This group purchase is limited 10pcs, YouTube&Twitch fans more than 1000, Geek post more than 200 or have other forums post experience priority to buy .
How about no?
Edit: Let me be more eloquent. If you need "influencers" to sell your product for you, then you need to make a better product or advertise it better. I think this kind of elitest, gatekeep-y bull**** of only selling your product to influencers needs to stay far away from this hobby.
Let me say here I 100% back this comment up. Let me tell you why. Let's take a quick look at OP's history in Geekhack.
It's full of "Nice!" or "I like this" comments. There are however three things that make me shiver.
Exhibit 1The first one being about an early IC the OP posted, called the KORNO65, which has been deleted leaving everyone in the thread confused. OP's history shows a couple comments there, but I would wager the original post has been lost due to the deletion. My keyboard spider senses start to tingle.
Exhibit 2Another thing, and this a serious one, is that in this post, he claims:
"Why limited 10pcs?
- We can't wait to share our product, which has been in the design stage for 14 months from the initial idea"
Which not only does not answer the question as to why only 10 pieces, I also find weird because not only his account was created earlier than that, but in their comment history (comment n.18 in the above images), they state:
"I have been interested in keyboard diy for a long time, and I finally decided to do something by myself. Now I have set up a team to design an electrostatic capacitance & mechanical gasket aluminum shell. I hope you will like it"Which is dated may 19, 2020. Was the electrostatic capacitance project the KORNO? Also you don't know bullocks about what you are saying because an "electrostatic capacitance" does not exist and second because "gasket aluminum shell" sounds like a missile you are launching somewhere. You don't even know this community's jargon, costumes and rituals.
So no OP, you haven't been designing a god-damned thing for 14 months. You basically admitted to started designing in may. So you have been lying to us.
And honestly, who the hell are "we"? Who is your team? How many people are there? Are you designers, engineers, industrial designers (which even the Gater-on can be these days apparently) or just hobbyists? WHO THE F ARE YOU
Exhibit 3This. The pièce de résistance:
"This group purchase is limited 10pcs, YouTube&Twitch fans more than 1000, Geek post more than 200 or have other forums post experience priority to buy". We could understand "we want to make this exclusive" or "since we are new, we want to keep numbers low to learn while keeping quality". But no, you basically said
**** you, only 10 pieces, we will proceed to use hype tactics to sell this product which not only tells us you are a douchebag but also points towards the fact you don't trust your product. You might want to clarify the reason for that, but my money is on it's simply not a good product.
The use of "influencers" and "hype" is something that is making this community grow larger and we love that, but that use has its downsides. The most glaring of them being, it's very easy to hype up a horrible product and selling hundreds of it in a single build stream whilst destroying the reputation of a good one that simply didn't attend to the streamer's particular likings -- not to the streamer's fault, but to the audience's that understands a "I would have the top bezel smaller" as a "THIS IS LITERALLY HORRIBLE. DONT BUY THIS". This has a very bad consequence in this hobby because we are losing objectivity in what is a good keyboard or keyset or artisan, and instead we are shaping the hobby more towards "what is prettier and has better hype". This has a double negative effect: on the community side, it has generated a downwards spiral of flipping and over-hyping that has made aftermarket nearly impossible to get into, constraining people into either getting at GB, paying three times the price after they are delivered, or simply enver getting the keyboard they want. What if I don't want to pay 2k USD for a good 65% keyboard? From a designer's perspective, the fact the community is enabling bad designers by buying their objectively bad but hyped keyboards while willing to pay hideous amounts of money in the aftermarket for the very same bad-but-hyped products make good-intentioned and community-invested designers to either stop designing, keep putting out the same stuff over and over, or simply having their interest dwindle. And all of this has made the community overly competitive and toxic because people are frustrated. Also because people are a-holes in the interwebz.
Not only that, your sentence sounds gatekeepy, elitist and we don't want this here. If you want exclusivity for the sake of exclusivity, get the crap out and never come back. We want people to have nice keyboards. Having open-sourced my stuff and tried out of my heart to popularize keyboard design and make it more accessible to aspiring designers, this sentence offends me personally.
Keyboard design is serious business. It is very technical, intricate and takes a lot of practice and skill honing to get right; let alone make a hallmark product. ai03, Upas, Hiney, TGR, all have been designing keyboards for years before landing the products they have. Some of these designers are higher-educated in engineering or computer science and design products this professionally. They order prototypes even before the IC and sometimes revamp the whole thing just because of feedback; take Sagittarius for example. Not only that, many of these designers were beaten out of existence because they at some point slipped with our community. This that you are doing is outright disrespect and we will not take it.
Final thoughtsDon't buy this. This is totally wrong, this post should be re-written and we should combat this mentality that pretty=good.
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EDITs: corrections and minor addittions