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ericholscher
Joined 3,105 karma
I am helping to make the software world care more about documentation with my projects Read the Docs and Write the Docs. Also working to build privacy-first developer ads to help monetize those docs with EthicalAds.
https://www.ericholscher.com
Email: eric@
- ericholscherSeems like this is the reply you wanted: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=45372303
- 4 points
- Been using Django in production since 2008, and so happy with my choice. Absolutely amazing being able to keep the same knowledge and workflow for my whole career so far, and still have a modern, maintained piece of software as a base. The Django Admin still makes my life better all these years later.
Props to the Fellows who are keeping these releases running on time and getting better every year. Boring software FTW!
- Yep -- our story here: https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse... (quoted in the OP) -- everyone I know has a similar story who is running large internet infrastructure -- this post does a great job of rounding a bunch of them up in 1 place.
I called it when I wrote it, they are just burning their goodwill to the ground.
I will note that one of the main startups in the space worked with us directly, refunded our costs, and fixed the bug in their crawler. Facebook never replied to our emails, the link in their User Agent led to a 404 -- an engineer at the company saw our post and reached out, giving me the right email -- which I then emailed 3x and never got a reply.
- Yea we all have a lot of books to read, but trying to figure out how the group wants to learn something and discuss is hard. Especially when the goal is having some business benefit, not just reading for fun.
There’s a lot of “paper reading” clubs which might also be interesting to look in to.
- Love this idea! We wrote up a post about the book club we were running at our small company, and it was great for expanding people’s interest and understanding of different topics: https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2022/05/running-a-company-boo...
Picking a book was often the hardest part though, so this tool having recommendations and voting seems like a really nice solution.
- I usually use :q! which seems to do the same thing
- I've been working in this space for a long time, where I'm one of the co-founders of Write the Docs: https://www.writethedocs.org/ -- we focus more on software docs.
The view from the industry is basically that STC was a bit behind the times, and was slowly dwindling in terms of reach and value. They still had some active chapters, magazine, and academic journal that provided value for folks, but membership wasn't as valuable as it had been.
They have been around a long time, and had a wider purview that WTD, focusing on many different types of technical writing. They had members in industries like Automotive, Engineering, and Aerospace, as well as Software.
The best way to think about them is something like the ACM in the software industry. They have been taken over by more current community approaches in various areas (eg. Pycon), but also still doing some more traditional stuff that adds value but isn't as relevant to day-to-day practitioners.
- We’re talking specifically about a SaaS app in this post. I’m well aware of this working at small local levels, and even mentioned in my comment that it might work in niche environments, but I have a hard time believing it would work for a disconnected SaaS app, where there isn’t some larger form of Community bonding people together.
- This is a beautiful vision, but I think it would be hard implement in practice. I’m trying to imagine how a pitch like this might work. Do you offer the customer/members some kind of profit sharing? A discount on future services?
Given that customers often want to avoid lock-in on any purchasing decision, it seems hard to build a service that has a larger up front psychological and legal commitment. I love the idea of getting bonus points in life for building structures with collaborative ownership, but realistically most people and businesses only want a simple “buy a service that I can cancel” relationship.
That said, I'd love to see someone try it! I think it could work well in a niche environment, or something like a Kickstarter where people feel they helped bring something into being.
- Hey Dave,
Glad you're still doing cool things :)
Read the Docs is pretty much all open source, including the billing code (https://github.com/readthedocs/readthedocs.org/blob/main/rea...), but we are structured like a normal company, with some custom bylaws that protect the OSS codebase if ownership changes hands. We haven't found anyone else setting up a competing instance or anything, but that might also be because the product is kind of niche.
I kinda love the idea of having people in the community that use the service have some kind of ownership over the platform. It would likely lead to longer term loyalty of the userbase, which would help keep the project sustainable and avoid the enshittification cycle.
We've played around with sharing ad revenue that we generate on documentation pages split with the projects, which is partially a win/win way of sharing in the upside of success.
Anyway, I don't have a great answer here, but wanted to say hi, and give a bit of context from our place in the world.
PS: You might also talk with the folks here: https://zebrasunite.coop/ -- they are structured like a co-op and mostly come from the tech/design community.
- We did get $7k out of one of the AI companies based on the massive bandwidth costs they caused us.
https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse...
- This keeps happening -- we wrote about multiple AI bots that were hammering us over at Read the Docs for >10TB of traffic: https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse...
They really are trying to burn all their goodwill to the ground with this stuff.
- 3 points
- Haha. I think they are definitely relevant, and I’d call them a technology more than a tool.
That is mostly just that we don’t want folks going up and doing a 30 minute demo of Sphinx or something :-)
- This is a great post. I’ve also been having a lot of fun working with embeddings, with lots of those pages being documentation. We write up a quick post on how are using them in prod, if you want to go from having an embedding to actually using them in a web app:
https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2024/04/using-embeddings-in-p...
- 26 points
- 2 points
- For those saying "just use a CDN", it's not nearly that simple. Even behind a CDN, the crawlers on our site are hitting large files that aren't frequently accessed. This leads to large cache miss rates: