What we’d probably do is, for most articles, just tell you it’s best to read the article here. We’ve done that quite a few times before and try to let people know we do this when describing the product.
scott_from_castify
Karma: 120
I suppose what we’d really like to know is the expected value of of each sequence so we can do the one with the highest expected revenue. We could have asked you to put probabilities of purchasing each sequence next to the name of the sequence. Maybe next time…
Feedback from Less Wrong Community
One of our customers uses a Firefox plugin called downThemAll which, given an podcast feed, will download all the MP3s for you. I suspect this will most closely resemble the outcome you’re looking for.
V qbhog irel zhpu jr jvyy ghea lbhe pbzzragf vagb na nhqvbobbx, ohg vs jr qrpvqr gb, jr’yy or fher gb nfx sbe rkcyvpvg crezvffvba. :)
We’re doing LessWrong content as audio. There are currently several commutes worth of audio from the sequences, with more coming soon.
FYI, The Simple Truth, as an experiment is now CC-BY-SA licensed.
Thanks. New sequence coming very soon.
The issue is that we have been called parasites, yet we haven’t done anything parasitic—in fact, short of asking for feedback, we haven’t done anything at all. We are asking for feedback because we don’t want to be parasitic. We understand there will some people who will never be comfortable with us using their stuff, some who wish to be compensated, some are happy to allow LessWrong [management] to decide what’s in their interest and some who are happy to freely allow us to use their material, perhaps subject to some restrictions.
What’s offensive is you using loaded terms to those who are actively trying to engage with you to maximize the utility for the community. If the end result is that there are no terms beneficial to both us and the community, so be it. The premise that we’d like to use your stuff with no benefit to you is incorrect. We would rather not pursue our business model than be parasites.
That was why we created this discussion in the first place.
In response to some of the comments here and as a bit of an experiment, we’ve made The Simple Truth mini audiobook available with a CC-BY-SA license. Enjoy and share alike.
Thanks for that. I hope you enjoy it.
If you’d like to be notified of new channels, sign up to our nascent newsletter. http://eepurl.com/sLDU1
New Sequences and General Update From Castify
That’s a good idea. Any suggestions on the best way to go about doing that?
Your confusion is warranted. I quickly changed the terms to one year based on feedback, but didn’t update the description text. Sorry for the confusion.
Interesting. I love how everyone has such different preferences.
We’re definitely going to stick strictly to the human-narrated content, but there is certainly a growing market of services which can get you your TTS content and we think they have a place too.
What we’re really interested in doing moving forward, aside from more sequences, is turning the promoted posts into a podcast. This would be offered as a paid monthly subscription.
We’d love the community’s feedback on this.
Edit As suggested by somervta, if anyone is themselves interested in narrating some content, please get in touch with us. We’d love to get people familiar with LW content to help out with the load. When we start adding more channels, we expect our of main challenges to be keeping the quality of the readers high.
It’s great to get all this feedback. Answer updated. Thanks.
Yes, we’re very cognisant that some content just doesn’t work as spoken word. We thought Less Wrong content was a great test case because most articles translate well to spoken word and is pretty unique in that the sequences nicely cluster content for us to offer.
Another good suggestions. That’s something I overlook all the time and is pretty easy to fix.
Thanks everyone. How to Actually Change Your Mind up next.