School
And now, it's almost week 10 into the semester, and I'm taking a Master's in Artificial Intelligence in the same university I did my undergraduate studies (linked, in case you are curious). "How's that going?" Well, it's been pretty tiring to be working + studying. A normal weekday looks like this for me: Work > School > Study > Sleep. I'm just really, really lucky I don't have to do OT. When my friends ask how I manage to juggle work and school, I tell them I have little to no social life. Which is quite true... I socialise at work/lunch/on my phone and hardly hang out with friends on weekday nights or weekends.I experienced a burnout 6 weeks into school and spent the entire recess week doing nothing related to school at all, just to recover from the burnout. I'm still feeling a little burnt out/stressed these days but it's mostly because I let my school work pile up as I allow myself more time to rest. Which honestly might not be the smartest thing to do because it causes me more stress. Lol. Anyway I'm just trying my best for school, to learn as much as I can and hoping to pass with decent grades. Many ppl in my line of work will tell you that there's no point in taking a Masters...
I don't think I've shared this on my blog before (more on why I haven't been updating this blog later), but I'm working as a software engineer. It's also been more than 3 months since I took an internal transfer to another team within my firm and I'm really happy with the decision. It's kind of like changing jobs as I had to go through the usual interview process for my current team. But at the same time, it's not a completely brand-new job where I need to relearn everything as I'm already familiar with most tools and practices that my firm employ. I'm happy with my decision because it fulfilled the reason why I changed team - I wanted to grow technically.
I initially did not consider changing teams. But my (ex) boss left the firm earlier this year, and he was the one who provided me with really great opportunities at work to demonstrate my abilities and with him leaving, I thought it was a good time to change team too with no hard feelings. Prior to that, I've already put in my application for Masters, and that was because I felt that I was plateauing in my old team (same role) and wanted to satiate my learning hunger. As to why I was plateauing, I'm not going to share as it's kinda complicated to explain and probably quite boring...
So after I put in my application to change teams, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a letter of offer for the graduate studies. I accepted it thinking it's really a waste to pass it up considering that the process is highly selective (I believe they only accepted 20% of the applicants). In my line of work, having experience in building applications, etc. counts a lot more than getting all As in your undergraduate studies. I believe that's because we can be measured by our output (which is pretty tangible). So in all honesty, I will not get a raise just because I have a Masters degree (unless I'm employed by the government or my job specifically needs that skillset, but that's usually PhD level). It will however, satiate my curiosity (as in understanding the theory of neural networks, bayesian networks, etc.), give me a better chance of taking on AI-related projects in the future and also allow me to make new friends!
My point from the 3 previous paragraphs is that I am taking the Masters to learn, and it's ok not to score As in everything (I always believe the scoring system is only useful to a certain extent). I'm not saying I'm not trying my best. I am. But the thing is, I will not be upset if I do not get As at the end of the semester (it's super ingrained for most of us in Singapore to do well in school - get all As - by our parents in order to have a 'better life'). If I want to be absolutely practical, employers do not care about your grades for a Masters degree unless of course, you are applying for a PhD programme. So between work and school, health and sanity, I'm trying to strike a balance such that I'm able to learn and pass at school while not overworking.
Dayre
If you have read my first post, I explained that I'm back to Blogger because Dayre announced that it's shutting down. It was really sad for most of us who has been using the platform for YEARS and because it was kinda abrupt. I thought they made money off their stickers or from people choosing to purchase DayrePlus (which allows you to privatise whatever posts you want), but seems like not many people paid and being in the red for so long triggered the new CEO to just shut it down. There was a save Dayre effort and a group of investors bought over the company so that the app doesn't have to be shut down. They planned to make the company profitable so that the app can continue. So of course, I was pretty excited, because the Blogger mobile app is really terrible, and I very much prefer to be able to pen down my thoughts on the go and have followers (just my real life friends tho, lol) who would follow me for updates and comment on my posts like in Instagram. If you just want my opinion in brief, please scroll all the way to the end. Otherwise, read on.I kept waiting for news and I stopped posting because I didn't want to have to manually backup my posts again if I decided that the new Dayre wasn't for me. I think Dayre wasn't performing well too as it has some bugs here and there (I didn't face them because I didn't post much) and the new team said they were looking into the bugs, but because they are taking over the Dayre system, they need time to find these bugs and fix it as they are not familiar with it. It took forever before the new team finally posted an update saying that they will release Dayre 2.0 earlier this year and they'd decided to rebuild the app instead of fixing and enhancing the old app.
So just my 2 cents on this since I'm a software engineer. It takes a lot of effort and time to build an app, especially from scratch (I think most non-tech people are unaware of this or are overly optimistic about timelines) and if you don't have that many engineers. It can be quite costly just to make an app which is probably why the new team decided to get developers from India as the wages are cheaper. However, if it took months to build Dayre 1.0, it will also take that many number of months to build Dayre 2.0 or more because you are trying to replicate all the features that Dayre 1.0 has which might have been rolled out incrementally over the years. It would also require a period of testing to make sure that the app is stable (no major bugs). I think they really had to weigh whether it was worth rebuilding the app, or just making some changes to the existing app. I have 0 idea what they did, but my impression from reading their update is that the developers rebuilt from scratch.
The new team said that Dayre 2.0 will have 0 ads as ads are not profitable (really? I honestly have no idea, I just assumed ads are profitable from all the ads in mobile games) and not suitable for such a small community. They decided that they will adopt a gated community strategy. In other words, they will charge both readers and writers a monthly fee to use the platform but will provide a free one month trial.
Alright, I see they need to prioritise making money.. they didn't reveal the price of the monthly fee at that time (Sorry I forgot the date; I don't have access to the platform anymore so I can't check either, so all these are based on my memory. Forgive me if I remembered wrongly) and said they would only do so a few days before the launch. I remembered thinking to myself, OK, that's fine, I can wait. And for a while there were no updates, so everything was pretty much in limbo. I still see people actively using the platform but I lost all interest in writing on the platform.
Then, they happily announced the launch of Dayre 2.0 early this year (I think March?), emphasising that it will be so private that no search engines will be able to find your posts although people on the platform can. And then they realised that they did not build a search feature into the new app which is critical la. I mean if nobody can find your posts on search engines already, then obviously they would need to be able to search in your app right? -.- So anyway, they said they will roll it out soon once they have that feature in. But it took months before I saw an update again. And that should be sometime around August.
The official release was 1 Sep (iirc). And before that they finally released the pricing. They did some polls on price prior to the release and I was in a way surprised that they decided to price the monthly subscription at SGD$3.50 (no option of yearly payment). But this price is only for users who sign up before end of september. and it was a way of them saying thank you as they will raise the price after that (they didn't mention how much). The catch is that although you get all the benefits like unlimited photo/video uploading (which they might charge future users), you only lock that in IF you continue to subscribe at that price. Meaning that you cannot stop your subscription at any point and get the same price/benefits again after which.
My thoughts on the app will be numbered so you can follow easily.
1. I thought the price at $3.50/month is still ok. It's not cheap, but it's not expensive either, considering that they are offering unlimited storage. But then again, if you are like me, with the know-how of hosting your own blog, and knowing how to take advantage of all the free storage solutions out there, your cost will probably be something like SGD$0-20 / year. But of course, $3.50/month is the cost of convenience.
2. What I didn't like was that even though they said they wanted to reward the old Dayre users, it's not set up that way. If they really wanted to, they wouldn't have said you cannot stop your subscription at any point if you still want the benefits for being an old Dayre user. Plus the benefits also applied to anyone who signed up during that Sep period. So really, it should just be early Dayre 2.0 user perks.
I was curious about the new platform, so I decided that I will utilise my one month free trial to determine whether I want to be paying $3.50/month for the rest of my life for Dayre. I'm using an android phone so I thought they would integrate the monthly subscription with my Google play account, but they had their own payment system integrated. They promised it's secure and it didn't look sketchy so I entered my CC info (which will only be charged when my free trial ends. Exactly like any other free trial platforms, e.g. Netflix).
That began my one month trial (on Sep 3). During that period of time, many users complained about bugs which led me to think that they did not do proper UAT (user acceptance testing). It was surrounding the main functionality of the app, like unable to post, image resolution is so low, search results are only limited to 10, no infinity scrolling, etc.
3. I did not have a very pleasant one month trial. Namely, because the app is still unstable. To be honest, I don't use all the features (like I don't actively search for content to read. I'm more of a writer than a reader on the platform). But knowing that there are so many bugs on their app bugs me. The only bug I found was that the status of posts reverts to public even after I set it to private.
4. Not everything was bad though. The best improvement for me was that each post can be up to 2000 characters instead of 500. There were updates during the initial period about the known bugs and I was pleasantly surprised that they fixed quite a lot of these bugs within the first week or two. But there were still more bugs and after a while, they stopped posting updates.
5. People were also complaining about how they were not getting responses even after dropping emails for days but the team responded that they are getting high volume of emails and just to be patient. IMO that's not good. The industry standard is to reply within x working days. And really, they should do that, instead of letting people guess when they will be replying. If necessary, hire more people during the initial launch, or don't sleep, but aim to maximise customer satisfaction. After all, you are CHARGING for your product after the free trial.
6. Users also asked them to extend the free trial period given the bugs but they were unwilling to. It left an unpleasant taste in my mouth because I really wouldn't want to be paying for an unpolished app.
7. Users also reported that Dayre was consuming HUGE amounts of data in the comments section. Users were seeing 1-3 GB of mobile data consumed over 2-3 days. I'm not sure if it's because these users were reading other users' posts which has many pictures and Dayre did not optimise the pictures (after the low res fix) such that each picture is rendered at full quality. It could also be that these users are posting photos and uploading many photos/videos at full quality will consume a lot of data. It's a bit hard to verify my suspicions though. There was no update on this before I cancelled the subscription. This issue is a bit scary to me as I usually use less than 3 GB of mobile data per month despite having a limit of 10 GB. I think it's terribly hard to be using so much data unless you are watching videos. Even surfing on the web doesn't use that much data even though websites can be quite data-consuming.
8. The main thing that puts me off (surprisingly no users complained about this publicly) was the startup time. The old Dayre started up really fast, while the new version has to animate the Dayre logo as it starts up. To me it's wasting 5 seconds of my life unnecessarily.
The new platform offered the following:
- Unlimited Text, Photo & Video Uploads
- Members-Only Community
- 3 Privacy Setting for posts (Self, Close Friends, Dayreans)
- In-App Search
- Full Sticker Library Access
- Unlimited Favourite Posts
- About Me page
- Like & Comment
- Co-Dayre
- Exclusive Content
- Community events
- Lifestyle Rewards Store (coming soon)
- Full-Feature Web Version (coming soon)
- Chat & Inbox (coming soon)
9. The whole premise for the new Dayre to be a gated community was so that people feel safe and secure in penning down their thoughts as posts are not searchable on search engines and people have to pay to see what they write and only serious readers will do that. (But I think it's flawed because $3.50/month is NOT REALLY A DETERRENCE la if someone really wants to harass/stalk you, they would. And they get free one month trial to do that 😅) To be safe, you can choose to privatise your post to only Close Friends/just yourself like in Point 3 of their feature list. I would really have preferred a freemium model though where my posts are public and then decide whether I need Dayre's protection. I don't really see it as a selling point...
10. For point 11, they did have 2 community events while I was on the free-trial. All it did was made me feel like I wasn't part of the community because the community is made of mostly mothers, brides, from what I see from the trending hashtags list. I'm neither of those and can't relate. I was quite curious though because the old Dayre didn't have such events. The first event was for moms and it was a kinda like a seminar as the topics the speakers talked about are all for moms. Obviously I did not participate. The events are totally optional though, so I didn't based my decision for not using the platform on that, but I thought it'll be interesting to highlight this feature. Their second event is some limited edition handbag thing which I don't get. -.-
11. So I can't review points 12, 13, and 14 of the feature list because they aren't released yet. I think it would have been much better if they already had the web version. Or at least announce how soon is the "coming soon". I might have continued with the subscription because I'm such a curious person if they had said that the web version would be released in Oct. I have a feeling this would be months though, considering they took months to work on the in-app search feature...
I think the coming soon features hold a lot of promise, but somehow I just cannot justify why someone should pay to read my content and if they are charged, then Dayre should pass on the profits to me? LOL.. Anyway I think someone asked if the team will consider charging a different price for read-only / write-only / both but they said no. I just don't understand their business model. Having that pay wall will deter a lot of potential users (the free trial doesn't help that much because of the friction in having to put in your CC details).
The team really should read this book called Platform revolution (I'm reading it for one of my courses in school). The book talks about monetisation in Chapter 5 (or 6) and gives many examples on what worked or did not work for other platform companies.
So will I pay to use Dayre 2.0?
In my opinion, the nice thing about it is that it's a micro-blogging app which I can use on the go. For me, it's not about the community, as I write mostly for myself and others who might find my content helpful/interesting, which then means a gated community doesn't make sense. The main deal-breaker is even though I *might* be okay with paying a small sum to post content, I cannot justify why readers should pay!How I think it should have been: I'm largely supportive of a freemium model because that's how you get users via network effects, don't piss users off and still monetise. If they really want to make the community safe, they should just let the users decide whether or not to privatise to post. Or have a separate feature which users have to pay so that their content does not show up on search engines (but honestly, i won't understand why they will charge for it since many platforms have this for free, like tumblr). As I said, I don't understand their business model, so maybe I'm the one who's not getting it. After all, i'm not running the business, and don't have a business for show so I'm really not in the position to comment, other than providing an evaluation based on common sense...
