I noticed a bit of buzz from a
recent tweet I made announcing that I now have a desk and a real company that runs TwoCans. Mostly the buzz was "how are you making money off of us?" since there are clearly no ads and this site is still free.
The short answer is: I am not making a profit. TwoCans still costs money to run. However, the longer answer is that TwoCans is a platform that I want to use in a larger ecosystem that could potentially yield profitable technology.
But first, a quick statement to clear things up:
your hand-drawn avatars are NOT being sold behind your back in some sort of pixel art black market. That statement also applies to all your private data. That is not my business model, nor will it ever be.
The company I've created is called String Labs and focuses on two things. The first is to build up TwoCans into a modern social platform with an emphasis on developer extensibility. The games SDK will be expanded to include multiplayer games and also interactive non-game types of apps. For example, the QA itself may potentially be converted to use this system and still integrate seamlessly with the rest of the site. I don't really expect the developer side of this to appeal to more than a small percent of users, but the results of this will be beneficial to everyone. My goal here is to not just create a large array of apps for users to spend lots of time on, but also make it easy enough to create these apps that the entire workflow for this is a compelling experience to introductory programming and create a space that is really geared towards playful tinkering with code in a social way.
This brings me to the second thing that String Labs will focus on. The product line of String Labs is a set of cloud-based compilers, an IDE, tutorials, and other related tools where TwoCans is the flagship showcase of these in action. While plenty of these things do exist already, one of the key features of Crayon (the programming language I created and am using for all this) is that it is, as far as I know, one of the only localizable programming languages, meaning that it can be switched to non-English languages. Currently there is a world-wide surge in requiring programming as a course in pre-college curriculum. But the state of programming education in non-English-speaking countries is not very ideal. Educators basically have two options for course material: force kids to memorize the English phrases like Harry-Potter-style magical incantations OR use a graphical toy programming environment such as Scratch, which is localized, but only effective up to a certain age and complexity. While it will always remain true that professional software engineers must learn English to get the most out of their career, the burden of English as a gateway to introducing programming to someone for the first time, especially younger audiences, is a large unnecessary hurdle. This is where String Labs and its Crayon-based cloud tools come in. My goal is to create a turn-key solution for course software for various ages and languages.
Expanding TwoCans helps build a developer community. A large healthy developer community creates more stable tools. More stable tools supports my larger goal. But this is going to take a long time and my goals are kind of long term. And if it doesn't work out, I will fall back and focus my efforts on just TwoCans, because TwoCans on its own is still a pretty cool project to spend my time on.
So how am I paying for all this in the mean time? I am able to self-fund TwoCans for another few years while I work on this. But if TwoCans has a
sudden surge in traffic or if my full plans do not pan out and I change my focus to just working on TwoCans or if my appendix bursts, I may have to consider the possibility of introducing ads, promoted questions, etc. But I will hold off on that as long as possible as I'm pretty proud of the fact that this place is still free and ad-free. But please rest assured that I will never sell private data as a business model. Ever.
I also fully support ads if that is the path you decide to go down. This would be the first site I turn ublock origin off for tbh. You've given 61071 users and counting a great experience for a long time out of your own pocket, and we owe you.
If I had the volume of traffic to actually justify putting up ads, the income might not necessarily be enough to hire someone, but enough to at least contract periodic help for things that I don't excel at. Like a UX designer.
The majority of bots I've seen are ads pasted directly into super old user blurbs. What's the best way to bring these to admin's attention? Troll reports thread?
Edit: Also congrats, I'm wishing String Labs only the best.
P.S. I'd buy a Twocans shirt in a heartbeat if they were a thing.
I'll second that.
EDIT : Also, just out of curiosity, is there any sort of rough timeline for when to expect new features/maintenance/changes/updates?
The first wave of changes will be making things load in real time rather than per-page load. My first targets are going to be the page header notifications and the messages.
I take full credit
Cool I'll post a list once I accumulate a good amount. Most of them seem to be registered 2012-16 for some reason.
Does that make the Mods interns of String Labs?
You haven't even shown up for work yet!
I second that notion. Being hired might be nice
Blake, I've got community support. This is the guy they want answering the phones at String Labs.
"Two Cans and String: A Netflix Original"
Back in March I stayed awake for two days while stuck in various airports and accidentally wrote a sit-com. I checked the pitch rules for some reason.
Can you post that, please? Sleep-deprived writing is always interesting to read.
Also, I guess we’ll have to just make our own streaming service then.
🤫
Edit: spam baleeted
Blake, why aren’t these already a thing? Merck is not only a good way to make money, it’s also a fun way for us to advertise the site and our association with it. And also, if you ever need money, make a gofundme, and post it in the forums or as a question. We would all be completely happy to help.
Edit: yes, I know this thread is dead, but I don’t care I just took a look and I felt the need to say this.
I've kind of been down some of this path with my old site/community (Nerd Paradise):
Oh cool, I like the sound of that.
also GL adsfjkl;
Well, I mean
You essentially used a forum-based website
To create a forum
About another forum-based website
Which has its own forum
It just seems a little redundant. But I suppose it could serve as a meta-TC&S?
I think.
Maybe it can just be a question archive. And a place to spread the glory of TwoCans(hopefully at a manageable rate).
Maybe it can just be a question archive. And a place to spread the glory of TwoCans(hopefully at a manageable rate).
Yeah, that’s the idea.
There's gotta be a Pinewood Derby happening somewhere, right?