8 ms·

(Rant) What a snobby, begrudging comments section. Well done to OP for writing a detailed summary of a succesful productised service that they got off the groun

(Rant) What a snobby, begrudging comments section. Well done to OP for writing a detailed summary of a succesful productised service that they got off the ground as well as a solid list of actionable tasks you can take to improve your own product. They've outlined how their clients have loved the service, it's been financially successful and everyone is happy, yet all people here do is complain about a) how this is the downfall of the internet b) there's some technical or editorial minutiae of the post itself they dislike c) how they could have done it better d) what they're doing is just plain wrong or unimportant. If HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you could buy it was via the command line. Infuriating.

hathawsh 5y ago
I agree; this looks like a great service. I don't understand the objections. Thanks @ollymeakings!
EricE 5y ago
It really is amazing. He's helping people improve landing pages. It's not how to generate spam, robocalls, improve your targeted facebook ads or some other form of active marketing - it's about making your passive marketing message more effective. I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad. Without marketing how the heck would you ever learn about or even find potentially useful products? As with all things moderation is key and this guy is focusing on the most neutral kind of marketing out there!
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad. All marketing is inherently untrustworthy by virtue of conflict of interest. The people trying to sell products have every incentive to lie and mislead potential consumers. At best you get language that emphasizes upsides while downplaying downsides. There's a reason people search forums like reddit when they need real product reviews: marketing simply cannot be trusted. > Without marketing how the heck would you ever learn about or even find potentially useful products? Word of mouth.
  - Xamayon 5y ago
    Word of mouth works, but can be very slow and still faces the problem of getting those first users. Where did the first person in the chain hear about it if not for marketing or self promotion? At some point the word has to reach someone who can actually spread it before anything will happen. So many awesome products and services die because they aren't flashy or cool enough to drive viral word of mouth spread. I'm quite familiar with this, as my reverse image search service SauceNAO has never done any kind of paid marketing. It took years for users to spread the word to any significant degree. Even now, nearly 13 years later, there are many people who would benefit from it greatly who have never even heard of us...
    - kradeelav 5y ago
      This is off topic to the main post, but wanted to thank you personally as somebody who's used saucenao pretty consistently for the last ten years, being adjacent to a lot of anime/game fandoms and even personally posting art on pixiv regularly. Such a fantastic and easy little tool. Can't even remember where I heard about it, which in some ways speaks to how good the site is.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      > Word of mouth works, but can be very slow Is slow growth not fine? I think organic growth is healthier for society. All this explosive never ending economic growth we see today seems pathological to me. > Where did the first person in the chain hear about it if not for marketing or self promotion? Those first users are presumed to be close to the person who made the product. People trust their friends. They'll tell other people about it if they liked it. > my reverse image search service SauceNAO Thank you for making SauceNAO. I first saw it on image boards, it's a well-integrated feature of those sites. I'm not sure if you have a business model so I can't tell if advertising would present conflicts of interest.
  - notriddle 5y ago
    Word of mouth is something you can optimize for. Multi-level marketing schemes and social networks both do this. I would prefer companies to focus on landing page quality than to start altering the product to turn customers into salesfolks.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad. Because 99% of marketing is bad.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    99% of marketERS are bad. Only like...80% of marketing is bad.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Are you sure you're not just weighing that heavily based on how frustrated you are by a given piece of marketing and thus heavily over-counting the "bad" marketing and under-counting the huge amount of marketing that doesn't stand out and frustrate you?
duxup 5y ago
I'll admit I felt a less than positive impulse from the title of the article. Probably the 'roasting' part reminded me of bikeshedding / every yokel with their own advice that occurs surrounding a font or button color or something .... that's kinda a horrible peeve for a lot of folks and came to mind for me. But the article and ideas seems sensible. Landing pages are hard, I think there's a lot of magic and weird theory out there on them. I did enjoy how focused and down to earth this article / his advice was. Anyone who felt similarly I suggest giving the article a read, it's pretty good IMO. Probably not going to turn a landing page into a customer magnet but nothing really does that and I think the advice is good / I find it useful.
- rorykoehler 5y ago
  I saw this in the wild (Twitter I think) before I saw it here and ignored it because of the name.
  - duxup 5y ago
    I almost did here, for the reasons stated. I very much would have ignored it on Twitter ;) Glad I did not here.
onlyfortoday2 5y ago
welcome to HN LOL
steve76 5y ago
No one has any money. That's the big problem today. The people who have it went far away, and turned their backs on everyone. The best way to sell is to live there. Go there and live among people and it's easy. But today everyone is poor. Nothing wrong with being poor. Wealth today is about being opportune. You can commoditize people. Churn leads. The top of knowledge is known by a few people in the world though. The authorities who can speak truth to medical researchers or experimental scientists can't be churned. So you are just wasting your time. You're going to sell. Sell what? Do business what? Work what? $20 trillion economy. Much better for everyone to just jump onboard. The world would be a better place if you could work remotely running essential services without having to travel to Africa or Asia as a corporate hostage just so some jerk in a suit can buy a bigger yacht.
serverholic 5y ago
I've had to take breaks from HN just because of how insufferable people are on here.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 5y ago
  The only way to address that is for us all to start seeing the same insufferability in ourselves. That's why the site guidelines now include "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." — as a tentative first step in that direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Let's hope that HN is around for the rest of our lives because it will probably take at least that long. Edit: I pinched this comment for a long explanation upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145616
chrisseaton 5y ago
Doesn’t roasting mean to unfairly and harshly criticise? Maybe that’s what people are reacting to.
pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
I definitely hear you but at this point its kind of why I come to HN and why I tell my software students to do the same. I think you're right that if a lot of these folks had their way the only way to do anything on a computer would be through a terminal interface, but when its not taking the form of an inactionable rant that just feels like such a beautiful kind of idealism to me and a valid / real perspective shared by a lot of engineers. I too cant help myself from occasionally dreaming of some alternate reality where GUIs were never invented and all the problems of addictive online media were somehow magically sidestepped. In any case even though I could have done without the repeated revenue stats being thrown around I think its great this guy made the extra effort to consolidate his observations and conclusions as an open resource. What more can we all do as members of this community? That said after reading the article and a lot of the comments I did find myself wondering, if we stopped treating our users like 12 year olds would they stop interacting with our sites like 12 year olds? And is that even something we'd want?
- jt2190 5y ago
  > ... if we stopped treating our users like 12 year olds... This is not what the OP is suggesting. He's paraphrasing a well-established usability guideline [1] to use text that has a readability score of 5th grade or lower, because people are in a hurry and they don't read text on the web, they scan it. Using more complex sentence structures in this context only leads to misreadings and misunderstandings. [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/
  - chefchaouen 5y ago
    A dev in my department is doing a POC to demonstrate the relationship between the quantifiable readability (albeit in Japanese) of a company’s securities filings and that company’s financial performance. That project, and the nngroup link you kindly shared make me think readability is a legitimately important consideration when designing a landing page as the OP is suggesting.
    - 5y ago
Jasper_ 5y ago
... all we're doing is roasting their landing page. I thought that would be on topic here.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
That’s just because people on HN are FAR too smart to be affected by mere APPEARANCES. /s
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
msla 5y ago
Maybe if more people knew the bizarre way "roast" was apparently being used here, the comments would be better.
kleer001 5y ago
> the only way you could buy it was via the command line Hahaha! Congrats, I actually chuckled. Technically though, I don't think there's anything that by default is purchasable via CLI. But, yes, that's why it's funny.
- kbelder 5y ago
  Build a CLI interface to amazon. There's your million dollar idea. amzn buy --ship fedex --address home "micro usb 6' cable"
  - runiq 5y ago
    I mean… I'd use that.
  - pelagicAustral 5y ago
    Yes, please.
  - kleer001 5y ago
    Sounds good... The hooks for Amazon Dash are likely closed as it was phased out a year after start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash Though, it can be done through Alexa. There's this : https://github.com/MarQG/bamazon-cli https://github.com/MarQG/bamazon-cli But I have no idea what a bamazon database is. Personally I don't think I'd ever want to build a product on top of a huge company's product. That way lies madness.
z3t4 5y ago
> f HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you could buy it was via the command line grep "features" | sort price Meanwhile the rest of the world make their purchase decision based on emotions, social, and smell (we need a smell API in web browsers), and prefer passively.
gnarbarian 5y ago
This is one of the most negative player hating envious websites ever. definitely not what you would expect from a community ostensibly set up around trailblazing, high risk entrepreneurship.
- chuckSu 5y ago
  HN comment section been toxic
- dang 5y ago
  The trouble is that comments like this manifest the exact same negativity that they complain about. We're all busy seeing it in other people, which is what keeps the negativity going.
- granshaw 5y ago
  By far the most common HN commenter nowadays seems to be your typical pedantic tech worker geek that has no entrepreneurship ambitions whatsoever I genuinely wonder whether there was a time when the majority here were actually entrepreneurial, even in the early days
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Well, the name of the site is Hacker News, not Startup News.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> If HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you could buy it was via the command line. ... Unironically, that would be amazing. Maybe an optional page for pictures/screenshots, but otherwise I don't see a problem with that if your audience is compatible. I mean, I don't expect everyone to go that way, but if I never had to leave my terminal I'd count it an improvement.
dang 5y ago
Ah, the contrarian dynamic strikes again: (1) an initial wave of objections to the article; (2) a second wave of objections to the objections; (3) those get upvoted, so that (4) the most popular comment becomes the one about how the site is so negative, all people do is complain, etc., producing (5) irony! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434665 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20objection%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... If you study this phenomenon, it becomes clear that the difference between (1) and (2) is not negativity, just timing. And the upvotes of (3) are negative in the same way. Negativity about negativity is not positive. It's an idempotent operation. (Edit: I hope it's clear that I don't mean to pick on you or anyone else personally! This is a systemic problem that we're all part of—that's kind of the whole point actually.) If we want a solution to the ambient negativity that can afflict HN threads—which we do—we need to tackle it a little more deeply. We all need to become aware of how the same negativity that we perceive in others exists in ourselves, and without cheap avoidances like "well, the others do it worse". It always seems like others do it worse; everyone experiences that. It is the chief way we avoid looking at ourselves. If we admit that we're all just mirroring our own denied negativity to each other, we can start taking steps to a solution. Not that we'd never be negative any more—but maybe we can get less mechanical in our responses if we learn something about how the mechanism works in ourselves. Denouncing it in others doesn't work—that's how the problem recreates itself: all this disowned negativity keeps circulating through the system, when what's needed is for people to work with it internally so that it can start to shift a little. That's why the site guidelines now include this line: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." – as a baby step in that direction. The HN community has been around for long enough that I think we can take this as a task to work on together. It would be a big step towards optimizing this place for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), which is what we're all here for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- echlebek 5y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
"If HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you could buy it was via the command line." s/planet/www/;s/HN/& commenters/;s/its/their/ This is funny because I have always had a dream about ordering from the command line, instead of fiddling with HTML forms in web pages in graphical web browsers. Then we users could more easily automate purchases. In the dream, order details are in the HTTP headers. There is a standard for collecting user order information that all sites follow. HTTP headers can be an efficient way to convey information. Consider a (failed) proposal like the DNT header. Instead of being able to manipulate a user into giving "consent" via ever more "creative" web forms, popups, etc., the question, "Do you want tracking?" is standardardised. There are only two answers: "yes" or "no". The answer can be automated by the user. Progress! Then I wake up. We remain stuck with HTML forms of infinite variability. Also, the word "snobby" is interesting. Much like that word "elite" that has become "weaponised" in today's online (and offline) discourse. Neal Stephenson compared Linux to a free tank and MacOS to a European luxury car. Wouldn't the "snobs" be the ones using an "elite" interface like the one offered by Apple. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_...
- string 5y ago
  I built an ecommerce website recently with a terminal of sorts. You can list and add products to your cart using commands. Alas the platform it's built on (Shopify) doesn't have an API for checking out/taking payments otherwise I'd probably have built an installable CLI as a bit of fun.
jaworrom 5y ago
I rarely visit Hacker News for this reason... I've come to realize there are a lot of angry "holier than thou" neckbeards that congregate here these days.

hathawsh 5y ago

I agree; this looks like a great service. I don't understand the objections. Thanks @ollymeakings!

EricE 5y ago

It really is amazing. He's helping people improve landing pages. It's not how to generate spam, robocalls, improve your targeted facebook ads or some other form of active marketing - it's about making your passive marketing message more effective. I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad. Without marketing how the heck would you ever learn about or even find potentially useful products? As with all things moderation is key and this guy is focusing on the most neutral kind of marketing out there!

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad. All marketing is inherently untrustworthy by virtue of conflict of interest. The people trying to sell products have every incentive to lie and mislead potential consumers. At best you get language that emphasizes upsides while downplaying downsides. There's a reason people search forums like reddit when they need real product reviews: marketing simply cannot be trusted. > Without marketing how the heck would you ever learn about or even find potentially useful products? Word of mouth.
- Xamayon 5y ago
  Word of mouth works, but can be very slow and still faces the problem of getting those first users. Where did the first person in the chain hear about it if not for marketing or self promotion? At some point the word has to reach someone who can actually spread it before anything will happen. So many awesome products and services die because they aren't flashy or cool enough to drive viral word of mouth spread. I'm quite familiar with this, as my reverse image search service SauceNAO has never done any kind of paid marketing. It took years for users to spread the word to any significant degree. Even now, nearly 13 years later, there are many people who would benefit from it greatly who have never even heard of us...
  - kradeelav 5y ago
    This is off topic to the main post, but wanted to thank you personally as somebody who's used saucenao pretty consistently for the last ten years, being adjacent to a lot of anime/game fandoms and even personally posting art on pixiv regularly. Such a fantastic and easy little tool. Can't even remember where I heard about it, which in some ways speaks to how good the site is.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > Word of mouth works, but can be very slow Is slow growth not fine? I think organic growth is healthier for society. All this explosive never ending economic growth we see today seems pathological to me. > Where did the first person in the chain hear about it if not for marketing or self promotion? Those first users are presumed to be close to the person who made the product. People trust their friends. They'll tell other people about it if they liked it. > my reverse image search service SauceNAO Thank you for making SauceNAO. I first saw it on image boards, it's a well-integrated feature of those sites. I'm not sure if you have a business model so I can't tell if advertising would present conflicts of interest.
- notriddle 5y ago
  Word of mouth is something you can optimize for. Multi-level marketing schemes and social networks both do this. I would prefer companies to focus on landing page quality than to start altering the product to turn customers into salesfolks.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> I dunno why everyone assumes all marketing is bad. Because 99% of marketing is bad.
- atatatat 5y ago
  99% of marketERS are bad. Only like...80% of marketing is bad.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Are you sure you're not just weighing that heavily based on how frustrated you are by a given piece of marketing and thus heavily over-counting the "bad" marketing and under-counting the huge amount of marketing that doesn't stand out and frustrate you?

duxup 5y ago

I'll admit I felt a less than positive impulse from the title of the article. Probably the 'roasting' part reminded me of bikeshedding / every yokel with their own advice that occurs surrounding a font or button color or something .... that's kinda a horrible peeve for a lot of folks and came to mind for me. But the article and ideas seems sensible. Landing pages are hard, I think there's a lot of magic and weird theory out there on them. I did enjoy how focused and down to earth this article / his advice was. Anyone who felt similarly I suggest giving the article a read, it's pretty good IMO. Probably not going to turn a landing page into a customer magnet but nothing really does that and I think the advice is good / I find it useful.

rorykoehler 5y ago
I saw this in the wild (Twitter I think) before I saw it here and ignored it because of the name.
- duxup 5y ago
  I almost did here, for the reasons stated. I very much would have ignored it on Twitter ;) Glad I did not here.

onlyfortoday2 5y ago

welcome to HN LOL

steve76 5y ago

No one has any money. That's the big problem today. The people who have it went far away, and turned their backs on everyone. The best way to sell is to live there. Go there and live among people and it's easy. But today everyone is poor. Nothing wrong with being poor. Wealth today is about being opportune. You can commoditize people. Churn leads. The top of knowledge is known by a few people in the world though. The authorities who can speak truth to medical researchers or experimental scientists can't be churned. So you are just wasting your time. You're going to sell. Sell what? Do business what? Work what? $20 trillion economy. Much better for everyone to just jump onboard. The world would be a better place if you could work remotely running essential services without having to travel to Africa or Asia as a corporate hostage just so some jerk in a suit can buy a bigger yacht.

serverholic 5y ago

I've had to take breaks from HN just because of how insufferable people are on here.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dang 5y ago
The only way to address that is for us all to start seeing the same insufferability in ourselves. That's why the site guidelines now include "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." — as a tentative first step in that direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Let's hope that HN is around for the rest of our lives because it will probably take at least that long. Edit: I pinched this comment for a long explanation upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145616

chrisseaton 5y ago

Doesn’t roasting mean to unfairly and harshly criticise? Maybe that’s what people are reacting to.

pkdpic_y9k 5y ago

I definitely hear you but at this point its kind of why I come to HN and why I tell my software students to do the same. I think you're right that if a lot of these folks had their way the only way to do anything on a computer would be through a terminal interface, but when its not taking the form of an inactionable rant that just feels like such a beautiful kind of idealism to me and a valid / real perspective shared by a lot of engineers. I too cant help myself from occasionally dreaming of some alternate reality where GUIs were never invented and all the problems of addictive online media were somehow magically sidestepped. In any case even though I could have done without the repeated revenue stats being thrown around I think its great this guy made the extra effort to consolidate his observations and conclusions as an open resource. What more can we all do as members of this community? That said after reading the article and a lot of the comments I did find myself wondering, if we stopped treating our users like 12 year olds would they stop interacting with our sites like 12 year olds? And is that even something we'd want?

jt2190 5y ago
> ... if we stopped treating our users like 12 year olds... This is not what the OP is suggesting. He's paraphrasing a well-established usability guideline [1] to use text that has a readability score of 5th grade or lower, because people are in a hurry and they don't read text on the web, they scan it. Using more complex sentence structures in this context only leads to misreadings and misunderstandings. [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/
- chefchaouen 5y ago
  A dev in my department is doing a POC to demonstrate the relationship between the quantifiable readability (albeit in Japanese) of a company’s securities filings and that company’s financial performance. That project, and the nngroup link you kindly shared make me think readability is a legitimately important consideration when designing a landing page as the OP is suggesting.
  - 5y ago

Jasper_ 5y ago

... all we're doing is roasting their landing page. I thought that would be on topic here.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago

That’s just because people on HN are FAR too smart to be affected by mere APPEARANCES. /s

dang 5y ago
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

msla 5y ago

Maybe if more people knew the bizarre way "roast" was apparently being used here, the comments would be better.

kleer001 5y ago

> the only way you could buy it was via the command line Hahaha! Congrats, I actually chuckled. Technically though, I don't think there's anything that by default is purchasable via CLI. But, yes, that's why it's funny.

kbelder 5y ago
Build a CLI interface to amazon. There's your million dollar idea. amzn buy --ship fedex --address home "micro usb 6' cable"
- runiq 5y ago
  I mean… I'd use that.
- pelagicAustral 5y ago
  Yes, please.
- kleer001 5y ago
  Sounds good... The hooks for Amazon Dash are likely closed as it was phased out a year after start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Dash Though, it can be done through Alexa. There's this : https://github.com/MarQG/bamazon-cli https://github.com/MarQG/bamazon-cli But I have no idea what a bamazon database is. Personally I don't think I'd ever want to build a product on top of a huge company's product. That way lies madness.

z3t4 5y ago

> f HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you could buy it was via the command line grep "features" | sort price Meanwhile the rest of the world make their purchase decision based on emotions, social, and smell (we need a smell API in web browsers), and prefer passively.

gnarbarian 5y ago

This is one of the most negative player hating envious websites ever. definitely not what you would expect from a community ostensibly set up around trailblazing, high risk entrepreneurship.

chuckSu 5y ago
HN comment section been toxic
dang 5y ago
The trouble is that comments like this manifest the exact same negativity that they complain about. We're all busy seeing it in other people, which is what keeps the negativity going.
granshaw 5y ago
By far the most common HN commenter nowadays seems to be your typical pedantic tech worker geek that has no entrepreneurship ambitions whatsoever I genuinely wonder whether there was a time when the majority here were actually entrepreneurial, even in the early days
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Well, the name of the site is Hacker News, not Startup News.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> If HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you could buy it was via the command line. ... Unironically, that would be amazing. Maybe an optional page for pictures/screenshots, but otherwise I don't see a problem with that if your audience is compatible. I mean, I don't expect everyone to go that way, but if I never had to leave my terminal I'd count it an improvement.

dang 5y ago

Ah, the contrarian dynamic strikes again: (1) an initial wave of objections to the article; (2) a second wave of objections to the objections; (3) those get upvoted, so that (4) the most popular comment becomes the one about how the site is so negative, all people do is complain, etc., producing (5) irony! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25434665 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20objection%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... If you study this phenomenon, it becomes clear that the difference between (1) and (2) is not negativity, just timing. And the upvotes of (3) are negative in the same way. Negativity about negativity is not positive. It's an idempotent operation. (Edit: I hope it's clear that I don't mean to pick on you or anyone else personally! This is a systemic problem that we're all part of—that's kind of the whole point actually.) If we want a solution to the ambient negativity that can afflict HN threads—which we do—we need to tackle it a little more deeply. We all need to become aware of how the same negativity that we perceive in others exists in ourselves, and without cheap avoidances like "well, the others do it worse". It always seems like others do it worse; everyone experiences that. It is the chief way we avoid looking at ourselves. If we admit that we're all just mirroring our own denied negativity to each other, we can start taking steps to a solution. Not that we'd never be negative any more—but maybe we can get less mechanical in our responses if we learn something about how the mechanism works in ourselves. Denouncing it in others doesn't work—that's how the problem recreates itself: all this disowned negativity keeps circulating through the system, when what's needed is for people to work with it internally so that it can start to shift a little. That's why the site guidelines now include this line: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." – as a baby step in that direction. The HN community has been around for long enough that I think we can take this as a task to work on together. It would be a big step towards optimizing this place for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), which is what we're all here for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

echlebek 5y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

"If HN had its way, every product and service on the planet would be devoid of marketing, sales or design and the only way you could buy it was via the command line." s/planet/www/;s/HN/& commenters/;s/its/their/ This is funny because I have always had a dream about ordering from the command line, instead of fiddling with HTML forms in web pages in graphical web browsers. Then we users could more easily automate purchases. In the dream, order details are in the HTTP headers. There is a standard for collecting user order information that all sites follow. HTTP headers can be an efficient way to convey information. Consider a (failed) proposal like the DNT header. Instead of being able to manipulate a user into giving "consent" via ever more "creative" web forms, popups, etc., the question, "Do you want tracking?" is standardardised. There are only two answers: "yes" or "no". The answer can be automated by the user. Progress! Then I wake up. We remain stuck with HTML forms of infinite variability. Also, the word "snobby" is interesting. Much like that word "elite" that has become "weaponised" in today's online (and offline) discourse. Neal Stephenson compared Linux to a free tank and MacOS to a European luxury car. Wouldn't the "snobs" be the ones using an "elite" interface like the one offered by Apple. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_...

string 5y ago
I built an ecommerce website recently with a terminal of sorts. You can list and add products to your cart using commands. Alas the platform it's built on (Shopify) doesn't have an API for checking out/taking payments otherwise I'd probably have built an installable CLI as a bit of fun.

jaworrom 5y ago

I rarely visit Hacker News for this reason... I've come to realize there are a lot of angry "holier than thou" neckbeards that congregate here these days.