I've seen this link posted far too many times in there: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
This site definitely has potential to generate revenue. They could embed video advertisements or use sponsored food or cellphones, etc. Justin.tv might fail, but its model could be successfully extended to other reality tv shows. I believe that is the direction they plan on taking :)
Very interesting if it works out. Latency with EVDO isn't great, but mostly good enough. WiFi is pretty useless for mobile broadcasting because it's not very mobile.
1. Congratulations. In two days, you have managed to create a community more fucked up than YouTube.
2. I started watching because of the outrageous stuff other viewers were doing. When you go to curb the abuse, be aware of this. Many of your viewers may be watching only because folks are doing stupid stuff like ordering pizza and making yCombinator pay for it. Lose the hassles and you may lose the audience.
3. Reality TV shows succeed because they're unreal. TV execs hype up and dramatize all sorts of conflict, because that's what gets viewers to tune in. Nobody wants to see an ordinary person's life, because it's boring.
4. Who do you want to be - Anna Nicole Smith or Paris Hilton. Your success in attracting viewers is proportional to how trashy you are willing to become. Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton remain media darlings because we can look at them and think "Wow, look how pathetic they are." It makes us feel good about ourselves. Unless you are similarly pathetic, people will not want to look at you. Respectable people like Tim Berners Lee or Steve Wozniak seldom end up on the news.
5. If you are respectable and still choose to go on reality TV, you're setting yourself up to be torn down. The justin.tv tagline is accurate: "An exercise in narcissism". Narcissism is going to prompt abuse. People think that since you've set yourself up on a pedestal, you've given them an opening to tear you down.
6. I initially had logged in watch the yCombinator dinner. That proved impractical because of the technology: the audio quality was shitty, the video would randomly drop out, and you couldn't really see anything anyway. Part of the problem for attracting a decent community is there's nothing for decent people to do. That leaves it as a festival for troublemakers.
7. Have you guys not read Shirky? Almost all the problems tonight could've been predicted from his articles. http://shirky.com/.
8. Lose the arrogance. Kyle was bragging about his 1337 MIT CS skillz in the chatroom. Emmett was talking about their being only a finite number of attack vectors, and he'd have them all patched in a week. In my experience, never underestimate the clever things people will do to break your system. People will still be finding ways to abuse it a year from now, assuming it still exists. The arrogance is just an invitation for them to try harder.
9. I won't be back, mostly because this is a complete waste of time. But I thought I'd give you the courtesy of telling you why I won't be back.
\me wanders off to check Joi Ito's moblog.
