I am canceling my Readwise as you didn't get me an advance notice for username grabs and I couldn't get mine, so, I have no incentive to promote username I don't associate myself with. You guys need to understand the meaning and value of identity - you can't play games of rolling dice! Learn from how Meta did it with WhatsApp usernames - they did it right, and you screwed up!
Wow, I've never heard about this -- sorry about that!
We specifically let all Readwise subscribers in at the same time (with an email that went out on the same day), giving them access before the general public. I wasn't aware there was actually more we could have done. Were we supposed to let people bid on them? How would we deal with conflicts across two subscribers?
You announce the launch in advance so that people can prepare. Otherwise, you're discriminating people by time zones giving an unfair advantage to people who were awake when you announced it or weren't at work or didn't want to do personal stuff while at work. This is exactly how Facebook did it years ago - they didn't have usernames in the beginning, but announced at what date and time they will open it up to the world. But you didn't have to invest a new identity - you could've used Goodreads or X.com or another one common among your customers. Also, you reserve usernames in high demand and you create some automated granting process - the more social media accounts with that username you link, the higher weight in the claiming process you get, and so on.
But the best approach is not to launch a service with usernames - you gain NOTHING. In fact, you can only piss people off! You launch the service, you allow users to link other social identities and you then decide what to do.
Man, OK. We're not Facebook, I just don't think we had the resources to do something like that. It's a small private beta of a bootstrapped company's reading app... very different from a billion+ user service like Facebook.
On goodreads/X, we have a loooot of users who use neither of those, so I don't think that approach would have work.
I take your feedback and will try to do better next time. We really just didn't think people would care that much, as far as I can tell you're the only person who has brought this up with us.
Hey all, founder of Readwise here, happy to chat about this if anyone is interested :)
I am canceling my Readwise as you didn't get me an advance notice for username grabs and I couldn't get mine, so, I have no incentive to promote username I don't associate myself with. You guys need to understand the meaning and value of identity - you can't play games of rolling dice! Learn from how Meta did it with WhatsApp usernames - they did it right, and you screwed up!
Wow, I've never heard about this -- sorry about that!
We specifically let all Readwise subscribers in at the same time (with an email that went out on the same day), giving them access before the general public. I wasn't aware there was actually more we could have done. Were we supposed to let people bid on them? How would we deal with conflicts across two subscribers?
You announce the launch in advance so that people can prepare. Otherwise, you're discriminating people by time zones giving an unfair advantage to people who were awake when you announced it or weren't at work or didn't want to do personal stuff while at work. This is exactly how Facebook did it years ago - they didn't have usernames in the beginning, but announced at what date and time they will open it up to the world. But you didn't have to invest a new identity - you could've used Goodreads or X.com or another one common among your customers. Also, you reserve usernames in high demand and you create some automated granting process - the more social media accounts with that username you link, the higher weight in the claiming process you get, and so on.
But the best approach is not to launch a service with usernames - you gain NOTHING. In fact, you can only piss people off! You launch the service, you allow users to link other social identities and you then decide what to do.
Man, OK. We're not Facebook, I just don't think we had the resources to do something like that. It's a small private beta of a bootstrapped company's reading app... very different from a billion+ user service like Facebook.
On goodreads/X, we have a loooot of users who use neither of those, so I don't think that approach would have work.
I take your feedback and will try to do better next time. We really just didn't think people would care that much, as far as I can tell you're the only person who has brought this up with us.