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Ask HN: What's the Deal with Tailscale?

• adenozine 4y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree. At the same time, there’s a slippery slope that the moderators responsible for the site have to balance. Banning Rust for example, would be a massive improvement for the overall quality of the site but would deter a lot of conversations and site traffic. HN is an important part of making sure that YC companies have built-in exposure and marketing by using the site to ensure that a lot of people will see certain posts. In this same way, Tailscale is important to saturate the audience with, recently. I don’t envy the job, however poorly I think it might be being done. It’s like being a world leader or something. It’d be miserably stressful for most people who complain about it, but absolutely catastrophic if they tried themselves. Someone has to do it, at the end of the day.
  • spapas82 4y ago
    I definitely agree about the amount of Rust posts however consider that Rust is an open source programming language, not a commercial product like Tailscale. Tailscale posts is like free advertising to the Tailscale company. There's a whole community behind Rust that would benefit from these posts, and not a single company.
    • Operyl 4y ago
      This is a slippery slope, the entire client is open source (besides some GUI bits for macOS/iOS/windows). Do we ban GitLab for more than once per month because it’s also commercial? What about SQLite?
• boredtofears 4y ago
  • spapas82 4y ago
    I also have the same opinion but I keep it to myself since this is not something I can prove somehow. That's why I don't think it would be proper to accuse them of AstroTurfing. However the fact that this product is about networking makes me even more suspicious about a very elaborate voting ring.
    • the_gipsy 4y ago
      The fact that it's about networking is what makes it even more suspicious to me. For programming languages or OSs this normal. However I agree, without any proof perhaps it's just a very smooth product.
  • robocat 4y ago
    You are blatantly ignoring multiple HN guidelines. Your reply is especially egregious given you just answered my previous comment regarding the guidelines and you stated “I've been around HN long enough” which means you should know them anyway (even at low karma). “Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.” “Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.” Disclaimer: I am not a mod. I just believe the guidelines are worthwhile following.
    • boredtofears 4y ago
      • robocat 4y ago
        Wow: that is really doubling down on the “I don’t care about the HN guidelines” vibe! I am old enough to have seen fans of many companies write kool-aid comments with zero shilling involved, and I really find it difficult to tell the difference between fans and competent marketing. An analogue to Poe's law (parody vs sincerity). I honestly want to learn from you: how you differentiate comments written by true fans, versus saccharine shilling written by marketing droids?
• yekurtal 4y ago
  Have you tried Tailscale? I have and our company is going to migrate in the next year or so because it does a LOT of stuff better. As for your rule limiting submissions to the front page to only one every month. Who’s gonna moderate that? Are blog posts about the product also prohibited? Cause that is how I learned about Tailscale in the first place. My point being, no I wouldn’t want a rule to moderate something like this. Because I come to hackernews to learn about these types of stuff. Learn to ignore stuff in live you don’t enjoy.
  • spapas82 4y ago
    About your questions: No i haven't tried it since it's not something I need. However my point was not about Tailscale being a good or bad product. My point was about the amount of a product related articles in the front page of HN. Let's suppose I had a product in the same space as Tailscale. How was I supposed to get any customers if everybody in HN knew about Tailscale? About the rule: I think once a month is enough; the article would get traction and you d still see it and learn about it. The duration is not really important, it could be 15 days is a month is too long. But definitely not every 3 days like it is now! Finally, the moderators would do the moderation. Users would flag frequent Tailscale articles and the moderators would demote them.
  • jbverschoor 4y ago
    Zerotier almost got zero coverage, but it existed long before tailscale. It’s also not a YC company
    • spapas82 4y ago
      Exactly! That's the first time I hear about that. And there may be many more that we'll never learn about them.
      • sascha_sl 4y ago
        If you want to run your own, there's also Nebula. Not as much of an HN darling, but still pretty popular.
• baggiponte 4y ago
  Incidentally, is Tailscale reliable? I recall VPN services are a bit iffy because they need to store user data so it does not really matter the service they offer - if what you are after is privacy, rather than a way to bypass country-based content filtering systems
  • gilbertbw 4y ago
    Tailscale it not a VPN intended to proxy all your traffic, it’s designed to allow all your devices, wherever they are, to be able to communicate as if they are in the same LAN. From a privacy perspective Tailscale never see the keys to decrypt this traffic, and as mush as possible the traffic goes point to point, not through a Tailscale server. That said you do have to trust them to orchestrate setting up the keys across machines.
• sph 4y ago
  No need for conspiracy. HN has its darling companies that people are really enthusiastic about, more so when they actually work really good. And karma whores know this fact and know any Tailscale article will probably hit the frontpage. Blame the game, not the player. I know I will click on a Tailscale post because people have said it's cool, I tried, and it is indeed cool and it feels like I'm only scratching the surface. There is astroturfing on HN but don't forget we're a bunch of enthusiastic tech nerds. Do you complain because there is a big number of Linux or M1 posts? People really like them. Disclaimer: not affiliated with Tailscale or any of its employees, haven't interviewed with them, not even giving them any money. I am not from a marketing or ad agency but just a lowly SWEng nerd.
  • spapas82 4y ago
    Yes I also don't want to go to the conspiracy blame game. However as I propose to the ask HN, the HN could add a rule to impose a limit to the amount of product related articles on the front page per month (or some specific time duration). This will protect other companies in the same space and improve the quality and interest of the site. HN has grown too big to ignore this.
    • brigandish 4y ago
      So one Linux article, one Apple article…
      • spapas82 4y ago
        Not really! These are not the same thing :) It'd be more like one Apple ipods article, one Linux Debian article etc.
        • sph 4y ago
          Does a Tailscale iOS article and a service disruption post-mortem from them count as two separate articles? They deal with different topics with potentially different audiences. What about two articles about running Debian, one on an iPod the other on a PC? These intricacies is why we have lawyers and Reddit moderators killing your post because there is an arbitrary exception to their 15 rules you hadn't considered. We can do without these. (This whole conversation thread reminds me of my time reading Bakunin & co. :)
• bilinguliar 4y ago
  I think there are a few factors that contribute to its popularity: • Once you have tried Tailscale - you are hooked; • The team behind Tailscale is capable of changing the industry; • Tailscale users become evangelists; Sincerely yours, Tailscale fan
• dvzk 4y ago
  I’m torn between thinking it’s voting manipulation or the network effect of creating a desirable product so simple nearly anyone can use it. A huge amount of Tailscale comments are from people who find configuring trivial Wireguard tunnels challenging.
  • nickysielicki 4y ago
    I don’t find configuring wireguard tunnels challenging, I find it logistically exhausting to distribute and manage key pairs of every device to every device in order to achieve a fully connected network. It’s not hard it just takes a long time.
• fuzzy2 4y ago
  I question the premise: I browse HN quite a bit and I don't see Tailscale very often, certainly not every 2-3 days. Other than that, keep in mind that major updates of software/services often result in a flood of secondary "literature" about the topic.
• gfd 4y ago
  Their founder has a pretty famous blog that frontpages all the time (5+ pages of search results with 100+ upvote each): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=apenwarr.ca&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... So no surprise that the product he made is also interesting to HN
• linsomniac 4y ago
  First, can you provide references to your assertion that Tailscale is being mentioned "every 3 days"? Doing a search for "Tailscale" with a "past month" limit is showing 2 front-page hits: "Tailscale SSH" and "Tailscale ate my network". There are two other submissions that didn't make the front page, and one Tailscale alternative that also didn't make the front page. My personal opinion is that missing either one of those posts through a "once a month" rule would be a negative to me. I personally read both and interacted with both and got value from them. Deno and fly.io are also things that seem to have been mentioned a lot lately and while I'm not in the "market" for them like I am for Tailscale, I still find it useful to see those mentions. Much of what I get from HN, like going to Python conferences, is just hearing the "word on the street". Artificially muting that word on the street because something similar has been mentioned within the last month, is a disservice. Finally, your point about "Say I have a tailscale alternative, how do I overcome the Tailscale inertia?"... You do cool stuff. Tailscale SSH is something they recently built and is very cool. However, the first mention can ride on the coattails, much like one of those tailscale references I mentioned above: "netbird is a tailscale alterantive". But it just didn't generate enough interest. If you can show legitimate vote fraud or the like that is leading to Tailscale showing up unreasonably frequently (again, it seems your perception is skewed, because TS has only been frontpage twice this month), then that's one thing. But muting what other people seem to be legitimately finding interesting is totally unreasonable.
  • spapas82 4y ago
    I haven't done any statistics, I'm mentioning my feeling: every couple of days I see some Tailscale related front page story. Maybe you are right, they aren't that many but, expressing my opinion: they are too many. Tailscale doesn't seem to be cool to me. It just solves a common problem using cool open source technologies. There are thousands much more cool and interesting and important projects that don't get to be twice a month on the front page of HN. Actually they have never been on the front page of HN so we never know about them and they never take off! Showing off a project so frequently does not offer anything to the HN community, only to the pockets of the Tailscale owners.
    • 4y ago