This is excellent, thank you again. I would guess I'm mentally in the same place as you describe yourself in the first paragraph -- and reading other comments

This is excellent, thank you again. I would guess I'm mentally in the same place as you describe yourself in the first paragraph -- and reading other comments it sounds like many HNers would self-assess similarly. It's that (probably startling) transition to 'until we started getting demands from companies to advertise for them' that most of us have never experienced, and I can see how that would massively skew the expectations on both sides, especially as popularity / traffic increases and demands get more frequent, emphatic, dubious, etc.