I have pondered the sensibility of using AI to support the initial birth of new communities. Given the needed social validation of seeing both 1. A populated community and 2. The tone of the community being grounded, non-toxic and useful.
The alternative is having a community born that will be small, have early adopters who can be overly passionate or critical and gatekeep folks from discussion. That means high effort to curate initially.
It’s a pity that the leading eBike brands like Van Moof and Cowboy are not available in Australia.
I believe part of the reason for the delay & resulting country exclusivity is due to needing a repair presence to support the bikes.
Speaking to an independent senior bike repairer, they told me that they’re unlikely to fix eBikes as they can be more complicated & once they touch a bike to repair the onus is on them to bring it to restore to a repaired state (ie if you pay for a repair and it’s not repaired then the fault will lay with them until corrected).
So unlike traditional bikes that largely are free & operate mechanically similarly, you’re more likely going to see a more electronic car-style repair model (eg where only Tesla are repairing Tesla cars) and a push to consolidation where the 3rd party bike manufacturers or parts (eg Bafang motors or no-name) will lose out to those who have a physical store & large network (Trek, Giant, etc).
I’d love someone’s opinion on this to validate or challenge the thinking here — as for now, it seems I’ll wait forever and never to get a Van Moof or Cowboy & importing seems a dead end since it wouldn’t be repairable by any local repairer.
Reading the comments, I thought I’d jump in to try Apollo again. I recalled it being stifling and yep sure enough, it hasn’t changed:
Basic navigational functionality such as swiping through content from one post to another is not available by default, instead it is behind a paywall.
Look, I totally get if there’s premium functionality such as notifications, better posting functions that you need to charge for it.
But as it exists it has less functionality than the default reddit app in which you can navigate. If you’ve already broken user trust by degrading a basic service I will not trust to pay you for the rest.
The alternative is having a community born that will be small, have early adopters who can be overly passionate or critical and gatekeep folks from discussion. That means high effort to curate initially.