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Rufus Ping
Dec 27, 2006





I'm a Friend of Rodney Nano
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ompW5mxa5ug

https://this.ishuman.me/

Part 1: Who are you?
Part 2: What is human?
Part 3: What can I do to help?

Part 1: Who are you?

Greetings ladies and gentlemen! :) My name is Max Kit Human, Max Human or just Max for short (I prefer the latter), born Maxim Kit. I'm a kid just like every one of you. I came here (here being Toronto, Canada) from Ukraine when I was almost 13 and, with a few exceptions, have been ever since. Normally I hate talking about myself (how can you ever learn anything if you just keep repeating the same stuff over and over - focus on the other person!) but for the sake of this document I will make an exception. I have some pretty big goals, and I need you guys to believe that I'm actually capable of achieving them. For that you need to know a bit of my business history. If you don't give a crap and just wanna read about the project, simply skip to part 2 below! :)

At 15 I started a gaming site called KGN, or Kickass Gaming Network, which you can still find on web.archive.org at kickassgaming.net. I did the same thing I always do with business: convinced a bunch of people to join me (we had a team of 8) and then started contacting some really big names to get the kind of supercharged boost we needed to start. Within weeks we were able to score awesome content, and months later were publishing global exclusives like the first ever screenshots of GTAII (a huge deal at the time - courtesy of the president of Rockstar) and awesome interviews like that with the co-founder of Bioware and many other big names. Content was king: we started the news updates earlier in the day than all the other big sites, and focused on articles, game and hardware reviews, interviews and screenshots. It was awesome. Then the dotcom industry went bust and you can guess what happened next.

Having had a taste of being my own boss, I could no longer stand high school (why would I need to learn to be an employee if I already knew I would never become one?) and dropped out. I spent exactly a year and day making sandwiches in Mr. Sub, which to this day remains the only job I've ever had as an adult (as a kid I started delivering newspapers and flyers at 13, and worked as a mover in the summers). At about 17 or 18 I ended up without a job (turned the music up a bit too loud at 3am - we were open til 4 in the club district - and the boss's son walked in) and so did my dad (he was a construction foreman and stood up for the workers when their boss, after not paying for months, announced that all their salaries were cut.. 3 months ago). Anyway, so that's how I became the president of a construction management company. By 23 or 24 we had about 75 people in total - my strategy of always focusing on big goals paid off as usual.

By 25 I realized that I was wasting my life - I was making money but not making a difference in the world, and felt unfulfilled as a result. So I decided to quit. Following the advice in Tim Ferris' wonderful book 4 Hour Workweek, I then started my 3rd company, a construction management firm blended with a dotcom, and semi-retired off the passive income 6 months later. I spent the next half a year relaxing on tropical beaches and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. When I decided to quit construction 2 years prior to my semi-retirement I decided to be a film director, and after working on it for a year or two, quit at the last moment instead of making a feature film because I realized that I'd never be able to make ENOUGH of a difference as a film director to finally make myself happy and fulfilled. So I was almost 28 by the time I realized what I ACTUALLY wanted to do: build a sister company for Google. And now here we are 3 years later.

More info: https://linkedin.com/in/maxhuman https://fb.me/iammaxkit https://twitter.com/iammaxkit

Part 2: What is human?

human started out as a design for a social network named peekr in 2011. In 2012 I realized that I wanted to make it MORE than a social network and changed the name to aocao - an ambiguous name like Google that would allow us to make ANY sorts of products. The first one we added was charitable crowdfunding. Then more ideas emerged. I walked around happy as a kite when I realized that my talent for marketing, entrepreneurship and design would soon make me a billionaire. I had more of a talent for each than most of the CURRENT tech billionaires, so it seemed like a no-brainer, and to be honest not even much of a challenge (especially in an age when even tiny companies like Oculus and Airbnb are worth billions). Then on January 25th 2014, I was smoking a joint on a stairway (hey we're being honest here right?) when an idea hit me like a bag of sand on the head: GIVE IT ALL AWAY. Make EVERYBODY the owner of this company, and rename it something that UNITES everybody. I decided to go with it then and there, on the spot. Initially thought to name it something like Earth, and finally settled on human a few hours later when I realized that people were already living outside of Earth on the ISS, and would soon populate the Moon and Mars as well.

That was over 8 months ago. Since then, human has undergone her (starting with peekr) 4th design evolution. She is now almost entirely video based, with only some GIFs, still images and text. The interface is all but invisible. She now consists of over 20 global online services such as social networking, crowdfunding, food delivery and car rentals, and 6 hardware lines including phones, tablets, virtual reality headsets, wireless headphones, smartwatches and later this decade even contacts. Following the announcement of her birth on January 25th, we had several offers to invest (although we have NEVER seriously approached even ONE investor for money) - the best one was for about 3 or 4 hundred grand at a 1.2 billion dollar valuation. There were several others. We turned them all down because we wanted a minimum of 1 million dollar investment, and at a 2.5 billion dollar valuation at the very least. It seemed (and this has only INCREASED since then!) obvious that this company would eventually be worth tens of billions (and at one point we even planned to do a 100 billion dollar IPO on Nasdaq after 2020), so selling shares at 1.2 billion seemed like a waste of money.

We went back and forth for about 6 months with the "give it all away" part - mostly as I struggled and fought myself, because doing so would mean that I would never become a billionaire. But last month, when I thought I was near death, I realized that my one regret in life was NOT going ahead with that business model, so I took a deep breath and made a plunge. I officially announced that I would be giving ALL of my shares away, except for one. It made sense. The plan from day one was to do what Bill Gates did: work for decades, make tens of billions off a huge tech company, and then give it all to charity. So I realized: if all of this money is for the PEOPLE anyway, and all I need to be happy is a decent house, car and money to travel, WHY WAIT 20 or 30 years??! By giving EVERYBODY a share I would also ensure that the company would grow SUPREMELY FAST, so I'd be able to achieve in 10 or 15 years what before would have taken 25 or 30. I knew immediately that this was the right way to go.

So that brings us to today. Today is my 31st birthday, and as you can see on my Facebook I have exactly 8 dollars and 40 cents left. Two years ago I closed my 3rd company (the passive income asset) because the few hours of work it DID require consisted of yelling at people and it was ruining my inner peace. I could not devote 100% of my attention to human with that sort of a destraction. So over the past few years I completely and totally depleted my savings, and even ended up borrowing a few thousand bucks from the fam. None of that mattered though (and still doesn't) - I got a few big people interested in the project (despite hardly even trying) and I knew that once we launched I would EASILY be able to get multi-million dollar investments. This is still the case - although we are now owned by the public, we will still accept investments - the only catch is that they come with a clause allowing us to buy back the shares at a 250% premium or the current valuation, whichever is higher, and that no more than 10% of the shares can be sold - if we want to sell more, we have to buy back some of the old ones first. The other good news is that my 3rd company can be restarted and sold for over a mil, and that I'm owed about 100 grand, and all of that down to the last penny I am donating to human. Even my car. So we're expecting to dump about 50 grand into our bank account in the coming weeks.

How does human operate? Basically the idea is that everybody who asks for a share gets a share. There are no requirements and no approval process. Everybody can only own one share, and they cannot be sold or transferred (otherwise millions of gullible people would be instantly swindled out of theirs). You can even get one if you're a kid, but your share won't have any voting power until you're 12 or 14 (exact age to be decided). So yeah, everybody gets one vote, including myself. There is no management hirearchy - there are (may be?) team leaders, but they are chosen by those they are leading, and they are more like coaches and not bosses. They have the same say as everybody else. In terms of voting power, there is no diference between myself, a salaried employee of the company, an unpaid volunteer or some random person on the street who just requested a share. All the decisions: for what we make, how to make it and how to spend the profits are made together. The people of Earth are quite literally the owners and operators of this company. For this reason, we think of it as the collective human consciousness: all the people coming together as one. Any random person you now see on the street is no longer a stranger - they are a fellow shareholder working on the same goals.

More info: https://ishuman.me https://fb.me/thisishuman https://twitter.com/thisishuman

Part 3: What can I do to help?

So what do we do now? Now we need to launch the web beta of empower charity - our charitable crowdfunding platform. We decided to launch this component of the network first for two reasons: 1) because it most directly fulfills our mission to help people, and 2) because the profits it generates will help pay for everything else, one component at a time. empower charity represents maybe 5% of our network, and we are planning to launch on nearly 10 platforms (web, iOS, Android, Glass, consoles, TVs, cars, so on and so forth) so realistically it's probably about 0.5% of the work. For the beta I also removed about 80% of its features, shrinking the total amount of coding required for our launch to just 0.1% of the total. Just the basics allowing us to launch, start helping people and start making money, and nothing else. You'll notice the included designs show only 2 pages: the main grid of empower charity, and the watch tab (the finished version will have 4 tabs in total) of a crowdfund on empower charity. And again, these are missing about 80% of the features. The total is about 150 pages.

We will start from here and keep building. Once we launch the web beta of empower charity, we will immediately start making a 3.95% commission off all the crowdfunds. Once we can afford to do so, we wil drop that to 0% and even pay the payment processing fees ourself (thereby making this a 100% free charitable crowdfunding platform), but for now we need the money. Also from day one we will start selling hero memberships to our supporters, at $4.95 a month, and accepting donations. So three revenue streams from day one, and then we launch the rest of the network piece by piece. Also this year we will start taking pre-orders for our hardware, and expect to receive tens of millions of dollars in pre-orders alone, and hopefully over 100 million in hardware sales by the end of 2015. Not to mention investments - we'll be approaching 10 tech giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, LG, Lenovo and others with offers to invest 5 million each at a 2.5 billion dollar valuation, and also asking them to throw in a 1 million donation each on top. Long story short the money side is taken care of and we'll be fine and dandy.

This is where you guys come in. The second biggest decision we've ever made, aside from deciding to give it all away, is to also make everything we do entirely open source. Meaning the software AND the hardware. We are hoping the global open source community will adopt this project as their own (because it IS your own!) and help us build it. Worst case, we've calculated that for less than a thousand bucks we can pay a solid developer in Ukraine to put in the 40-50 hours necessary to launch the web beta of empower. Since our only expenses would be my monthly salary of only 3000 bucks to start (less than minimum wage when you count my hours), a 400 dollar deposit for a virtual office and receptionist, and the aforementioned thousand bucks (if we need it), that'd still leave something like 46 grand in the bank to spend on.. God knows what. And don't forget that the moment we're down to the 46, we will unlock the first 3 revenue streams, so a 0 will be added to the end of that number rather quickly! :)

So what can you to do help? Code the drat thing! :) And/or get your friends to. Help us launch this first piece as quickly as possible so that we can get rolling! This coming week the registrations for our for-profit and non-profit (like Google and Google.org), both owned by the public, will be completed. We're expecting the law firm to do the work pro bono. We'll imediately open a bank account with Canada's largest bank - RBC Royal Bank, and deposit all the money I'm donating in there. It will be hooked up to our site to receive the commissions for crowdfunds, fees for hero memberships and donations. As with everything else in our company, the finances will be completely transparent - we'll even ask RBC to make a special view-only publicly accessible bank account that anybody can log into and check things out. And of course, detailed explanations of what every single deposit and expense is, complete with copies of invoices and everything imaginable, will be available online. This is YOUR company - you deserve to know EVERYTHING.

So right now, there is basically no difference between me and you. I've left myself one share, same as everybody else, and as the founder I decided to give myself just two priviledges: the right to set my own salary for as long as I'm involved with the company and my pension thereafter (don't worry, I doubt I'll ever make even 10% of what Tim Cook does, or more than 1 or 2% of the 10 million a day I would have made, like Gates, Zuckerberg and many others, had I kept the company for myself). All I need is a decent house, car and money to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. I don't need a 10 bedroom mansion, 5 supercars and a 200 foot yacht. In fact, chances are that after I buy a couple of houses for the elderly members of my family, and after I pay for my own, I'll end up making even less than what I just described. I don't need savings - all I need is money for life. That's why right now I'm starting off with a laughably small salary, less than minimum wage, because that's all I need to pay for the rent, food and miscellaneous daily expenses. The second priviledge is the right to veto - this is so that people don't accidentally run the company into the ground with their votes, and as soon as I see that everything is running smoothly I will give up this right. It is only temporary, and our Articles of Incorporaton will state the same.

So that's that ladies and gentlemen, that's the whole story! Please check out the video, designs and documents and let us know what you think, share your ideas with us and jump in and help! Tell your friends about the company, donate some time or money, apply for a salaried job, post about this on all the forums and social networks, call the press, or just sit back and watch and enjoy the show. Thank you all and God bless! And welcome to the collective human consciousness. :)

https://this.ishuman.me/opensource/docs/intro.txt

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Widdiful
Oct 10, 2012

:firstpost:

Ericadia
Oct 31, 2007

Not A Unicorn
it stinks!

LP0 ON FIRE
Jan 25, 2006

beep boop
i think that kind of background music can be randomly generated now with a few clicks. humanity certainly has come a long way! :)

Moo Cowabunga
Jun 15, 2009

[Office Worker.





Phoenixan
Jan 16, 2010

Just Keep Cool-idge
hello i am a human beep boop just like youuuu *spits out a sheet of printer paper*

Ericadia
Oct 31, 2007

Not A Unicorn

LP0 ON FIRE posted:

i think that kind of background music can be randomly generated now with a few clicks. humanity certainly has come a long way! :)

logic pro featuring apple loops

(for real though)

akadajet
Sep 14, 2003

:wink:
:wmwink:

LP0 ON FIRE
Jan 25, 2006

beep boop
less tooth gap lady - people don't want to see that, but you can put her in for a couple parts here and there to make the video more convincing and realistic, that might be a good idea. way more, WAAAAY more of the blue hair lady and more of that smug dude with douchey hair. anyway, those are my suggestions. good luck

prefect
Sep 11, 2001

No one, Woodhouse.
No one.




Dead Man’s Band

Phoenixan posted:

hello i am a human beep boop just like youuuu *spits out a sheet of printer paper*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTVUlbP40tI

Rufus Ping
Dec 27, 2006





I'm a Friend of Rodney Nano

By the way in case you're wondering where I got the idea for the last name.. It started with the realization that last names are no longer necessary. In the old days, they served a purpose: of you were from a small town and ran into somebody, you could say "Oh, he is of the Smith family - I know of them." In big cities this is of course no longer the case. In the old days, your last name is the only thing that set you apart in all sorts of records, ranging from government to workplace and everything in between. Now, your file at work and elsewhere isn't a sheet of paper with your last name on it, it's a computer file. Your last name is simply something entered into one of the boxes, but the file itself is linked to you anyway, so even if the last name box was empty the computer would still find you by your file number - it doesn't care about the last name. Even with the government and so on, you are listed by your social insurance or passport number, and even medical records are becoming digitized, so with each year there is less and less of a use for a last name. You don't care if somebody is a Smith or a Jones - you know them as Bob and Margaret, their last name to you is utterly irrelevant. So it started with this simple logic - if something isn't needed, why have it? Then I realized that last names are yet another thing that divides us. If we knew everybody by their first name, we'd feel closer to them. Notice how you call friends by their first name but strangers by their first and last or just last - now imagine if there was no more of that and you called everybody by their first. People are already divided by a ton of irrelevant things such as skin color or nationality - do we really need another? No we do not. So I figured screw last names, I just wanna be Max. Then I realized I still need SOMETHING to put into the last name box on my government id, so I picked the one thing we all have in common - Human. A generic last name that doesn't mean ANYTHING and connects you to EVERYBODY. See how that last part is the TOTAL opposite of what we have now - instead of connecting, the last name separates? Well so there you have it. Max Human. And to set myself apart (after all you can't have a million Max Humans) and keep my family history, I'll put my last name in the middle - Max Kit Human. Perfect. People liked the idea so much that they started changing their own. Nobody ever asked them to - the first person who did it did so without even telling me first, and the second and the third. Now I run into people on Facebook - people I've never spoken to in my entire life - some from the far corners of the globe, and their last name is Human. Isn't it wonderful? We're like one big family now. Exactly what we've always been, but now we are finally beginning to remember it!

Rufus Ping
Dec 27, 2006





I'm a Friend of Rodney Nano

Rufus Ping
Dec 27, 2006





I'm a Friend of Rodney Nano

Jonny 290
May 5, 2005



[ASK] me about OS/2 Warp
those types of interfaces are great if your entire feed is properly edited stock photos with just enough whitespace

Cold on a Cob
Feb 6, 2006

i've seen so much, i'm going blind
and i'm brain dead virtually

College Slice
lol if your feed isn't just an infinite stream of dillz and vajs

Rufus Ping
Dec 27, 2006





I'm a Friend of Rodney Nano

Phoenixan
Jan 16, 2010

Just Keep Cool-idge
windows 9 metro interface update looking good

Rufus Ping
Dec 27, 2006





I'm a Friend of Rodney Nano

Phoenixan posted:

windows 9 metro interface update looking good

good girl gina

Djeser
Mar 22, 2013


it's crow time again

Hello Friend alcove to bring human. Today in laugh but how to be human: having human contain. Human connection own invoices taping which is vibrational transfer of days. Jumada will ask such thing as how is you are doing or whether you have eaten in a recent time. Remind them you at human and they will beer pleaded.

z0rlandi viSSer
Nov 5, 2013

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat

Djeser posted:

Hello Friend alcove to bring human. Today in laugh but how to be human: having human contain. Human connection own invoices taping which is vibrational transfer of days. Jumada will ask such thing as how is you are doing or whether you have eaten in a recent time. Remind them you at human and they will beer pleaded.
i concur.

z0rlandi viSSer
Nov 5, 2013

Sham bam bamina!
Nov 6, 2012

ƨtupid cat

Moo Cowabunga
Jun 15, 2009

[Office Worker.




lol

SmokaDustbowl
Feb 12, 2001

by vyelkin
Fun Shoe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdAmkx8eAos

A Pinball Wizard
Mar 23, 2005

I know every trick, no freak's gonna beat my hands

College Slice

smugmrsgw

Captain Foo
May 11, 2004

we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

the gently caress is this garbage

jony ive aces
Jun 14, 2012

designer of the lomarf car


Buglord

Cold on a Cob
Feb 6, 2006

i've seen so much, i'm going blind
and i'm brain dead virtually

College Slice

noice

Ericadia
Oct 31, 2007

Not A Unicorn

big scary monsters
Sep 2, 2011

-~Skullwave~-

Rufus Ping posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ompW5mxa5ug

https://this.ishuman.me/

Part 1: Who are you?
Part 2: What is human?
Part 3: What can I do to help?

Part 1: Who are you?

Greetings ladies and gentlemen! :) My name is Max Kit Human, Max Human or just Max for short (I prefer the latter), born Maxim Kit. I'm a kid just like every one of you. I came here (here being Toronto, Canada) from Ukraine when I was almost 13 and, with a few exceptions, have been ever since. Normally I hate talking about myself (how can you ever learn anything if you just keep repeating the same stuff over and over - focus on the other person!) but for the sake of this document I will make an exception. I have some pretty big goals, and I need you guys to believe that I'm actually capable of achieving them. For that you need to know a bit of my business history. If you don't give a crap and just wanna read about the project, simply skip to part 2 below! :)

At 15 I started a gaming site called KGN, or Kickass Gaming Network, which you can still find on web.archive.org at kickassgaming.net. I did the same thing I always do with business: convinced a bunch of people to join me (we had a team of 8) and then started contacting some really big names to get the kind of supercharged boost we needed to start. Within weeks we were able to score awesome content, and months later were publishing global exclusives like the first ever screenshots of GTAII (a huge deal at the time - courtesy of the president of Rockstar) and awesome interviews like that with the co-founder of Bioware and many other big names. Content was king: we started the news updates earlier in the day than all the other big sites, and focused on articles, game and hardware reviews, interviews and screenshots. It was awesome. Then the dotcom industry went bust and you can guess what happened next.

Having had a taste of being my own boss, I could no longer stand high school (why would I need to learn to be an employee if I already knew I would never become one?) and dropped out. I spent exactly a year and day making sandwiches in Mr. Sub, which to this day remains the only job I've ever had as an adult (as a kid I started delivering newspapers and flyers at 13, and worked as a mover in the summers). At about 17 or 18 I ended up without a job (turned the music up a bit too loud at 3am - we were open til 4 in the club district - and the boss's son walked in) and so did my dad (he was a construction foreman and stood up for the workers when their boss, after not paying for months, announced that all their salaries were cut.. 3 months ago). Anyway, so that's how I became the president of a construction management company. By 23 or 24 we had about 75 people in total - my strategy of always focusing on big goals paid off as usual.

By 25 I realized that I was wasting my life - I was making money but not making a difference in the world, and felt unfulfilled as a result. So I decided to quit. Following the advice in Tim Ferris' wonderful book 4 Hour Workweek, I then started my 3rd company, a construction management firm blended with a dotcom, and semi-retired off the passive income 6 months later. I spent the next half a year relaxing on tropical beaches and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. When I decided to quit construction 2 years prior to my semi-retirement I decided to be a film director, and after working on it for a year or two, quit at the last moment instead of making a feature film because I realized that I'd never be able to make ENOUGH of a difference as a film director to finally make myself happy and fulfilled. So I was almost 28 by the time I realized what I ACTUALLY wanted to do: build a sister company for Google. And now here we are 3 years later.

More info: https://linkedin.com/in/maxhuman https://fb.me/iammaxkit https://twitter.com/iammaxkit

Part 2: What is human?

human started out as a design for a social network named peekr in 2011. In 2012 I realized that I wanted to make it MORE than a social network and changed the name to aocao - an ambiguous name like Google that would allow us to make ANY sorts of products. The first one we added was charitable crowdfunding. Then more ideas emerged. I walked around happy as a kite when I realized that my talent for marketing, entrepreneurship and design would soon make me a billionaire. I had more of a talent for each than most of the CURRENT tech billionaires, so it seemed like a no-brainer, and to be honest not even much of a challenge (especially in an age when even tiny companies like Oculus and Airbnb are worth billions). Then on January 25th 2014, I was smoking a joint on a stairway (hey we're being honest here right?) when an idea hit me like a bag of sand on the head: GIVE IT ALL AWAY. Make EVERYBODY the owner of this company, and rename it something that UNITES everybody. I decided to go with it then and there, on the spot. Initially thought to name it something like Earth, and finally settled on human a few hours later when I realized that people were already living outside of Earth on the ISS, and would soon populate the Moon and Mars as well.

That was over 8 months ago. Since then, human has undergone her (starting with peekr) 4th design evolution. She is now almost entirely video based, with only some GIFs, still images and text. The interface is all but invisible. She now consists of over 20 global online services such as social networking, crowdfunding, food delivery and car rentals, and 6 hardware lines including phones, tablets, virtual reality headsets, wireless headphones, smartwatches and later this decade even contacts. Following the announcement of her birth on January 25th, we had several offers to invest (although we have NEVER seriously approached even ONE investor for money) - the best one was for about 3 or 4 hundred grand at a 1.2 billion dollar valuation. There were several others. We turned them all down because we wanted a minimum of 1 million dollar investment, and at a 2.5 billion dollar valuation at the very least. It seemed (and this has only INCREASED since then!) obvious that this company would eventually be worth tens of billions (and at one point we even planned to do a 100 billion dollar IPO on Nasdaq after 2020), so selling shares at 1.2 billion seemed like a waste of money.

We went back and forth for about 6 months with the "give it all away" part - mostly as I struggled and fought myself, because doing so would mean that I would never become a billionaire. But last month, when I thought I was near death, I realized that my one regret in life was NOT going ahead with that business model, so I took a deep breath and made a plunge. I officially announced that I would be giving ALL of my shares away, except for one. It made sense. The plan from day one was to do what Bill Gates did: work for decades, make tens of billions off a huge tech company, and then give it all to charity. So I realized: if all of this money is for the PEOPLE anyway, and all I need to be happy is a decent house, car and money to travel, WHY WAIT 20 or 30 years??! By giving EVERYBODY a share I would also ensure that the company would grow SUPREMELY FAST, so I'd be able to achieve in 10 or 15 years what before would have taken 25 or 30. I knew immediately that this was the right way to go.

So that brings us to today. Today is my 31st birthday, and as you can see on my Facebook I have exactly 8 dollars and 40 cents left. Two years ago I closed my 3rd company (the passive income asset) because the few hours of work it DID require consisted of yelling at people and it was ruining my inner peace. I could not devote 100% of my attention to human with that sort of a destraction. So over the past few years I completely and totally depleted my savings, and even ended up borrowing a few thousand bucks from the fam. None of that mattered though (and still doesn't) - I got a few big people interested in the project (despite hardly even trying) and I knew that once we launched I would EASILY be able to get multi-million dollar investments. This is still the case - although we are now owned by the public, we will still accept investments - the only catch is that they come with a clause allowing us to buy back the shares at a 250% premium or the current valuation, whichever is higher, and that no more than 10% of the shares can be sold - if we want to sell more, we have to buy back some of the old ones first. The other good news is that my 3rd company can be restarted and sold for over a mil, and that I'm owed about 100 grand, and all of that down to the last penny I am donating to human. Even my car. So we're expecting to dump about 50 grand into our bank account in the coming weeks.

How does human operate? Basically the idea is that everybody who asks for a share gets a share. There are no requirements and no approval process. Everybody can only own one share, and they cannot be sold or transferred (otherwise millions of gullible people would be instantly swindled out of theirs). You can even get one if you're a kid, but your share won't have any voting power until you're 12 or 14 (exact age to be decided). So yeah, everybody gets one vote, including myself. There is no management hirearchy - there are (may be?) team leaders, but they are chosen by those they are leading, and they are more like coaches and not bosses. They have the same say as everybody else. In terms of voting power, there is no diference between myself, a salaried employee of the company, an unpaid volunteer or some random person on the street who just requested a share. All the decisions: for what we make, how to make it and how to spend the profits are made together. The people of Earth are quite literally the owners and operators of this company. For this reason, we think of it as the collective human consciousness: all the people coming together as one. Any random person you now see on the street is no longer a stranger - they are a fellow shareholder working on the same goals.

More info: https://ishuman.me https://fb.me/thisishuman https://twitter.com/thisishuman

Part 3: What can I do to help?

So what do we do now? Now we need to launch the web beta of empower charity - our charitable crowdfunding platform. We decided to launch this component of the network first for two reasons: 1) because it most directly fulfills our mission to help people, and 2) because the profits it generates will help pay for everything else, one component at a time. empower charity represents maybe 5% of our network, and we are planning to launch on nearly 10 platforms (web, iOS, Android, Glass, consoles, TVs, cars, so on and so forth) so realistically it's probably about 0.5% of the work. For the beta I also removed about 80% of its features, shrinking the total amount of coding required for our launch to just 0.1% of the total. Just the basics allowing us to launch, start helping people and start making money, and nothing else. You'll notice the included designs show only 2 pages: the main grid of empower charity, and the watch tab (the finished version will have 4 tabs in total) of a crowdfund on empower charity. And again, these are missing about 80% of the features. The total is about 150 pages.

We will start from here and keep building. Once we launch the web beta of empower charity, we will immediately start making a 3.95% commission off all the crowdfunds. Once we can afford to do so, we wil drop that to 0% and even pay the payment processing fees ourself (thereby making this a 100% free charitable crowdfunding platform), but for now we need the money. Also from day one we will start selling hero memberships to our supporters, at $4.95 a month, and accepting donations. So three revenue streams from day one, and then we launch the rest of the network piece by piece. Also this year we will start taking pre-orders for our hardware, and expect to receive tens of millions of dollars in pre-orders alone, and hopefully over 100 million in hardware sales by the end of 2015. Not to mention investments - we'll be approaching 10 tech giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, LG, Lenovo and others with offers to invest 5 million each at a 2.5 billion dollar valuation, and also asking them to throw in a 1 million donation each on top. Long story short the money side is taken care of and we'll be fine and dandy.

This is where you guys come in. The second biggest decision we've ever made, aside from deciding to give it all away, is to also make everything we do entirely open source. Meaning the software AND the hardware. We are hoping the global open source community will adopt this project as their own (because it IS your own!) and help us build it. Worst case, we've calculated that for less than a thousand bucks we can pay a solid developer in Ukraine to put in the 40-50 hours necessary to launch the web beta of empower. Since our only expenses would be my monthly salary of only 3000 bucks to start (less than minimum wage when you count my hours), a 400 dollar deposit for a virtual office and receptionist, and the aforementioned thousand bucks (if we need it), that'd still leave something like 46 grand in the bank to spend on.. God knows what. And don't forget that the moment we're down to the 46, we will unlock the first 3 revenue streams, so a 0 will be added to the end of that number rather quickly! :)

So what can you to do help? Code the drat thing! :) And/or get your friends to. Help us launch this first piece as quickly as possible so that we can get rolling! This coming week the registrations for our for-profit and non-profit (like Google and Google.org), both owned by the public, will be completed. We're expecting the law firm to do the work pro bono. We'll imediately open a bank account with Canada's largest bank - RBC Royal Bank, and deposit all the money I'm donating in there. It will be hooked up to our site to receive the commissions for crowdfunds, fees for hero memberships and donations. As with everything else in our company, the finances will be completely transparent - we'll even ask RBC to make a special view-only publicly accessible bank account that anybody can log into and check things out. And of course, detailed explanations of what every single deposit and expense is, complete with copies of invoices and everything imaginable, will be available online. This is YOUR company - you deserve to know EVERYTHING.

So right now, there is basically no difference between me and you. I've left myself one share, same as everybody else, and as the founder I decided to give myself just two priviledges: the right to set my own salary for as long as I'm involved with the company and my pension thereafter (don't worry, I doubt I'll ever make even 10% of what Tim Cook does, or more than 1 or 2% of the 10 million a day I would have made, like Gates, Zuckerberg and many others, had I kept the company for myself). All I need is a decent house, car and money to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. I don't need a 10 bedroom mansion, 5 supercars and a 200 foot yacht. In fact, chances are that after I buy a couple of houses for the elderly members of my family, and after I pay for my own, I'll end up making even less than what I just described. I don't need savings - all I need is money for life. That's why right now I'm starting off with a laughably small salary, less than minimum wage, because that's all I need to pay for the rent, food and miscellaneous daily expenses. The second priviledge is the right to veto - this is so that people don't accidentally run the company into the ground with their votes, and as soon as I see that everything is running smoothly I will give up this right. It is only temporary, and our Articles of Incorporaton will state the same.

So that's that ladies and gentlemen, that's the whole story! Please check out the video, designs and documents and let us know what you think, share your ideas with us and jump in and help! Tell your friends about the company, donate some time or money, apply for a salaried job, post about this on all the forums and social networks, call the press, or just sit back and watch and enjoy the show. Thank you all and God bless! And welcome to the collective human consciousness. :)

https://this.ishuman.me/opensource/docs/intro.txt

that's the longest introduction to "got any spare change" i have ever experienced

Sweevo
Nov 8, 2007

i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

A Retrospective On Ten Years of SA

Hello. Im Tom Collins, famous for typing more words than anyone wants to read. Today marks ten years of my time here, and Id like to take a moment to reflect on it.

Ive never been a good one for memories of forum events, so this isnt going to be a retrospective of SA forums history. Really, that wouldnt be interesting if you hadnt been there, anyway. Who gives a gently caress who banned whom in 2003, or what fat goon flew to wherever to marry some other fat goon?

Sure, I remember stories of things that happened around here, but really until the creation of YOSPOS, I was just another goon. I had a very low postcount for my time here and no real recognition from any other posters. I used to be known as Death Incarnate the name seemed cool when I was 14, but it got old fast.

Instead, its going to be my observations on forums themselves after ten years of posting on SA and other forums, and why I still choose to read and post here more than anywhere else. I'm crossposting it in YOSPOS and GBS to get two different perspectives on the issue. Thanks for reading.

1. Moderation is crucial.

Moderation is the backbone of a forum. Forums with weak moderation become rife with NWS content (where it isnt wanted), inappropriate or lovely threads, spam, and other crap that makes the forum useless. Overly strong moderation leads to a culture of fear, because inevitably it leads to random bannings that are based on drama between users rather than on forum rules.

In the end, you need to have a core group of mods that are actually a little bit distanced from the posters, who can interpret the rules of each subforum correctly with just enough wiggle room to allow good posters to get away with bending the rules, and to allow poo poo posters to be banned even if they havent outright broken one. They cant fraternize with the posters too much, or theyll start playing favourites, a surefire recipe for drama.

SA has done reasonably well on this count. Im not going to name any names, but generally Ive found the moderation here to be sane, and to deal with drama amongst themselves in an appropriate (and usually hidden) fashion. I dont want this to be seen as me sucking up, so dont take it that way but note that I recognize SA as having had fairly consistent and balanced moderation for a decade, which most other forums cant say.

2. Monetization of posters is just as crucial.

Forums are expensive to run. Server hardware and service contracts arent cheap; bandwidth isnt cheap; administrative staff isnt cheap; and when its something that takes enough of your time to be your fulltime job, it also needs to pay the bills, which isnt cheap either. The king needs his tax.

Many forums resort to whiny donation drives, or switch to subscription models to keep the place running. I registered back when the forums were free, when the glory of the Dot Com era was still a warm enough memory that people thought it would be possible to support something of this size purely on advertising. Its not, though.
Setting a basic price point on an account accomplishes two goals: it turns people into paying customers right from the start, so that they value their account. It also keeps out people who would just register new accounts every day, and thereby makes banning an actual punishment youre out your ten-dollar investment.

The further monetization, through platinum accounts, avatars, and the like, is good in that it offers users the choice of donating further for goods that have perceived value but cost the forums nothing to give. Letting people buy gifts or insults for other people turns the act of giving the forums money into an actual tool for social interaction, which is valuable.

The new cancer thing, well, peoples opinions are mixed on that. All I can say is that if its needed to keep the place running, and the admins feel its a good method for upping the quality of posts, then its a valid experiment. Well just have to watch and see how it goes. I was more in favour at first, but as of late its just encouraging RFA losers to come and post in good forums and poo poo the place up, which is the opposite of the intended purpose.

Im just glad that this isnt the kind of place where every other month a huge DONATE!!! sticky thread appears, and the same few people fling a few bucks at it each time to keep it going. Those methods arent sustainable over time.

3. Being a source of memes is fun, but its also debilitating.

The first big meme that SA launched (even though we didnt actually start it) was All Your Base. SA always had a good group of photoshoppers, and PS threads were probably some of the funniest and best threads in the early days of the forums. AYB actually got some real-world fame, and since then weve always had a bit of a hand in perpetuating Internet memes.

Forum-specific memes are good because they allow new posters, once theyve got a handle on the current memes, to contribute in a fashion that fits in with established posters. On the other hand, its pretty annoying for a new person who nobodys heard of to show up on a thread and post a loving fiestacat. Ultimately, they get run into the ground, and the best thing for everyone to do is to recognize when that happens and move on before it becomes too annoying.

Producing the really sticky sorts of memes that spread around the Internet today requires a faster-paced discussion medium than SA offers, however. When Moot left SA (well, whatever happened) and created 4Chan, he spawned a discussion format more conducive to making memes than SA is. If memes are made by throwing poo poo against the wall to see if it sticks, /b/ has the process down.

Really, its probably for the best that were not actively trying to be a source of memes; they get overplayed far too quickly to really be much fun. What lasts longer is having a culture of people that run with things if someone posts a photoshop thread, having people around that want to run with the idea rather than shouting it down leads to a much more funny and enjoyable forum.

Thing is, its always going to be a lot easier to shout someone elses attempts at humour down heckling, essentially than it is to actually go and produce your own attempts. When you do produce your own, youre also running the risk of having others heckle you, so it can be a little daunting to try. A healthy balance of heckling and running with it is essential to maintain quality.

4. Specialized subforums are a mixed bag.

A long, long time ago, there were far fewer forums than there are today. Im not going to give you a grand history lesson of what forums were first, mostly because I dont really remember what order they all came in. But whats important to note is that over time, the forums have become more and more organized. GBS used to be full of posts on every subject from e/n to cars to computers to Photoshop to stories of peoples lives to short fiction to general hilarity.

I know its a tired old thing to say that GBS used to be better, but. GBS used to be better. For me, it was the forum of choice for perhaps six of my ten years. Id pop over to SH/SC or AI ever so often, but for a long time GBS had the humour and the freshness that made SA what it is.

Over time, though, things were broken out of GBS. There were too many car threads, so AI was created. Too many E/N threads, so E/N was created. And as each of these categories of posts was removed from GBS, you ended up with less material that was actually appropriate for GBS. Whats left? Posts based on news, subject-specific megathreads that are too small to sustain their own subforum, the occasional Photoshop thread.

Its not terrible. Its as good as the general boards of most other forums are. But its not what it once was, and Ill miss the idealized GBS of my memory.

On the flip side of the coin, the subforums can be amazing. For example, AI is a bastion of good car advice, the hardest kind to find on the internet. Theyre a great, close knit yet welcoming community. YOSPOS, my present home, is a fun community of FYAD-Lite shitposting that couldnt really exist inside of any other forum. You cant have that without breaking out of GBS, but once you break it out, you cant have those posters, those jokes, and that spirit in GBS any more.

Maybe its inevitable that as the place grows, GBS slowly becomes a shell of what it once was. Thats fair, and really we should be glad that its still as relatively decent as it is though sometimes the comments in there are pretty loving atrocious. Well get into that later.


5. Regdate bias is inevitable, but its pretty loving retarded.

It doesnt really matter how long someones been around once the range is as long as it is here it only matters that theyve been around, lurking, for at least six months so they have the lay of the land. After that point, the gloves are off, and cool people will be recognized for being cool (and losers for being losers).

Im sure Ive tried to get respect for my regdate in the past, but its a misguided, weak attempt at an argument from authority. Just because someones older or been around a forum for longer doesnt mean they know anything, or that theyre cool in any way. That has to be earned, by posting well and by making friends in the community. You can do that in two weeks if youre good enough at it.

However, I gotta say, most of the 00s and 01s who have stuck around are pretty cool characters. There cant be that many of us left. Cheers to those guys.


6. Dont poo poo where you eat: piracy and porn are awesome, but its clear they had to go.

So theres a seldom mentioned part of the forums history: DPPH, NMP3s, and the Bittorrent Barnyard.
You see, once upon a time, this place was a lot more liberal concerning file sharing than it is now. The porn forum, Dont Post Porn Here, was first (back then it was mostly picture sets, none of these fancy movies!), and the music forum No MP3s Here followed. They were both quality forums with good posts, and the culture of file sharing on here was very condoned as long as it didnt extend to software of any kind.
The Bittorrent Barnyard followed suit, utilizing external trackers but officially permitted for the purposes of sharing music, movies, and TV.

Not to get into any of the drama of it, but ultimately the decision was made that they had to go. I believe it was one of the wiser decisions the forums ever made, despite the fact that those subforums were a huge draw for new members. Keeping them around would have led to more drama and legal headaches than anyone would have wanted to deal with. Luckily, those forums and the communities in them have been completely and utterly destroyed without a trace, so we dont have to worry about them anymore.

I think that any forum that wants to have quality discussion and humour does need to focus on those subjects, and avoid trying to be all things to all people. The influx of members onto SA who were here just for the file sharing forums resulted in tons of idiots who had clearly never used a forum before and were looking for some kind of Napster-like experience, leading to a lower quality posting experience for everyone else. Some of them have no doubt evolved into decent posters over time, and the rest have left or been banned. All in all, it was fun while it lasted.


7. Drama doesnt profit anyone.

Theres a tendency for many humans in social interactions to blow misunderstandings out of proportion. Online, we lose the benefits of vocal intonation, facial expressions, and body language, which leads to a language barrier that cant be crossed without either getting really wordy and really honest, or getting really good at reading between the lines. Realistically, people are bad at both of those.

Couple the tendency to go overboard with the lack of normal social graces caused by everyone being faceless behind their computers, and you can have a festering pool of flamewars and shitposting. Moderation can solve this, but only if the moderators are inhuman enough to be able to do it without rising to the trolls and their flamebait.

Its important for people to take a step back before plunging headlong into some drama with their ill-informed ideas. Usually, people get this idea that theyll be rushing to the rescue of a thread, like a well-read bouncer at a bar separating two combatants and solving their quarrel at the same time. In practice, they just stoke the fire and turn a two-way argument into a three way one, and perpetuate the problem.

Im all for honest and in-depth discussion of an issue, but its crucial that people avoid ridiculous interpersonal arguments that dont accomplish anything.


8. The Goon Stereotype isnt true.

The Goon Stereotype is a 23-year-old fat white American male with poor hair, worse hygiene, and no sense of style. He has some form of autistic-spectrum disorder, possibly self identifying as Aspergers. He likes Anime, bad electronic music, and hacked-together electronics. He has no social skills, is a virgin, and masturbates three times a day to the worst pornography imaginable while eating Cheetos. He works a poo poo job, drives a poo poo car, and thinks hes better than everyone else in the world.

Those goons exist. Theres probably hundreds of them. But most of us are just people. A slice of society; there are hot people on here and horrible people, rich and poor, young and old. If anything, its far more diverse than anyone realizes, though understandably with a bias towards white or whitewashed Americans who are the target demographic.

Its bad for us to have such a negative image of the average poster, because it can encourage people who dont fit the stereotype to act as though everyone else is beneath them. Really, what does it matter who a person is in the real world, compared to what they post online? It would be better for us to judge more on a persons projected character than on the insights it gives us to their real life, because ultimately theyre going to play the part they wish they could play every day but arent able to due to social inequalities.

I almost consider it similar to wearing a uniform in school it limits personal expression, but it puts people on a level footing. Were all wearing the Goon Uniform, like it or not; so it might be a good idea to stop assuming the uniforms so terrible.


9. Getting in with a crowd of posters is actually really easy.

This one could have been called something like IRC and forums go hand in hand, because its true. An IRC channel for a subforum is like the behind-the-scenes spine that holds the thing together. Communities can form on forums themselves without anything else, sure, but the asynchronous form of post-wait-read-post doesnt lend itself to human interaction in the same way that a real, synchronous chat like IRC does.
For forums that arent completely serious, like YOSPOS, people on IRC are generally out of character compared to their forums selves. Its almost like as though the forum itself is some sort of game, and the IRC channel is the discussion between people playing the game one level more removed from the action of posting. You can easily have conversations with other people about themselves, and get to know them, and by doing so become part of the community in a way that you really cant just by posting.

If you want to get in on a community, all it takes is posting, getting to know people, and getting into the IRC in order to really meet the different movers and shakers in the community that give it its particular character. Otherwise, youll only ever see the surface level thats presented on the forums, and youll miss a lot of the undertext.

However, the forums have always traditionally had some level of bias against the corresponding IRC channels. This is probably because the IRC channels have never been official, and so they arent run and moderated by the same crew as the forums leading to an alternate set of administrative types that have no official ties to the forums. Maybe theres fear of IRC cabals or something, who knows. So far, my experience has been very benign, and I believe that a combination of realtime and asynchronous communication leads to a stronger community.

One caveat to this: you have to actually be a decent, likable person for this to work. If you're as much of an rear end in a top hat on IRC as you are on the forums, it's not going to make a bit of difference.


10. Caring and putting work into a post shouldnt be shunned.

Last but not least. This is sort of a personal sticking point for me, and its sure as hell not SA-specific but the problems rampant here too.
I can understand not wanting to read some long rant or tirade that someones bashed out, especially if its formatted badly or if during your initial skim it seems uninformed or stupid. However, its important that we recognize when people put in effort, and respond to them appropriately. If theyre stupid show them why theyre stupid, in as much detail as is needed. If theyre right show them youve read it, and that you appreciate it.
Its not always appropriate in every forum, but certainly its good to have people around that are willing to put some level of effort into things. We may never get a Goon Project off the ground, but as long as people keep putting effort into making quality posts, this place will always be strong. Like I said earlier, its always a lot easier to shout something down than it is to contribute to it but if thats all anyone ever does, there wont be any reason for people to try anymore.



So thats it, ten years of watching people post. Were doing well. Keep doing well and Ill be sure to look back on this in 2020. Im looking forward to it.

GameCube
Nov 21, 2006

Rufus Ping posted:

I walked around happy as a kite when I realized that my talent for marketing, entrepreneurship and design would soon make me a billionaire.

:pwn:

GameCube
Nov 21, 2006

We went back and forth for about 6 months with the "give it all away" part - mostly as I struggled and fought myself, because doing so would mean that I would never become a billionaire.

GameCube
Nov 21, 2006

as the founder I decided to give myself just two priviledges: the right to set my own salary for as long as I'm involved with the company and my pension thereafter (don't worry, I doubt I'll ever make even 10% of what Tim Cook does, or more than 1 or 2% of the 10 million a day I would have made, like Gates, Zuckerberg and many others, had I kept the company for myself). All I need is a decent house, car and money to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. I don't need a 10 bedroom mansion, 5 supercars and a 200 foot yacht. In fact, chances are that after I buy a couple of houses for the elderly members of my family, and after I pay for my own, I'll end up making even less than what I just described.

GameCube
Nov 21, 2006

what the f*ck

A Wheezy Steampunk
Jul 16, 2006

High School Grads Eligible!
i didn't read any post in this thread but i just wanted to chime in that i'm a human too, op

GameCube
Nov 21, 2006

a real human being

GameCube
Nov 21, 2006

<meta property=”og:title” content=”The billion dollar company owned by YOU!”/>

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GameCube
Nov 21, 2006

judging by this guy's story and many others, it's insanely easy to make a decent living as a "small business owner" if you're a sociopath

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