penkster

I'm probably going to get downvoted to the stone age, but I'll toss it out here.

I think your approach is misguided. You're focusing on transitioning energy needs from a fossil fuel / heavy damring model to something... weird, but you're not taking into account that the last 10 years have seen staggering changes in energy generation, efficiency, and usage.

Here's my example. I have a small energy efficient home. I have efficient heat pumps that manage cooling and heating. I have a 5kw solar panel installation. My power bills each month? Zero. I am generating as much power as I'm using and my excess goes back onto the grid.

I also drive an electric car, something else not really possible 5 years ago.

These small changes are something everyone can do with almost zero impact on their daily lives (and in my case a net win. Full house air conditioning in the summer!)

Aa far as food sources, now I can choose where to buy my produce and protein to make better decisions.

I would very much like to hear your response here, as I feel you're steering people to a back to earth, naturalist approach to things, which is a very difficult sell, and avoiding the very simple changes people can make that make a huge impact.

Provenance. It's the name of the game in this stuff.

It might help you to understand that for now, all articles are crowd-sourced. Our enthusiastic readers save articles from the web to the app (like in Pocket), then read it in the app. That's the way new content enters. It works a bit like Reddit/Hacker News too.

I'm sorry, let me understand this.

• A company writes an article on a website (say, the New York Times).
• Someone takes that article and copies it into your app.
• Your app publishes it internally, and charges the user for access to that article.

This sounds textbook copyright violation. You're actively going around the controls the publisher creates to avoid this sort of wholescale harvesting, and republishing the work, charging for it on your exclusive platform.

Reddit / hacker news frequently is just a link to the original content, or publishes a section of the content. You are literally taking original content and putting it behind your own paywall, charging to access it in its entirety.

Have you discussed this with any of the publishers to make sure they're okay with it?

I sort of get what you're doing, but I see a couple challenges here.

• You say "this article from the atlantic is completely ad free" - that implies you have a partnership with The Atlantic to provide the content to Readup clean (with no ads). Is this the case?
• I note that you pay out to the publisher? (I'm assuming the publisher, not the author as you state many times). So that money is going to (as in the example above) The Atlantic, not the author, as presumably they published the article on The Atlantic, and therefore they own it.
• I note that you also pay for articles in time. This seems a very youtube-y approach, meaning that you ahve to dedicate dead on focus time for it to be monetized for the publisher. I don't know about other people, but I read very fast, and skim articles rapidly, rarely reading an article word for word start to finish. How will this impact monetization and tracking?
• This appears to be ONLY an app. I do 99% of my article reading on my computer. I assume you'll have some sort of web interface for this? How will that wrk with focus time and tracking?
• Lastly, but I think most importantly - it sounds like you're re-inventing RSS. That only works if the publisher is willing to produce content in that form. Do you expect 100% committment / involvement from all the publishers to your platform?

Thanks very much.

My understanding is this is actually their operating model. Never respond, always attack. Unfortunately it is a model that has some success, not only in Scientology. I'll just leave that dangling.