Snail Mail Sign-Ups
9 points by dangroshev
9 points by dangroshev
Snail mail today costs about $0.60-0.70 per letter in the US. A snail mail signup system is just a paid admission cost with extra steps and the revenue goes to the post office instead of the service. You could save people a lot of time and hassle by just putting up an online paywall. If your goal is to guarantee humanity though, a web of trust like lobsters uses is probably a better approach.
Collecting payments can create a lot of legal and tax complications and it's a can of worms that many people will not want to open. Snail mail signup doesn't create any such problems.
Oh that reminds me of a thing. A related thing I've seen people do is "email me proof that you donated $1 to a charity and I'll email you a copy of my zine" online, which also has good economics and very little risk of legal or tax complications.
Last year, as part of research for a larger project I’m working on, I found a handwritten blog which invited handwritten comments: https://web.archive.org/web/20250723213012/https://handwritten.blog/2022-10-01-hyperlinks-in-handwriting.html demonstrates the result. (The sizing is painful, particularly when viewport width exceeds 800px; .post { max-width: min(640px, 80vw); } improves it a lot.)
Unfortunately, the registration lapsed and the domain has since been squatted.
I’d like to see more people play with concepts like these, breaking out of the increasingly-rigid traditions, whether the end result is practical or not. Definitely I’m going to; I’m currently working on a new personal website which is what would be called in art “experimental”. Full 3D space (CSS-powered, and not requiring JS for basic functionality), handwriting prominent, including ultimately letting others join in. Oh, and a pipe organ; turns out synthesising one to very high realism is surprisingly straightforward (like, a few dozen lines with the Web Audio API; so it’s almost entirely glue code to tie together all your keys, ranks, stops, &c.). And making that collaborative might get interesting.
I believe handwritten.blog was a project of ~nathell. I was sad to see it discontinued and the domain being squatted now. But I'm glad to see fellow Lobsters interested in integrating handwriting into their sites, and I too would be interested in seeing your experiments. I also plan on putting up a few handwritten pages (along with their actual texts) on my personal site one of these days.
https://indieweb.org/handwriting lists more examples of handwriting on the web.
Thanks for remembering handwritten.blog! Yes, sadly I ran out of motivation and fell victim of the domain being squatted. But I have now resurrected it at https://handwritten.danieljanus.pl – and applied your styling suggestion!
I’ve been loosely working on a system to turn a scan into a custom font so that the text would be selectable, copy-pasteable etc. to run a site like this.
The handwritten comments are so charming! Thanks for the link :)
Very excited to see your page when it comes out
I don’t like the font route: you lose far too much character and capability. For making text selectable, I prefer the route often seen in PDFs: invisible, absolutely-positioned-and-sized text atop the image. You can do that reasonably well with SVG. There are some more tricks to it, I’ll be writing about it along the way.
The ARRL operates a service called Logbook Of The World. Signing up for it involves requesting and waiting for a postcard, and that postcard gets you a secret to get your certificate signed. Truly a bizarre system for a hobby.
"Can receive mail at the public registered address of the license holder" seems like a fairly straight-forward way of authenticating that you are who you claim to be?
Mmm, but then there's this site where people can sign up to do physical tasks for AI bots for a dollar
Maybe I'm spending my spare time the wrong way, but the use of "instant gratification" here sits wrong with me because my mind instantly wandered off to a random project's bug tracker where I'd leave a "hey, I noticed this bug while testing your software. Feel free to close, I'm not sure if I will keep using it, I just wanted to report it".
Also just briefly looking at a lot of logins I use regularly, yes, a good chunk is me getting something out of the signup, but maybe only half of them.
Which services are suited to this model though? Maybe forums and sites like lobsters, where you might spend a few years, but there needs to be more like a "we have a spam problem" and less "we're offering this service and some amount of abuse is just normal" and surely not "we desperately want new users", which is kind of a problem, especially for new stuff that lives off of interaction of humans.
But yeah, I'm not sure how many services I would have ever really signed up for if this was the norm. Not many for sure.
I have a friend who works at a company that puts an API on snail mail. They have competitors. I'm sure if this was widespread enough to attract attention you'd start getting snail mail slop. :)
The US government's single sign on at www.id.me will send you a postal letter with your sign-on code when you register. You can come back to the website the next week and enter the code from the letter. I guess this is the only solution to some intersection of regulations, but I think it's cute.
um..... eep. thanks for the heads up. I guess I'd better go do that now if I want to file my taxes in time...................