As a long-time reader of Daring Fireball I learned to be highly skeptical of the things that are promoted there. In the case of Wavelength, I thought and still think it’s a solid app, but as a product it’s ultimately hindered in its growth by the invite-only nature of the group chats it offered.
To be clear, these group chats are actually hidden from the public. You join by entering an invitation code or receiving a link. There is no way to discover group chats by browsing or searching for them.
So I was completely surprised by Daring Fireball recently hinting at [0] Wavelength’s goal of becoming a breakout hit as a social platform.
Say what?
Without a large marketing rocket to pull you into orbit, I’m not sure how you can achieve any kind of success as a social platform with unlisted and private group chats. In the case of WhatsApp the boost came from a gazillion people having the common pain point that sending text sucked and/or was expensive.
It’s also worrying that they only had enough gas in the tank to keep the lights on for little more than a year. A year less than their previous endeavor.
But my questions in the hope of learning from this situation are:
Why not make some groups more visible than others? Example: The Dithering podcast has a group. [1] Why not show that it exists and inform about the ways to get in?
Was there any work done towards tools to help group owners handle high volumes of user influx and chat moderation? Are those the pro features hinted at in the TechCrunch article? [2]
Every time we tested any of the child protection features as adults the software failed basic tests. It did so ages ago with Mac OS X when we only had nieces to worry about, and more recently on macOS and iOS when we wanted to setup something for our own kids.
In a way, I’m glad that I’m being forced to sit down with my kids, set a timer, and be present and watchful. But as they grow up this model will no longer be feasible and I dread the day when after reevaluating Apple’s progress in this area, there’s still going to be unacceptable bugs.
Yes, please don’t assume that most people who speak German call it a revolution either.
Wende means turnaround and that’s good enough for the rest of us.
But today I learned that Hungarian is a Uralic not a Slavic language and so of course I had no chance discerning which word in «rendszerváltás» stood for system or change, which made me mad enough to want to look it up:
I know Hungarian doesn't normally have any Indo-European roots, but it can of course borrow words from neighboring languages, so I would have wondered whether váltás could have be borrowed from a Romance language, from the same root as volte/volta (from Latin volvo), meaning 'turn' (particularly given the possible cultural influence of German Wende, which we were just discussing).
I checked on Wiktionary and this nice theory is not right; váltás has been traced back to Proto-Finno-Ugric roots and has known cognates in other distant Uralic languages. Oh well! At least we live in a miraculous time where one can easily check etymologies in various language families in five seconds. :-)
But amusingly, "revolution" itself also literally etymologically means ... turn!
The names given to these important events are always controversial and are often politically motivated. For example in Hungary the 1956 revolution was called a counterrevolution under socialism, or for a more recent example the election of Orban in 2010 (who has been prime minister since) is often called another "rendszerváltás" in opposition circles.
Also, Hungarian being an agglutanative language the word "rendszerváltás" breaks down into simpler roots: "rendszer" = "rend" (order) + "-szer" (unique suffix) and "vált" (to change) + "ás" (suffix which turns verbs into nouns). I find this language really cool because of the fact that most words decompose into very simple morphemes.
Interesting. This -szer suffix seems to be used a lot. Attached to hajtó, it turns driver to fuel. Attached to autó, it turns car to car service. Attached to pàra, it tuns vapor to vaporizer. Attached to fékező, it turns braking into brake fluid.
Seems like adding -szer turns the meaning of the word into its enabler.
