Yes, I've seen that article and I'm familiar with this industry. Are you suggesting that people aren't buying drones? They are. They're just buying them (mostly) from one company, DJI, that in 2017, had revenue of over 2.8 billion dollars. To suggest that consumer robotics is not a thing because DJI has dominated the market is akin to suggesting that operating systems weren't a thing in the 90s.
For my purposes, voice chat is not a useful feature. I want our team's communications to be in text form so that we can communicate asynchronously, people don't have to be online at the same time and it's easy to read back through what has been said previously. I'm communicating with people all around the world, a very different use case to a team all working in the same office or time zone.
I use Slack frequently in about 20 different open source, interest-based, educational and hobbyist communities. I also use it frequently as part of small teams set up for various projects.
> Slack also has a disastrous "feature" wherein any user can cause the SlackBot to send a message to another user. In an open instance (which Slack seems wont to discourage), this means that a user can easily impersonate another user and purport to be sending messages in an official capacity.
Could you tell me more about that? How is that done and is there a way for workspace owners to prevent it?
For me, the voice channels are actually off-putting. I've never been a gamer and don't like the idea of feeling like I'm chatting on the phone with strangers. Text feels much more comfortable.
Thanks for your response. It is good to get feedback from somebody who has used Discord as I am just about to launch a new community on Slack. I will stick with Slack for now.
I've said this elsewhere in the thread, but Slack could already be making money off me if they offered an attractively priced plan for open source and hobbyist communities and gave workspace owners an easy way to forward that monthly subscription fee onto the users. But at the moment I use Slack a lot and pay them nothing.
Slack is also very popular with open source and hobbyist communities. People often seem to assume that it's used only at work, which I guess makes some amount of sense given that the vast majority of paying customers are probably workplaces. Slack would already be making money off me if they offered an attractively priced plan for open source and hobbyist communities and gave workspace owners an easy way to forward that monthly subscription fee onto the users. But at the moment I use Slack a lot and pay them nothing.
Is that still the case? That there is no way to export message history? I'm trying to find a way to publish messages from my Slack channel to my website in real-time so that I can give visitors a look at what they are signing up for. Similar to how Pieter Levels has nomadlist.com/chat/ set up (if anyone knows how he does that, please let me know).
How is Discord superior? I haven't really used it but my first impressions are that it seems very tailored to the gaming community. I have used Slack extensively and it appears more professional. And if Discord is free, how do they make money / keep the lights on?
I do worry about Slack's pricing since there is a vast chasm between their free plan and their paid plans. I use Slack to run some open source and hobbyist communities with thousands of members and if for any reason we were forced to switch to a paid plan (at $x per user) we'd be forced to go elsewhere immediately.
I designed a hardware product but haven't brought it to market because even if it is successful, Chinese manufacturers will reverse engineer it and then have a cheaper clone on the market within weeks, long before I can recoup even the cost of manufacturing, let alone make a profit. And since I can't afford to pursue legal action, it seems pointless to manufacture the product, and everybody loses. I wonder how much innovation is stifled this way.
fpvracing.tv is an online community for the rapidly growing sport of drone racing. I'm looking for somebody to help maintain the site, which is a rails app hosted on Heroku. Email address is admin at the domain.
What are you working on in Shenzhen? And how would I go about finding a company to produce a custom shape/size lithium polymer battery for a prototype?
> My point is that if you make a successful product, you're going to get cloned anyway.
If you're going to get cloned either way, how will you make selling your hardware a sustainable business?
I love hardware (robotics, incidentally) but I'm so hesitant to release a hardware product because of the inevitability and futility of competing against cheaper clones. I've seen it happen again and again in the nascent world of drone racing - somebody comes up with an innovative new design and there's a clone on Banggood three weeks later. Then most people just buy the clone. I don't see how it can be sustainable.
You're off by an order of magnitude. It works out to $840/page.