What's our marketing hook? What do we do about it?

Just trying to catch up with this thread, and I think this is an interesting angle.

I think the opposite is true, potentially.

Speaking as a non developer who has learned how to make a website via SAFE, the bar to entry is much lower than on the clearnet.

You don’t need to find someone to rent server space from, and you have a ready made Javascript API to work with, so you don’t need to learn extra server side programming.

I’d like to think that with some good CMS style apps that have networking capabilities, SAFE will have a much smoother continuum of social media post at one end, through personal blogging site, to company website at the other end.

I actually think this could be one of the network’s ‘killer features.’

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Gd point, this could be packaged as a “killer app”, one of many I hope. It is also likely to become much more. So a photo roll, website, youtube thing,blog, research paper repository and more. A simple (relatively) app which would capture all the app rewards on a ton of data, relatively easily. Especially if they all start sans commenting etc. So again relatively easy to release incrementally and best of all, no infrastructure costs. The person/team that does this is likely to be in a good place.

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I’ve actually struggled a bit to convey this to developer friends, I think because they’re so used to the ‘full stack’ architecture. They still think Safe is something more to learn, rather than less.

Thinking about it now, maybe the way to express it in developer terms is to emphasise how much can be done with a static website plus the Safe API.

If I build anything, it will certainly have minimal and very carefully thought out levels of feedback! I’m probably in the minority, and fighting a losing battle, but I think in almost all its forms its one of the most destructive and addictive aspects of the clearnet!

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How about starting a topic to brainstorm this. I imagine there’s are a bunch of possible ideas for simple publishing or sharing. If I was twiddling my thumbs I’d have a go.

I’m thinking, what’s that one thing you (random non technical user) would put on the web if it was as simple as “select, add some text, click”?

I suspect there some things people would love to do but which we’re all missing because currently it’s too much hassle, or constrained by some commercial imperative not to do quite what people want.

Like text messaging, which was dropped in but never seen as likely to be particularly useful, but users instantly loved.

I think the simplest no brainer is a share anything app which does all the setup for you so anyone can do it without realising they’ve reserved a name, uploaded a file etc. They select, add some text, then click publish, save (private) or share (private+selected viewers) kinda thing.

If we have a bunch of ideas we can keep a list and they might be a good basis for a Hackathon, or kept as a list of handy apps new developers could cut their teeth on.

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It seems a very obvious big hook if we get it right. The tricky part is folk need to be on Safe to see Safe sites. It’s way to simple to say integrate the clearnet and there will be raging debates about “just do it” as it’s simpler for users etc. If we could remove those debates or ban them from a particular thread then it would be amazing to explore this one.

That’s twice today I have recommended banning/moderating and it feels wrong, but sometimes I think we do need to say here is the subject, stay on track or talk on another thread. Otherwise things get too complex way to fast and ideas killed.

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I’ve long wanted more of this because I think we lose a lot of value by straying off here and there as people jump in without regard to the focus in an OP.

Those keen to explore more widely would learn to “reply on another topic”, so those discussions can still go on. In general I don’t think moderators want the extra work of this which I can understand. Cleaning up topics isn’t a favourite, you get flack for it etc.

EDIT: how about trialling an on-topic-only tag on which mods apply a strict please stay on topic policy and move infringing stuff without question (referring to guidelines). The original poster gets to apply the tag, or not. To begin we could ask original posters to append some boilerplate explaining this whenever they apply the tag.

EDIT2: @david-beinn I added an on-topic-only tag to your brainstorming topic and suggest adding the following boilerplate to the bottom of the OP:
__

Please stay on topic in replies

This is tagged on-topic-only so please stay on topic in your replies, and if you want to spin off a wider discussion please replay on a new topic by clicking the ‘link’ icon (a two link chain) under a post and choosing +New Topic.

This is an experiment, so let’s see how it goes. Thank you!

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:100: To be used for topics that should not stray at all, so strict on topic or similar. To be used with care.

is someone else’s hook on topic?
Just saw this https://onionshare.org/ which I wonder is a good real world story that states a relatable problem and sees the tool as the natural solution:

“When Glenn Greenwald discovered last year that some of the NSA documents he’d received from Edward Snowden had been corrupted, he needed to retrieve copies from fellow journalist Laura Poitras in Berlin. They decided the safest way to transfer the sizable cache was to use a USB drive carried by hand to Greenwald’s home in Brazil. As a result, Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was detained at Heathrow, searched, and questioned for nine hours.
That’s exactly the sort of ordeal Micah Lee, the staff technologist and resident crypto expert at Greenwald’s investigative news site The Intercept, hopes to render obsolete.”

That’s the actual definition of the “internet” in the 90s.
If we are talking about the next level I would add an extra property to it that is unique to the Safe Network: your personal internet or your cloud. Not very catchy, I know, but I am thinking along these lines.

I think the main added value is that we are getting all the conveniences from the cloud without sacrificing of our privacy to use it, this network would be truly making the internet ours.

I am thinking a way we can encapsulate this idea in a catchy way that wasn’t already used in hyperbole with crappy mundane products (the term “personal cloud” has already been used to sell NAS, “personal internet” has been used to promote VPNs…), without sounding nerdy, and to make people care about it.

Not an easy task.

I am not a lawyer but I think Safe would make redundant and obsolete regulations like HIPAA, PIPEDA and GDPR regulations. The savings in compliance and liability would be a no-brainer for any company to adopt it, if the network works as intended.
When patients and other customers truly own their own data, all companies would stop being exposed to all these risks associated with it.

Btw, I would re-explore the original inspiration for the Safe Network. The inspiration from biomimetics in the way the network self-organizes like an ant colony is a spectacular mental imagery. And this is not a “marketing puffery” like much of the superfluous abuse of terms like in other blockchain projects, this truly modeled from true inspiration from behaviors in nature.
I thought the talk given by @dirvine in Google Tech Talks in 2008 was very inspiring and exciting, we should revisit that to get more inspiration from it.

The thing that hooked me the first time was:

“If your computer breaks why do you want to fix it so badly… why isn’t it like your TV or your toaster, just get another one?”

And the rest was intriguing and funny as hell:
“Why is data stationary? It’s all in one place, if your server goes down, data gets wiped, the whole thing is gone”

“What is about ants that scales so well?”

Asynchronous, Network, Transport, System…”

“NAH! It’s actually ants”

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From the convenience point of view one thing I’m thinking is finally having an “internet money” that is actually usable.

Just yesterday I bought a pair of sneakers from the web with credit card, and I had to type so many numbers and on top of that verify with my bank credentials. How clumsy! Then I left my home and forgot my credit card next to my computer. Would be great to have some kind of money baked in the internet.

But, from the marketing perspective this might be difficult. I think any “internet money” is a bit scary to average person.

This is the default policy for all threads, but can be more easily enforced in a “strict” thread as you suggest if people are all aware that slight meandering off-topic will cause their post to be hidden.

Primary users in this “strict” thread are encouraged to more readily flag posts that begin to veer off-topic. A Mod’s role is then just to check that a flagged topic is really off-topic and not abuse of the flag. For the current “experiment”, flagged posts in this “strict” thread will simply be hidden and not organized/moved to a more appropriate Off-Topic thread.

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So continuing my sleep-deprived ramblings I think this would be a nice hook, in a youtuber-like clickbaity way:

"What if the whole internet was like your toaster?"

I think I would click on it, it is absurd and weird enough to make my brain itch.
I would then structure it like this:

  1. Explain how the current internet works
    1.1) Shortcomings: disk failures, third-party trust, hacking risks.
    1.2) Current systems to support these shortcomings, and whole industries that were born to just sustain its inefficiencies. The costs to the end user: insurance, liabilities, compliance, security audits, administrators on-call, backuping and disaster recovery, systems hardening, constant patching (and the impossibility to patch the latest updates in systems in production as soon as they are released), security in depth, etc… and after all this, even in the best scenario, to never be sure you’ve done enough to protect the network. Defending a network sucks, especially in a company.
    1.3) Show examples when all these systems fail catastrophically, and its consequences in our personal life, businesses, economies and the impact in our culture (lots of examples to pick from the “things that would not have happened in Safe”)
  2. Show a toaster.
    2.1) Show a dramatization of what happens when the toaster stops working (toss it, get a new one, get your toast)
    2.2) Show how absurd would it be to have regulations for toasters or paying warranties extensions for toasters or pay-per-toast plans or renting a toaster per month, or a toaster-as-a-service. W-what? Why would you?
    2.3) Ask the question: why can’t the internet be like a toaster? Free of any worries, like an appliance, easily replaceable if it fails. And always yours.
  3. Introduce the Safe Toaster, I mean, Network.
    3.1) An internet that you own, accessible from any device. Does the computer fail?, toss it worry-free and get a new one, and bam!, you get all your files for free, forever. Your data, your toast, free toast forever.

And there is a crumble on the table from the toast, and a few ants come to pick it up… which is a segue to how the network works.

I gotta get some sleep, this is enough crazy talk haha

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Thinking about what Jim was saying about the difficulty in encapsulating the benefits of Safe in a single sentence or catchphrase, why not create a series of mini ads for our target audiences? I’m not suggesting we actually create ads, but there’s a technique called 3-10-30 (I think although I just looked it up and can find no reference to it, so I may be making that up). Anyway the idea is you have a 3-second message (like a headline) a 10-second message (like a standfirst) and a 30-second message (like an abstract or a story) plus a call to action.

The idea is to pull the interested reader from one to the other before they lose interest. I find it a useful technique for finding the right sort of wording and ideas that may resonate, and because you’re not tied down to trying to find that one slogan it can be creatively freeing. Here’s a first attempt.

Target: App Developers

Bye bye server-side

This may be the last time you ever have to configure storage

Not everyone’s a full-stack developer. Most devs just want to craft a beautiful app that people will enjoy, but the ugly reality is that configuring storage, databases, servers and security is something that comes with the territory. Until now. With the Safe Network there is no server side because there are truly no servers. Content addressable, linked-data-compatible and fully encrypted, the Safe Network frees you from back-end drudgery.

Click here to start building your first Safe app right now.

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Target: Privacy aware end users

Dave, it’s Alice. We can’t trust Bob

An everyday tale of internet betrayal

It really hurts me to say this but after all these years I don’t feel I can trust Bob any more. I’m convinced he’s passing on really personal stuff about me to Carol, and God knows what she’s doing with it, but Eve seems to know more what I’m doing than I do myself. It’s scary. So Dave, from now on let’s chat and share over the Safe Network. It’s private and secure and no-one can eavesdrop. Other friends are joining too. See you there.
*Names of corporations have been changed for reasons of confidentiality (remember that?).
Join Alice and Dave on Safe. Click here for an invite.

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Target: Bloggers

Stop paying ISP hosting fees

ISPs and DNS providers and certificate authorities all charge recurring fees. Stop paying and your blog is gone for good. Here’s how Safe is different

On the Safe Network you can forget about recurring charges for your blog because it’s pay-once-keep-forever. Rates are way lower than subscription sites, and unlike free blogging platforms there’s no-one making money off your content but you. Best of all, your content is published forever. Yes really.
Pay once, publish for ever: Click here to find out more

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These would be great for Twitter using an image with a hint of branding for the long text.

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Yeah, I’m thinking of it at the moment as a way to chuck some ideas at the wall to see what sticks, but ultimately that would be the idea.

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Keep on chucking.

[There’s a song somewhere in there]

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My thoughts -:
In my opinion end users wouldn’t even look at SAFE network if we pitch it as “network of networks”, “own your data”, “Decentralization” etc. Like it or not, most don’t care about privacy or owning data. People will be willing to trade off privacy/owning data for ease of convenience. We wouldn’t have Facebook, Google etc otherwise. Also, to some extent other projects such as Sia, Filecoin etc solve some of these issues.

So, what makes people take a look at SAFE? This is where I think the focus should be.

What is the one thing that

  1. Only SAFE network can offer and no other network can
  2. People can easily relate to
  3. Tangible benefit
  4. Might lead to take an action

I think it’s - Data permanence.

My initial tag line would be - “Pay once. Store forever”. This one thing would satisfy all the above 4 criteria. I mean think about it. People do recurring payments every month just to keep their photos on Amazon, Apple & Google. If we show them there is a better alternative we would gain some traction. Then we can expand on that. Saving money could be a trigger point for most users.

If we just focus on storing photos, videos and songs alone, we would have tons of data which in turn can lead increased farming interest and eventually to more dApps.

On a second thought, “Pay once. Store forever” might sound like a scam. Maybe we can expand that to be like “Pay once. Store forever. Securely and easily”.
Ease of use is another thing that could be a selling point. All other decentralized projects are complex. Safe is easy to start with. The only challenge or downside is obtaining SAFE token. The more easy we make it to obtain SAFE token, the lesser the resistance to try out the network will be.

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“Pay once. Store forever. Security, Privacy, and Freedom without the hassle.”

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