my experience with the grid
12 December, 2016
This is something that I have been wanting to share for a while. It is one of the biggest disappointments I have had lately in connection with the internet.
In November of 2014 I first came across the advertising from ‘The Grid’. At that time, you couldn’t miss it, it was everywhe re. The promise of a website designed by artificial intelligence (AI) seemed really too good to be true, and it seemed to me to be a great idea. So, after much research, and a long and hard think I finally decided to support, what was at the time, a start-up project.
The Grid start-up campaign was successful, extremely successful and they managed to raise, according to the internet gossip, several million dollars… and that without a product to show. All they had was a website, claiming to be made by ‘The Grid’ although with hindsight I doubt that this was the case. The team at ‘The Grid’ however was impressive and full of high-tech gurus so I had little doubt that they wouldn’t provide the service they had promised. I had hoped to use it to provide content to my site whilst on the road, to keep the site up to date. It took until June of 2015 for the beta roll-out to start and the first of the founding members were able to start using the service. My turn came at the end of 2015 in December, one year after I had signed up. I didn’t mind that because we had been promised that the year’s subscription would start after the beta phase had ended, and bear in mind that the price of the founding member’s subscription was to be reduced for life as long as a valid subscription was kept alive. So all was still OK.
The first version of the site was fairly (read very) basic and not that much was possible, it did however keep updating and improving with time. I wasn’t happy with their choice of Trello as their way of informing users of new things, this meant you had to also join Trello to take part in discussions or risk writing into support to ask questions, suggest new things etc. Also, the Trello entries showed no dates on it, so you had no idea how up to date everything was.
I started to redesign my ‘Grid’ site and eventually I did get something close to what I was looking for and then they changed everything. My site looked like it had gone back to the dark ages of internet design and it need a lot of work to try and bring something normal back again. Support suggested I should just let “Molly” the AI just do everything. This meant you had no idea what was going on. You had to do a redesign based on 3 simple questions. Do you like the design? do you like the colours? do you like the font? Once a design was made then you had lost all your old things. You had no control over anything you could go back to the font you had and you didn’t even know what font you had. The answer was always the same, just let the AI do it. Sometimes I would try 30-40 designs just to try and get rid of the sidebar menu, with no luck. I had been brought up to design websites with good code, W3C compatible, no errors etc. The Grid just seemed to ignored all those things.
By this time “Molly” had decided that I was probably crazy and just had no idea what I wanted so she always brought back the same design without exception, time and time again. Support although extremely friendly only seemed to answer after I had first tweeted something critical of them and so began a cycle of mails, back and forth.
At this stage “Molly” had given up completely and wouldn’t let me do anything except post. I could do that OK, but couldn’t control where on the site the new post came, the Android app was working properly, and I couldn’t redesign. I was really frustrated. Between September and December I counted 67 Mail exchanges with varying promises being made, all with the same result.
And to top it all off I would read messages about great new developments being made, new ‘calls to action’ etc., joining forces with other companies etc. New members would be tweeting about how great everything was… this was all happening when my site was just sitting waiting to be fixed. To be honest they did suggest that I start again, but this didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. It’s not as if I did anything to change how Molly should work. You can’t change anything! you have absolutely no control over what Molly does. I even offered to Skype with someone to explain in detail what was happening but this fell on deaf ears. I just got the standard reply that “someone will reach out to me soon to solve the problem”. I twice received a nice mail saying everything should be working now, but it wasn't working and I just got more and more frustrated.
So, in a fit of rage, I did what everyone who is trying to preserve their sanity would do, I gave up… And on that day, I started looking around for an alternative solution.
You are looking at the result here, now. It took me 2 days to reach this stage and set everything up. This is much, much farther than I ever got with The Grid and I think it looks better. Take a look at the sites made with The Grid, if you find any and I’m sure you will see a big difference. This is not meant to be a personal attack on The Grid and is just the story of what happened to me. To all those who have joined the spacecraft called The Grid I wish them luck but be prepared for a rocky ride. Neil
In November of 2014 I first came across the advertising from ‘The Grid’. At that time, you couldn’t miss it, it was everywhe re. The promise of a website designed by artificial intelligence (AI) seemed really too good to be true, and it seemed to me to be a great idea. So, after much research, and a long and hard think I finally decided to support, what was at the time, a start-up project.
The Grid start-up campaign was successful, extremely successful and they managed to raise, according to the internet gossip, several million dollars… and that without a product to show. All they had was a website, claiming to be made by ‘The Grid’ although with hindsight I doubt that this was the case. The team at ‘The Grid’ however was impressive and full of high-tech gurus so I had little doubt that they wouldn’t provide the service they had promised. I had hoped to use it to provide content to my site whilst on the road, to keep the site up to date. It took until June of 2015 for the beta roll-out to start and the first of the founding members were able to start using the service. My turn came at the end of 2015 in December, one year after I had signed up. I didn’t mind that because we had been promised that the year’s subscription would start after the beta phase had ended, and bear in mind that the price of the founding member’s subscription was to be reduced for life as long as a valid subscription was kept alive. So all was still OK.
The first version of the site was fairly (read very) basic and not that much was possible, it did however keep updating and improving with time. I wasn’t happy with their choice of Trello as their way of informing users of new things, this meant you had to also join Trello to take part in discussions or risk writing into support to ask questions, suggest new things etc. Also, the Trello entries showed no dates on it, so you had no idea how up to date everything was.
I started to redesign my ‘Grid’ site and eventually I did get something close to what I was looking for and then they changed everything. My site looked like it had gone back to the dark ages of internet design and it need a lot of work to try and bring something normal back again. Support suggested I should just let “Molly” the AI just do everything. This meant you had no idea what was going on. You had to do a redesign based on 3 simple questions. Do you like the design? do you like the colours? do you like the font? Once a design was made then you had lost all your old things. You had no control over anything you could go back to the font you had and you didn’t even know what font you had. The answer was always the same, just let the AI do it. Sometimes I would try 30-40 designs just to try and get rid of the sidebar menu, with no luck. I had been brought up to design websites with good code, W3C compatible, no errors etc. The Grid just seemed to ignored all those things.
By this time “Molly” had decided that I was probably crazy and just had no idea what I wanted so she always brought back the same design without exception, time and time again. Support although extremely friendly only seemed to answer after I had first tweeted something critical of them and so began a cycle of mails, back and forth.
At this stage “Molly” had given up completely and wouldn’t let me do anything except post. I could do that OK, but couldn’t control where on the site the new post came, the Android app was working properly, and I couldn’t redesign. I was really frustrated. Between September and December I counted 67 Mail exchanges with varying promises being made, all with the same result.
And to top it all off I would read messages about great new developments being made, new ‘calls to action’ etc., joining forces with other companies etc. New members would be tweeting about how great everything was… this was all happening when my site was just sitting waiting to be fixed. To be honest they did suggest that I start again, but this didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. It’s not as if I did anything to change how Molly should work. You can’t change anything! you have absolutely no control over what Molly does. I even offered to Skype with someone to explain in detail what was happening but this fell on deaf ears. I just got the standard reply that “someone will reach out to me soon to solve the problem”. I twice received a nice mail saying everything should be working now, but it wasn't working and I just got more and more frustrated.
So, in a fit of rage, I did what everyone who is trying to preserve their sanity would do, I gave up… And on that day, I started looking around for an alternative solution.
You are looking at the result here, now. It took me 2 days to reach this stage and set everything up. This is much, much farther than I ever got with The Grid and I think it looks better. Take a look at the sites made with The Grid, if you find any and I’m sure you will see a big difference. This is not meant to be a personal attack on The Grid and is just the story of what happened to me. To all those who have joined the spacecraft called The Grid I wish them luck but be prepared for a rocky ride. Neil
