Get credit? Credit for what? Forgive me, I don't mean to be harsh, but is the only purpose to obtain bragging rights over which articles you've read on the Internet? I'm struggling to find a reason why I'd want to use this.
I kinda see what they're trying to do. In theory, if a person reads a bunch of articles on a topic, over time they should become an "expert" on that topic.
It seems they're pushing it a little far, to be honest. I'd say "expertise" is way too strong of a word for arbitrary knowledge gained by reading news on the internet. At the very least there should be some kind of testing component. I can click through every link on HN, but that doesn't mean I've learned, or even read, anything.
On the other hand, reading through their blog, perhaps the whole thing is a clever troll poking fun of the triviality of most "startups."
Expertise is definitely too strong of a word, especially for where we are at right now... we need to refine our copy.
Our goal is to eventually build in some testing mechanisms but right now we are primarily focused on testing out our tagging accuracy. We will probably roll out some form of time-on-site metric soon that will modify the tag's relevancy score to determine how much credit you should actually earn. In addition we've played around with some word-relationship stuff and it actually wouldn't be that hard for us to roll out some form of auto-generated quizzes. Again, a lot of this is very new and we are open to any feedback...
Yeah, this is absolute nonsense. It's gamification for your procrastination, as if your procrastination was not intrinsically motivating enough, here's some pointless extrinsic motivation (Google News badges did the same thing, were equally pointless, and have been discarded).
Since recruters ask for Git profile (what you do), Stackoverflow profile (what you ask), Linkit profile (who you know), why not include one profile on what you read (what interest you)?
If you show that you mainly follows the articles on Node.js for two years, it will make believable that you are indeed interrested in this techno.
That is our goal. This is definitely a very early look, but we also hope to provide you great content about Node.js from other top readers, which hopefully can help you discover useful content.
Or if you are new to a topic (like Node.js), you can find the articles that subject matter experts have read, and have at minimum a crash course "lesson plan".
No worries, and definitely a good question. What we have now is largely a proof-of-concept as to how accurately we can tag articles. The thought is that it could be cool to keep track of everything you read and see insights into your knowledge progression, in a way it's like a scrobbler for your news intake. It's still very early on though and we definitely have to figure out a solid way to answer the question "why do I care about credit?"
I suppose it's also a way for users to remember the gist of an article that they've read a long time ago? But honestly aside from that it does look like a Foursquare for reading articles...
Why is this Chrome extension unpacked. What? They make users download a zip file, extract the zip file, go into Chrome developer mode in the extensions tab and load an unpackaged extension. They could have done that themselves and then just have users drag the .crx file onto the extensions tab.
Chrome will refuse to load .crx files from random websites, but it'll trust .crx packages loaded from the local filesystem in developer mode, because it assumes you're developing them. So, providing a .crx in a .zip and recommending the use of developer mode suggests that they want to work around Chrome's normal protections against loading Chrome extensions from random sites. Doing so rather than just uploading it to the Chrome Web Store seems very questionable.
Yea but Chrome will accept any .crx file if you drop it onto the extensions tab. So it would in effect be the same thing, just a bit nicer for the user since they don't have to extract a zip and then browse to where it was extracted and load the extension.
Yea, one of our guys got a little excited and decided to post to HN a little prematurely. Right now we are just testing out our prototype and thus the .zip file. We will probably upload to the Chrome store next week. Definitely not trying to be shady...
Will these credits be transferable? Will ADVERTISERS be able to buy credit pushes (someone requests something"interesting" and they push it to relevant users?)?
Can these credits be used for purchases?
All good questions. I'll try to help - ADVERTISERS would likely desire that functionality, but we don't plan to monetize that way.. ancillary to qualifying humans for knowledge we also gain the ability to show the most relevant articles per subject (a timeless piece on Startup financing by Fred Wilson in "Venture Capital Models" or a post on Startups from Paul Graham in "bootstrapping"). All older posts that largely get covered up in the world of 'real time' that we have become so accustomed to in this age of twitter and google. Thus advertisers could... target by keyword/s in subjects/topics (like google ads). Credits per se aren't a currency for trade. They can only be acquired through reading/learning.
