I'm sure the company is completely legitimate, but just looking at their website front page has my scam alarms sounding left and right.
I have to have a VIP Code or join a waitlist, I can't just sign up? It's not a packed night club worried about the fire marshal, it's a website and on the internet you only need to hype things that don't stand on their own.
There are no navigation options and the page itself is as slow as my old grandma rolling through a patch of mud.
They made the terrible UI design decision to treat the page like a vertical slide show, meaning I can't scroll text to where it is comfortable for me to read. Don't do this. You're not an artist setting up a canvas to be viewed in all its glory; you're an engineer designing an interface to allow real people to navigate information. Just let the user scroll the page like normal. Fancy design is bad design.
Scrolling through the slides it just gets worse. Nothing of substance is said, just the standard marketing spiel that every shifty cousin, infomercial presenter, and shady startup has been using since the beginning of time; life is hard, existing solutions are too complicated, you're so busy and frustrated, with our solution your life will be so much better. What is their solution and how is it different? Not a peep.
But don't worry about any of that, look at all these awesome 3D animations!!! I mean, what screams we're a technically and practically superior service that can sell itself on its own merits more than spending a bunch of money on fancy graphics that take up more than fifty percent of every page!? Wait, I know, failing to optimize those graphics so they don't slow down the entire page; that will really show that we're a competent company!
After slowly scrolling through a dozen slides, finally the bottom of the page and useful links... or maybe not. There's a link to a ToS page, but no About page link, so I still have no idea what purpose this company is supposed to fill.
The Terms themselves are fairly standard butt-covering, but a few parts do jump out as worth mentioning.
In addition to the service getting the normal license to display a user's content, one also agrees to extend this license to anyone that uses the service; this seems to be an attempt at avoiding the problem Instagram ran into with users making copyright complaints over their content being shown on 3rd-party sites using Instagram's embedding mechanism. Nothing shady here, an understandable and acceptable move.
Sections 13.2 and 13.3 are two that need to be pointed out. The former attempts to remove the user's right to sue the company by forcing arbitration (specifically in New York and you might have to pay for the privilege) and the later attempts to remove users' right to form a class action against the company. The idea behind clauses like these are the legal equivalent of black magic and are unethical on their face as their goal is to take away one's right to protection under the law. They are also very possibly unenforceable as it biases the contract toward the more powerful party and in some jurisdictions they are explicitly illegal. Regardless, they are definitely a protection only needed by companies that haven't ruled out intentionally breaking the law and/or harming their customers.
Lastly, buried in the ToS is a link to their Privacy Policy. Nothing surprising there, just your everyday 5,000+ words detailing all the information they'll gather about you, where they could get it from, and who they may share it with. The part I like the most is that they make a point of listing "Publicly Available Sources" as one of the ways they could find information about you. Something almost refreshing about a company willing to admit they aren't above diving into your local library's microfiche archives if that's what it takes to gather more information on you.
My conclusion: They couldn't tell me what their service is much less give me any reason to think it would be useful, but there are a number signs telling me they aren't competent enough to build an informative website and several more signs that this place might just be some kind of scam, con job, or at best a hype driven fly by night money sponge.
Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
It doesn’t get much better when you actually get in, fancy graphics, ugly UI (but I can put up with that if the thing works), slow and makes very little sense.
I didn’t look at the website in detail just saw pretty pictures and people promoting it so I thought I would check it out.
So far nobody seems to have anything positive to say so I am guessing I will just delete my profile if nobody gives me a good reason (looking unlikely)
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I'm sure the company is completely legitimate, but just looking at their website front page has my scam alarms sounding left and right.
I have to have a VIP Code or join a waitlist, I can't just sign up? It's not a packed night club worried about the fire marshal, it's a website and on the internet you only need to hype things that don't stand on their own.
There are no navigation options and the page itself is as slow as my old grandma rolling through a patch of mud.
They made the terrible UI design decision to treat the page like a vertical slide show, meaning I can't scroll text to where it is comfortable for me to read. Don't do this. You're not an artist setting up a canvas to be viewed in all its glory; you're an engineer designing an interface to allow real people to navigate information. Just let the user scroll the page like normal. Fancy design is bad design.
Scrolling through the slides it just gets worse. Nothing of substance is said, just the standard marketing spiel that every shifty cousin, infomercial presenter, and shady startup has been using since the beginning of time; life is hard, existing solutions are too complicated, you're so busy and frustrated, with our solution your life will be so much better. What is their solution and how is it different? Not a peep.
But don't worry about any of that, look at all these awesome 3D animations!!! I mean, what screams we're a technically and practically superior service that can sell itself on its own merits more than spending a bunch of money on fancy graphics that take up more than fifty percent of every page!? Wait, I know, failing to optimize those graphics so they don't slow down the entire page; that will really show that we're a competent company!
After slowly scrolling through a dozen slides, finally the bottom of the page and useful links... or maybe not. There's a link to a ToS page, but no About page link, so I still have no idea what purpose this company is supposed to fill.
The Terms themselves are fairly standard butt-covering, but a few parts do jump out as worth mentioning.
In addition to the service getting the normal license to display a user's content, one also agrees to extend this license to anyone that uses the service; this seems to be an attempt at avoiding the problem Instagram ran into with users making copyright complaints over their content being shown on 3rd-party sites using Instagram's embedding mechanism. Nothing shady here, an understandable and acceptable move.
Sections 13.2 and 13.3 are two that need to be pointed out. The former attempts to remove the user's right to sue the company by forcing arbitration (specifically in New York and you might have to pay for the privilege) and the later attempts to remove users' right to form a class action against the company. The idea behind clauses like these are the legal equivalent of black magic and are unethical on their face as their goal is to take away one's right to protection under the law. They are also very possibly unenforceable as it biases the contract toward the more powerful party and in some jurisdictions they are explicitly illegal. Regardless, they are definitely a protection only needed by companies that haven't ruled out intentionally breaking the law and/or harming their customers.
Lastly, buried in the ToS is a link to their Privacy Policy. Nothing surprising there, just your everyday 5,000+ words detailing all the information they'll gather about you, where they could get it from, and who they may share it with. The part I like the most is that they make a point of listing "Publicly Available Sources" as one of the ways they could find information about you. Something almost refreshing about a company willing to admit they aren't above diving into your local library's microfiche archives if that's what it takes to gather more information on you.
My conclusion: They couldn't tell me what their service is much less give me any reason to think it would be useful, but there are a number signs telling me they aren't competent enough to build an informative website and several more signs that this place might just be some kind of scam, con job, or at best a hype driven fly by night money sponge.
Great rant with some excellent points.
It doesn’t get much better when you actually get in, fancy graphics, ugly UI (but I can put up with that if the thing works), slow and makes very little sense.
I didn’t look at the website in detail just saw pretty pictures and people promoting it so I thought I would check it out.
So far nobody seems to have anything positive to say so I am guessing I will just delete my profile if nobody gives me a good reason (looking unlikely)