6 ms·

If you're going to tear down a competitor's product and shill your own you should probably be up front about it.

• Clubber 7y ago
  In the type of capitalism the US employs, transparency such as this often puts one at a competitive disadvantage. We have an entire industry dedicated to misleading consumers: advertising and marketing.
  • stronglikedan 7y ago
    That industry has existed everywhere for most of civilization. Perhaps even the second oldest profession.
    • jayd16 7y ago
      Hmm is this a fair assessment? Seems like most consider modern advertising to originate in the late 1800s. At the very least you'd say there was an inflection point sometime after the printing press, no?
• abhisuri97 7y ago
  I think that if a blog shilling a company/product is hosted on said company's website, they're already sufficiently up-front about it.
  • carlisle_ 7y ago
    I really don't think so, I've never heard of this company I didn't know what they sell. I had to poke around the website and read the comments here to realize. That's really the exact opposite of being up front.
    • SkyMarshal 7y ago
      I’ve never heard of Plausible either but the instant I browsed to the article I suspected they were a competitor. I skimmed the table of contents and saw the last item was recommending a product with the same name as the website, and my suspicion was confirmed. They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything.
      • carlisle_ 7y ago
        >They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything. Wtf, this is the opposite of "up front." You had to poke around and figure it out yourself based on a suspicion. Up front means that they just tell you, no figuring out required.
        • lghh 7y ago
          "Reading the link" isn't quite poking around, is it?
          • overeater 7y ago
            You don't know what it is from just reading the link. And even that itself is not upfront -- browsers have been trying to hide the URL for a while now. What if you read it on Google AMP? I agree with the other commenter that this is misleading.
            • lghh 7y ago
              I should have been more clear - reading the content of the link.
              • carlisle_ 7y ago
                You mean at the very end of the article after they finish trashing GA?
                • SkyMarshal 7y ago
  • semas 7y ago
    i think the title is misleading. It says "Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website" but it's content means "Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website, and start using our software"
  • cortesoft 7y ago
    The blog seemed to very intentionally not mention the company's product until the very end. They should have led with that.
    • SkyMarshal 7y ago
      It's on the company's own blog under their own domain. It's not like this is a submarine article or the like. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
      • cortesoft 7y ago
        Sure, but I had no idea the company was an analytics company until the last paragraph. I clicked on the article from HN.
        • welly 7y ago
          You and me both. It's not obvious up front that this is a GA competitor if you just click on the link and read the blog post. You do have to delve a bit deeper, unless you know who Plausible.io is.
• ogre_codes 7y ago
  Seems like a fair number of articles on HN lately are of this vein. A pitch veiled as a criticism of another product. I know a lot of people agree with the premise of ditching Google Analytics but don't necessarily want to read a biased pitch piece about it.
  • tyrust 7y ago
    >lately This has been the case as long as I've been here and probably long before.