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The context for how this has gotten back on the radar: Today, Suhail Doshi, founder/CEO of Mighty (and previously the founder/CEO of Mixpanel), tweeted [1]: T

The context for how this has gotten back on the radar: Today, Suhail Doshi, founder/CEO of Mighty (and previously the founder/CEO of Mixpanel), tweeted [1]: This week I've witnessed some of the most rude, mean spirited, dismissive people. I suspect IRL they're much different. Meanwhile, there's been an outpouring of support, encouragement, and optimism to counter-act it all. My team & family appreciate it. All fuel for fire. I gather much of this happened in the HN thread [2], which included this gem [3]: This is like a parody of the current state of affairs in modern web development. Except it's actually serious. Sigh. I am so disappointed in our industry that tools like this even need to exist. It really makes me want to quit programming entirely I guess it's up to all of us to reflect on our reactions to new products/concepts, and consider what it says about our own place in the world, and exactly what kind of "help" we want to offer to those who are expending effort to try and make something better. [1] https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1388377957895315458 https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1388377957895315458 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26957215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26957215 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26960946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26960946

mellosouls 5y ago
This seems an unfair assessment - to consign those comments to coming from "haters" (though the one you quote is over the top, the first is fair comment to be debated), and not in keeping with the OP article here itself which is about those who attach themselves obsessively to particular people.
- tomhoward 5y ago
  Nobody that saying everyone who questions or criticises is a hater. Just that there is an important difference between people who raise legitimate questions or objections and express them reasonably, vs saying they "root for [your] company to crash and burn on principle" and "hope [your company and others like it] fails and fails hard" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961051. The thread had its share of both. The top comment was reasonable and Suhail replied to it with an interesting perspective. PG's point is that the more successful you are, the more "haters" you'll attract, in addition to fanboys, reasonable supporters and reasonable critics, and that a key to surviving the rollercoaster of commercial success is being able to identify the haters from the rest and avoiding letting them hold you back from doing good work. EDIT: People are objecting to the sentence in the original version of my comment that the linked comment "wish[ed] for personal harm". Fair enough that that can be seen as an inflammatory interpretation. For what it's worth I consider people angrily wishing for your company to go bust, which can often lead to personal impoverishment and career/reputational damage to the founder to be equivalent to a wish for harm to them, but I don't need others to agree with that.
  - lanternfish 5y ago
    Where in that comment does it advocate for personal harm? It seems to me to be an entirely valid (if somewhat extreme) ideological viewpoint about cloud computing applied to a product. This is absolutely a _reasonable_ critic, it's just that their criticism is fundamentally non-constructive because, by their analysis, the entire business model is in violation of some goodness criteria. Haters exist, but haters are fanatical. That threat had pretty much exclusively well reasoned and argued analysis, even if that analysis was remarkably critical.
  - morelisp 5y ago
    That comment does not wish personal harm on the product's creator.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - geofft 5y ago
    That comment is not wishing for "personal harm to a new product's creator." It's wishing that the market rejects a business. There's a deeply reasoned argument in that comment about the merits of the business model and it is anti-intellectual to dismiss it the way you would dismiss unhinged claims for violence. I understand that a side effect of a business failing is that the people working for the business lose their jobs. But if anything, that argument would apply primarily to the employees of the new product, not the creator. The creator understands that a new business is a venture - an attempt, not a guarantee - and that for many reasons it could fail. And, more generally, it seems like an awful slippery slope to characterize wanting some other business to not succeed as a desire to harm anyone. Suppose I agree with Suhail's goals but also I think I can execute on the idea better and I start a competitor. If there's only enough room in the market for one winner, and I want to be that winner, am I now wishing harm on Suhail too? Suppose I start a business that competes with some old-school giant ripe for disruption. Am I attempting to cause personal harm to the C-suite of that business? This is exactly what people are concerned about with Paul's article. Once you get comfortable painting some critics as "haters," it's easy to dismiss all critics that way. Haters and fanboys do not spring up from the quantum foam; they might not present their arguments in the best way, but if you have an overwhelming number of one or the other, there's quite possibly a reason for it.
morelisp 5y ago
> what kind of "help" we want to offer to those who are expending effort to try and make something better. This seems predicated on the assumption Mighty is trying to make something better, or even at one level removed the assumption that Suhail Doshi thinks Mighty is trying to make something better. That's before we get into the unstated assumption about what the "something" is and if it should be improved.
bogwog 5y ago
The anonymity/distance of the internet leads to rudeness, but that's not a good reason to dismiss a valid criticism. Dismissing those people as haters is just enclosing yourself in a bubble. If you're going to be launching stuff on the internet, you gotta have a thick skin for rudeness and personal insults. No amount of passive aggressive blog posts is going to change that fundamental aspect of the web/human nature.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
> Today X tweeted - You can stop right there - taking people on Twitter seriously is a bad idea.
a-dub 5y ago
moving the browser to the cloud to add compute power in order to deal with an ever expanding problem of front end code getting crappier, more complicated and slower reminds me of the classic "tape worm food" kids in the hall sketch. it is a sad state of affairs that such a thing need exist. i think what we really need are browsers that limit resource usage thereby forcing front end people to actually think about performance.
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
The HN thread did not seem "rude, mean spirited [or] dismissive" to me. People are obviously skeptical about the product and price point, but the majority also seemed curious.
- tomhoward 5y ago
  Fair enough - I just followed up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27006562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27006562
FlyingSnake 5y ago
> Sigh. I am so disappointed in our industry that tools like this even need to exist. But isn't this a valid concern? If we're at a stage that we have a thin client of a thin client we are correct to raise questions. This is Hacker news after all. Why are the SV elites so quick to jump gun and claim victimhood when they face ridicule and criticism? We don't see the mom-n-pop shops that closed operations last week whine in such fashion.
- kubanczyk 5y ago
  >> I am so disappointed in our industry > isn't this a valid concern? "Valid" is such a low bar. It's supposed to not be mind-bogglingly boring, if there's a bar to pass. And I don't think it qualifies, but that's subjective.
- tomhoward 5y ago
  > But isn't this a valid concern? If we're at a stage that we have a thin client of a thin client we are correct to raise questions. This is Hacker news after all. "Raising questions" is fine. Using someone's product launch to throw a tantrum and say you "want to quit programming entirely" is not raising questions. The matter of why the web is slow is deep and complex. But I grew up with Windows 3.1, 95, etc, and they could be pretty slow too. All that is peripheral to the fact that Mighty has spent two years working on a product that is one possible remedy to this problem, which people can choose to use if they want to. Nobody has to use it. > Why are the SV elites so quick to jump gun and claim victimhood Most of the objections to this essay seem to paint the act of identifying "haters" as "claiming victimhood" or being unable to handle "valid criticism". The YC partners and top founders all know that valid criticism is healthy and extremely important to listen to. YC's motto is "Make something people want" (they give you a t-shirt with it printed on it when you first walk through the door as a founder). The thing PG says to do more than anything else is "listen to your users". Good investors/founders don't carry a victimhood mentality. If they do, they fail. This essay is about understanding that some of the more extreme critics are not really critics but are "haters" and that where that is the case, it should be recognised, for the sake of the founder's sanity, which is a very precious commodity. Retorting that founders should have a thicker skin about legitimate criticism is not refuting the essay.
havernator 5y ago
I think skepticism and dismay are understandable reactions to “we stream a remote web browser to a local web browser so you can browse while you browser, and it costs $50/m” Doesn’t mean it’s not going to work. Doesn’t mean that, if it works, that’s not a harsh indictment of the industry, or that if it becomes the norm it won’t enable worse (spying of various sorts seems like an obvious application of this, which maybe people wouldn’t be so upset about if it weren’t so damn normal for tech companies to head that way) None of that’s mean to express, under the circumstances.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tomhoward 5y ago
Further to my comment above, to be fair to Suhail and HN, he didn't call out HN in his tweets, but he did point to the retweets of his launch tweet: https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1387063023521595394/retweets/with_comments https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1387063023521595394/retwee... That said, our future selves may look back with mirth at the HN commenters who wrote variants of "VNC can already do this".
marrs 5y ago
“I’m so disappointed the tool needs to exist” is not a criticism of the tool, is it? The person you quoted seems to be complaining about the state of the web more broadly
im3w1l 5y ago
> I suspect IRL they're much different. Of course people would never say such a thing to you irl. But they do say such things about you.

mellosouls 5y ago

This seems an unfair assessment - to consign those comments to coming from "haters" (though the one you quote is over the top, the first is fair comment to be debated), and not in keeping with the OP article here itself which is about those who attach themselves obsessively to particular people.

tomhoward 5y ago
Nobody that saying everyone who questions or criticises is a hater. Just that there is an important difference between people who raise legitimate questions or objections and express them reasonably, vs saying they "root for [your] company to crash and burn on principle" and "hope [your company and others like it] fails and fails hard" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961051. The thread had its share of both. The top comment was reasonable and Suhail replied to it with an interesting perspective. PG's point is that the more successful you are, the more "haters" you'll attract, in addition to fanboys, reasonable supporters and reasonable critics, and that a key to surviving the rollercoaster of commercial success is being able to identify the haters from the rest and avoiding letting them hold you back from doing good work. EDIT: People are objecting to the sentence in the original version of my comment that the linked comment "wish[ed] for personal harm". Fair enough that that can be seen as an inflammatory interpretation. For what it's worth I consider people angrily wishing for your company to go bust, which can often lead to personal impoverishment and career/reputational damage to the founder to be equivalent to a wish for harm to them, but I don't need others to agree with that.
- lanternfish 5y ago
  Where in that comment does it advocate for personal harm? It seems to me to be an entirely valid (if somewhat extreme) ideological viewpoint about cloud computing applied to a product. This is absolutely a _reasonable_ critic, it's just that their criticism is fundamentally non-constructive because, by their analysis, the entire business model is in violation of some goodness criteria. Haters exist, but haters are fanatical. That threat had pretty much exclusively well reasoned and argued analysis, even if that analysis was remarkably critical.
- morelisp 5y ago
  That comment does not wish personal harm on the product's creator.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- geofft 5y ago
  That comment is not wishing for "personal harm to a new product's creator." It's wishing that the market rejects a business. There's a deeply reasoned argument in that comment about the merits of the business model and it is anti-intellectual to dismiss it the way you would dismiss unhinged claims for violence. I understand that a side effect of a business failing is that the people working for the business lose their jobs. But if anything, that argument would apply primarily to the employees of the new product, not the creator. The creator understands that a new business is a venture - an attempt, not a guarantee - and that for many reasons it could fail. And, more generally, it seems like an awful slippery slope to characterize wanting some other business to not succeed as a desire to harm anyone. Suppose I agree with Suhail's goals but also I think I can execute on the idea better and I start a competitor. If there's only enough room in the market for one winner, and I want to be that winner, am I now wishing harm on Suhail too? Suppose I start a business that competes with some old-school giant ripe for disruption. Am I attempting to cause personal harm to the C-suite of that business? This is exactly what people are concerned about with Paul's article. Once you get comfortable painting some critics as "haters," it's easy to dismiss all critics that way. Haters and fanboys do not spring up from the quantum foam; they might not present their arguments in the best way, but if you have an overwhelming number of one or the other, there's quite possibly a reason for it.

morelisp 5y ago

> what kind of "help" we want to offer to those who are expending effort to try and make something better. This seems predicated on the assumption Mighty is trying to make something better, or even at one level removed the assumption that Suhail Doshi thinks Mighty is trying to make something better. That's before we get into the unstated assumption about what the "something" is and if it should be improved.

bogwog 5y ago

The anonymity/distance of the internet leads to rudeness, but that's not a good reason to dismiss a valid criticism. Dismissing those people as haters is just enclosing yourself in a bubble. If you're going to be launching stuff on the internet, you gotta have a thick skin for rudeness and personal insults. No amount of passive aggressive blog posts is going to change that fundamental aspect of the web/human nature.

BlueTemplar 5y ago

> Today X tweeted - You can stop right there - taking people on Twitter seriously is a bad idea.

a-dub 5y ago

moving the browser to the cloud to add compute power in order to deal with an ever expanding problem of front end code getting crappier, more complicated and slower reminds me of the classic "tape worm food" kids in the hall sketch. it is a sad state of affairs that such a thing need exist. i think what we really need are browsers that limit resource usage thereby forcing front end people to actually think about performance.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago

The HN thread did not seem "rude, mean spirited [or] dismissive" to me. People are obviously skeptical about the product and price point, but the majority also seemed curious.

tomhoward 5y ago
Fair enough - I just followed up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27006562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27006562

FlyingSnake 5y ago

> Sigh. I am so disappointed in our industry that tools like this even need to exist. But isn't this a valid concern? If we're at a stage that we have a thin client of a thin client we are correct to raise questions. This is Hacker news after all. Why are the SV elites so quick to jump gun and claim victimhood when they face ridicule and criticism? We don't see the mom-n-pop shops that closed operations last week whine in such fashion.

kubanczyk 5y ago
>> I am so disappointed in our industry > isn't this a valid concern? "Valid" is such a low bar. It's supposed to not be mind-bogglingly boring, if there's a bar to pass. And I don't think it qualifies, but that's subjective.
tomhoward 5y ago
> But isn't this a valid concern? If we're at a stage that we have a thin client of a thin client we are correct to raise questions. This is Hacker news after all. "Raising questions" is fine. Using someone's product launch to throw a tantrum and say you "want to quit programming entirely" is not raising questions. The matter of why the web is slow is deep and complex. But I grew up with Windows 3.1, 95, etc, and they could be pretty slow too. All that is peripheral to the fact that Mighty has spent two years working on a product that is one possible remedy to this problem, which people can choose to use if they want to. Nobody has to use it. > Why are the SV elites so quick to jump gun and claim victimhood Most of the objections to this essay seem to paint the act of identifying "haters" as "claiming victimhood" or being unable to handle "valid criticism". The YC partners and top founders all know that valid criticism is healthy and extremely important to listen to. YC's motto is "Make something people want" (they give you a t-shirt with it printed on it when you first walk through the door as a founder). The thing PG says to do more than anything else is "listen to your users". Good investors/founders don't carry a victimhood mentality. If they do, they fail. This essay is about understanding that some of the more extreme critics are not really critics but are "haters" and that where that is the case, it should be recognised, for the sake of the founder's sanity, which is a very precious commodity. Retorting that founders should have a thicker skin about legitimate criticism is not refuting the essay.

havernator 5y ago

I think skepticism and dismay are understandable reactions to “we stream a remote web browser to a local web browser so you can browse while you browser, and it costs $50/m” Doesn’t mean it’s not going to work. Doesn’t mean that, if it works, that’s not a harsh indictment of the industry, or that if it becomes the norm it won’t enable worse (spying of various sorts seems like an obvious application of this, which maybe people wouldn’t be so upset about if it weren’t so damn normal for tech companies to head that way) None of that’s mean to express, under the circumstances.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tomhoward 5y ago

Further to my comment above, to be fair to Suhail and HN, he didn't call out HN in his tweets, but he did point to the retweets of his launch tweet: https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1387063023521595394/retweets/with_comments https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1387063023521595394/retwee... That said, our future selves may look back with mirth at the HN commenters who wrote variants of "VNC can already do this".

marrs 5y ago

“I’m so disappointed the tool needs to exist” is not a criticism of the tool, is it? The person you quoted seems to be complaining about the state of the web more broadly

im3w1l 5y ago

> I suspect IRL they're much different. Of course people would never say such a thing to you irl. But they do say such things about you.