go wrong. I mean, luckily we have like lots of examples. Reddit is a big example of subreddits that are under the control of the moderators and the moderators are sometimes, I mean, moderators on Reddit are great, but sometimes they are abusing that authority or using that authority to do things. I've seen like subreddits.
for that had millions or hundreds of thousands of users go like weird, all weird because the moderators decided to be in some way like harmful to that. So yeah, definitely. I agree with you that those people who actually ban, who report, who decide on the reporting, they'd have to be somehow vouched.
for because that can go when you're a smaller platform. That's OK. But I was actually looking, someone shared on our Discord that Goodreads has a huge librarian problem. And that's not a surprise because I think I saw a group where they mentioned they had 200,000 librarians. So imagine having 200,000 librarians.
thousand people who are able to edit the book data and How do those people vouch for I mean, how are those people like they're in charge of the data on Goodreads and There's two hundred thousand people. I mean just imagine like I know one percent like two hundred Two thousand like users doing like some malicious stuff
You can already have authors like bullied out of the platform. You can, I mean, this is happening.
Adam (44:24.478)
Yeah. Especially since like, you know, there are so, there's so much surface area that even with 200,000 people, you have, let's say 10 million books. So if you squeeze in a couple extra books somewhere or delete a couple somewhere, it's going to be very hard for the other librarians to even notice until, you know, it becomes a problem for them, but there's, yeah, it's a, it's a hard problem for sure.
Ste (44:46.227)
Yeah.
Ste (44:50.995)
Yeah, it's a hard one. And I think a big part of planning for discussions is like planning for discussions to go wrong in the many ways that they can go wrong. So there's the moderation part. I was also wondering what we can do pre-moderation. So things we can, steps we can take so that we make sure.
that whoever posts can do as like as little trolling or no trolling at all. And no spam because like spam is like a bot thing. Trolling is like a troll thing. So those are the things we have to, the main things we have to watch out for. And I was thinking that we could do stuff like, uh, throttling.
which Reddit does pretty neatly. So that, you know, when you're posting a lot on some subreddits, you have to take a break. So you can't post like a lot, unless you have a certain amount of karma. That's one thing we could use.
Adam (46:02.166)
Yeah, or if you're a supporter, then you don't, yeah. Otherwise you can only post once every couple minutes or something.
Ste (46:05.904)
Yeah, because, yeah.
Yeah, that's great because I mean, the spoiler plan, apart from like really helping us push hardcover where we want, is also a way to vouch that someone is real because they have a verified account. There's also the onboarding, which is an extra step, but I guess if bots as well as trolls can bypass that pretty easily, but it is an extra step.
I mean, some trolls might be discouraged by that. What else was there? Let me see, we had some stuff written here. Oh yeah, maybe you have like a set number of like posts you can make per day. And if you are a supporter or you've got...
like you're really popular so that you build up your kind of like contributions. Uh, you can like contribute more. Maybe we can like think of something in that area. It's tricky. I know what's, uh, that could be like a thing. So, but I guess throttling would solve it.
Adam (47:13.614)
Hmm.
Adam (47:22.456)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, we could.
Yeah, I wonder like, yeah, what I'm trying to think what problem that would mostly solve, it would be like if someone came in, and they just want to, like, just spam things or troll.
Ste (47:44.187)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Adam (47:46.194)
Yeah, I think throttling might solve it, or at least it would limit their negative impact, but then...
Yeah.
Ste (47:56.123)
Yeah, it would work. I was thinking that, yeah, that's the thought I had behind, like this score, which can be like an informal score. It doesn't have to be like Karma on Reddit. So it can just be like the number of likes that you had. So it can just be like a simple thing, like the number of likes. But I was thinking that it might also encourage people
to think twice about what contribution they make to a post. So let's say for instance, when you're just like starting out on a hardcover, maybe you can like post like 30 posts or replies per day. That's like enough. But when you get to that point, there is a limited number. And depending on the number of likes you get on all those posts you make, you can post more.
Uh, so that you'd be encouraged to really think about what you're contributing, uh, with to the discussion. So that, you know, it's more appreciated, but yeah, that's kind of like, I think we can stick to throttling because yeah, as I said, it might be too extra and yeah. Maybe. Yeah.
Adam (49:12.874)
Yeah.
Adam (49:18.314)
Another option is once you've imported your books from another site or added 25 books or marked some number of books as read, then we lift your comment cap and you go from being able to do 30 a day to unlimited with throttling or something like that. So it's not like a tiered thing. It's more like...
At some point you hit a trigger where we think like, oh, we think you're probably real. And then we allow you to post any amount of stuff.
Ste (49:56.687)
Okay, yeah, that works. Yeah, that's nice. That's a nice way of doing it.
Adam (50:03.17)
Plus, most people that are currently using the site would already qualify for it at that point.
Ste (50:12.111)
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Yeah, that sounds good. Importing your library is definitely not the thing bots can do yet. They may might be able to do that with AI. But yeah, I think we have to take into account that bots might get smarter. And we definitely don't want bots to spam your favorite discussions on your favorite book. That would be a huge disappointment. So...
Adam (50:25.265)
Oh.
Adam (50:40.67)
Yeah. Kind of on that, that topic, I was thinking we probably need a way for either the author or for moderators or for, um, admins to disable discussions on a book, like, you know, just, you know, like this book doesn't have discussions. Or I think, uh, I was reading in that paper, they had, um, another topic for discussions, which was that they quarantine.
Ste (50:42.483)
Definitely.
Ste (51:00.72)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (51:09.906)
certain subreddits and quarantine subreddits don't show up in search. Um, they're never recommended. You know, they're basically like, unless you know, it already exists. You can't ever get there.
Ste (51:19.259)
Uh huh.
Ste (51:23.483)
Nice. Yeah, that sounds good. I think it might solve some problems. So it's like a DDoS attack on a book. And let's say someone who really hates an author trained like 1,000 AI bots that made the hardcover account. They went through onboarding, they added some books, let's say, and they're now
all the books from that author with like spammy content and they're liking each other's stuff. So you have 100 bots liking 100 things. It's unlikely to happen, but let's say it does. Maybe that's the future. What would we do in that case? And quarantine definitely seems like a good idea. Then we'd need some way to clean that up, but...
Adam (52:05.816)
and yeah
Ste (52:19.407)
I guess if we detect like malicious activity from 1000, like pretty awkward users, I think we can like mass ban them if 1000 users made like their accounts in the same like seconds and they don't have a profile picture. Maybe that's.
Adam (52:39.39)
And they're probably all from the same IP. And
Ste (52:41.895)
Yeah, maybe they make them go for different IPs. I was thinking like, can they do that or is it harder? Well, someone would have to really hate an author to do that, but.
Adam (52:47.342)
Hmm. Yeah.
Adam (52:55.976)
And one other potential thing that could help with that idea is if in addition to quarantine, another setting is like moderator approval required for posts. So like you make a post, only you can see it until it's been approved by a moderator. So that's kind of like an in-between step where it's like
We want this to be open, but only to good people. So it's kind of like, I don't think that would be a long-term solution for a book, but it's almost like an under attack solution.
Ste (53:34.368)
Yeah, we need, I mean, this is like, we need this stuff to think of it, about it before it happens, I guess, because it's gonna be like way easier to deal with it. So yeah, I think that's a good idea. I think between the things we discussed, definitely, I mean, it would help a lot. One piece of feedback we got from the same reader I mentioned earlier.
was being able to shut down replies on your post. So that's kind of like the same thing. I like that option. I was also thinking, you know, like Twitter does it, I mean, Twitter does like only people mentioned by whoever posted it can reply. I was thinking like have it only for the people in your network because assuming the people you follow are people you like.
Adam (54:05.211)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (54:28.955)
maybe you'd want to limit that posts to replies only from the people you follow. So there could be like those options. The first one would be like complete shutdown. And the second one would be just limited to the people I follow. What do you think?
Adam (54:50.254)
I'm not sure how I feel about that for something that lives in the book section. I think if it's like living on your profile, then I think that situation makes sense because then you're like, you're the owner of it. But I feel like if you're posting in the book section, you're kind of starting a public chat about this book. But I do like the idea that you can disable all comments, like if things go bad. And maybe like the moderator can do that, but you can also. And maybe.
Ste (54:56.841)
Yeah.
Ste (55:07.24)
Yeah, true.
Ste (55:13.129)
Yeah.
Adam (55:17.214)
even if you're not the main poster, but if you're applying to the main poster, you could disable comments on your reply to someone else's post, saying like, I just wanna join the conversation and say this, but I'm not looking for feedback on what I said.
Ste (55:28.931)
Yeah. Nice. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I definitely would be. I mean, I maybe I'd like both options for that kind of post you mentioned when it's maybe something like this. And you just want to maybe you want to like make something some kind of content, but only with the people in your network. So maybe in the like architecture of things.
We also take that into account. So it's not, it's like those like two levels, but definitely, yeah, we can have like that. Like maybe it's, we'll have to see how we do it in design. I'm still thinking about, you know, how you can do things without showing like these three dots, like next to each reply.
Adam (56:03.778)
Yeah.
Ste (56:24.027)
I'm thinking maybe a long press on each reply might render a drawer where you have all these things like reports. If it's yours, you can block comments or yeah, other options, let's say. But yeah, I'd have to explore that. I don't want to like be... every network has these three things, which bring up...
like small menu, like we have now on hardcover. So yeah, I was thinking how to make it like as clean as possible. So it's like a reading experience as much as possible.
Adam (56:58.658)
Yeah.
Ste (57:10.569)
Yeah.
Adam (57:10.678)
Yeah, yeah, getting the view right of like the individual like thread. Like here, here's the question or whatever in the description. And then all the other supplies. I liked, I liked some of the prototypes you had where there was like that line down the side. So it shows it's like nested under that. Yeah. And then. Yeah. I think. I think like.
Ste (57:17.17)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (57:20.81)
Yeah.
Ste (57:32.067)
Yeah, I like this, right?
Adam (57:37.41)
threading this in some way that makes it clear where it sits in the discussion with nested threads is good. That's one thing that if you've ever used discourse, the forum software, so it's an open source, it's supposed to be a replacement for a forum kind of thing, but it's like a single.
Ste (57:54.055)
Mm-hmm. Uh-huh, no I haven't yet.
Adam (58:06.666)
It's like a single thread all the way down. So it's like, you know, topic, post, post. But if someone wants to reply to someone in the middle, your post just goes at the very end. And that makes it hard to tell like, oh, I'm not reading this linearly, I'm reading this in flat. So yeah, having like hierarchical data, I think for sure for this.
Ste (58:18.455)
Okay.
Ste (58:32.423)
Yeah. Yeah, that's what I tried over here. And yeah, I kind of like that as well. I was thinking like how many levels does it go down? I know Reddit goes down like an infinite number of levels and I don't like that. I was thinking like two levels. I know Twitter does something like this. So you get the post, you get the replies, and then you get some replies to replies, but then you'd have to...
basically tap somewhere over here, let's say without like with more spacing to see this thread. And it would like make this one, like the primaries would go in the place of this one. So...
Adam (59:04.844)
Hmm
Adam (59:21.134)
Hmm, I see
Ste (59:24.019)
You just show the replies and the replies to the replies and maybe just like one or two replies to replies. And yeah, I think that could be, I think that's pretty well researched. Else something like this might work as well for the nested ones.
Adam (59:43.37)
I think one of the things that comes to mind for me with this is that readers also are writers a lot of the time. They like to write a lot. When I think about TikTok comments, TikTok comments are limited to, I don't know how many characters, but it seems like about 140. While I imagine some of these questions and some of these topics are going to be essays. People are going to be writing a lot.
Ste (59:52.671)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (01:00:01.65)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (01:00:11.934)
And then they're going to be replying to other people and writing a lot. And then the people are going to be replying to those people and writing a lot. So we have to. Yeah. Think about it in a way, like assuming people are going to write. Basically novels.
Ste (01:00:12.244)
Yes.
Yeah.
Ste (01:00:25.031)
Yes, we have reviews that are very, very long. Sorry about the noises. My cat's thrashing the trash can because she wants food. I was also thinking of actual threads, because another potential thing we could cover, lots of people write articles like this. So this would be a discussion that has like a
this would be like the second iteration maybe of the discussions where you're allowed to post like anything. So it doesn't have to be related to a book. But let's say you have something like this, and then maybe you'd want to thread it so that this is like the main post. And then each reply on your thread is like each of these books explained. So you'd have a post like this. I have to mock it up.
but then you would reply and dive into each of these books with a small paragraph. And that would mimic like the structure of all the articles on all the blogs. So it gives, it opens up the possibility to actually like having your book blog replicated or like.
maybe even made from scratch on hardcover. So you'd be able to book blog on hardcover and make a following with things like this.
Adam (01:01:53.698)
Yeah.
Adam (01:01:57.686)
One thing that came to mind as you're describing this is like the same end goal could be accomplished by making a list and then adding a reason for why every book was added to that list. Because you're effectively creating a list, sci-fi and fantasy books, you're giving a description, you're adding these books to it, and then for each book in that list you're giving a reason on why. Seeing it in this format,
Ste (01:02:16.958)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (01:02:20.328)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (01:02:23.91)
is a lot more attractive for sharing than just sharing a list where someone visits it and they're like, okay, here's a big list. Where do I get started? Say hi. I wonder about some synergy between, I hate that word, some way of working lists into discussions.
Ste (01:02:33.211)
Yeah. So.
Ste (01:02:47.623)
Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one. I mean, maybe we can explore that next. I had some mock-ups based on this, because the way we're probably going to start is with something like this. And we'll gradually move. So here, you can only post on the book page about a certain book, which makes things easier for us. And this is basically, I think, the
a major use case for discussions, but then slowly moving towards like having, how do you make the feeds have that quality to it? I think like allowing or encouraging posts like this, which are basically like what you see on all book blogs. So this basically would mean that you log on hardcover and have access to many, many authors.
that write on book blogs or book bloggers that share their content on hardcover as well. We can maybe also do canonical links on this so it links to the original article as well. So, yeah.
Adam (01:03:56.606)
Yeah, there's a lot to figure out, but I like this direction of like, the first step is potentially adding a discussion for every book. And then, yeah, one of the, as I was thinking about that earlier today, I was even thinking like, if someone posts about Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, then...
they're posting about that specific book. They're not posting about the Harry Potter series. So if you wanted to post about the entire series, we can have a discussion on the series page as well. And that covers all of the books. And that's effectively the same as this, except it's just tied to a series rather than a book.
Ste (01:04:43.207)
Yeah, exactly. I mean, starting this way, I think it makes sense from an architecture perspective because yeah, this is tied to a book, but then later on, if we just, let's say, eliminate that book as the root of the posts, it can just be a post about anything. So, yeah.
Adam (01:05:08.266)
Yeah, yeah exactly
Ste (01:05:12.571)
I guess now we have to explore every use case so that we don't bump into problems later on when we want to make something, I mean, when we want to build on this. And I think this is a good starting point because we can just take out things and they become like regular posts. And then, you know, given that we figure out a way to make the main feeds.
keep that quality that we'd see in discussions. Yeah, we can move that. We can make that step pretty easily. So yeah, it kind of, it makes sense. Yeah.
Adam (01:05:53.317)
Yeah. Cool.
Ste (01:05:54.963)
Well, that's good. I think, yeah, we've covered a lot of ground, so we could, yeah, wrap it.
Adam (01:06:02.963)
Yeah, I'm liking this direction for it. I think when I have the first user interview on Wednesday with the first person who signed up, I'll add you to that calendar invite. And I'm thinking I'll probably show these posts or these screens on the book page, since that's our kind of current hypothesis. And we can kind of just like.
Ste (01:06:22.204)
Yeah.
Okay.
Adam (01:06:27.53)
It's gonna be rough, these first user interviews, but most of the questions are gonna be before they even see the prototype, and then half of them are gonna be after they see it. So we'll be able to kind of mix and match what they think they want with an example and see what works and doesn't.
Ste (01:06:36.649)
Yeah.
Ste (01:06:45.891)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's going in a good. I have a good feeling about well, it's discussions are kind of like a Really? I mean, it's the moment we open up like what we set out to do creates like this Sentiments around books and of course when you see in the feed people like reading this wanting to read this Liking your list liking this
That's interesting, but you know, you'd want to like see the protein, see why people like do things, why people like things, talk about characters, talk about lore, talk about all that kind of stuff. So if we open that up in a smart way, because that's the thing you have to be able to find it, you have to be able to like browse and jump in any discussion. If we nail that, yeah, I think it's going to be like a really good thing. Plus it's a social platform.
Yeah, we have so much to learn from all the others. I think we're like, even like in this category, like social platforms, even if we could like be like a really good social platform, but just for books, I think there's a lot of people who would like appreciate that and use it to like.
Adam (01:08:03.678)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
Ste (01:08:04.403)
do all sorts of things, which we might not even imagine. I mean, definitely, I think, yeah, they're gonna do a lot of stuff with this. Hopefully not a lot of bad stuff. Great.
Adam (01:08:11.319)
Yeah.
Adam (01:08:18.566)
Well, good talk. Yeah, I think that's a good stopping point for today. Good. Cool.
Ste (01:08:25.223)
Yeah. Perfect. Wow. Until next week. Yeah. Have a good one.
Adam (01:08:29.878)
Yeah, have a good one. Talk to you later.
Ste (01:08:32.767)
See ya.