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I made $100K from a dick joke
- MrMcCall 2y ago[flagged]
- throwup238 2y ago> submorons (who don't even know who you are). Ahem.
- MrMcCall 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwup238 2y ago[flagged]
- MrMcCall 2y ago[flagged]
- Dalewyn 2y agoNone of that holds a candle to proper British insults. Consider, for example, being called a third rate bank clerk. That kind of burn is never going to heal.
- defrost 2y agoAs featured in the The Ballad of the Malheur Patriots (Song of the Oregon Wildlife Refuge Standoff) @3:25 The perfect treat to storm a building surrounded by ducks . . .
- bdndndndbve 2y agoBundy apologists in the wild? Insane.
- defrost 2y agoWho, the downvoters? There was a lot of up/down votes on that comment .. clearly some laughed and others cried.
- _1tem 2y agoSometimes I think about the years of hard work that I put into building a SaaS business and wondered whether I should've just done something silly like this instead.
- readyplayernull 2y agoAbout 10 years ago it was possible to make a living from silly Android apps. I made several of farts, meme sounds, and even politicians that were funny to laugh at. One of my fondest memories as dev is making apps for little kids and getting back long strings of hearts, kisses and smiles in the reviews.
- SteveSmith16384 2y agoAh, the golden age of Android where any app could make you money.
- vachina 2y agoThere’s only so many low hanging fruits to exploit (by a LUCKY few). Keep working on your business.
- bemmu 2y agoMedia likes to all cover some random silly hot story periodically, and they constantly need new ones. So I’d say it’s actually not limited, although being the one they happen to cover this week would need some luck for sure.
- phyzix5761 2y agoOPs story is like winning the lottery. The rest of us have to get up and work 80 hour weeks building our business. The latter is more fulfilling and longer lived in my opinion.
- more_corn 2y agoBut there’s an important lesson here. The structure is the same as a successful serious business. Build something people actually want to buy, build it so you can fulfill it cheaper than cost. Get a little ahead of yourself (but not a lot)
- redeux 2y agoA guy I worked with was fired for sending this to a woman we worked with that he had a grudge against for some reason or another. Apparently he sent it from his work computer, which wasn’t the brightest idea. He sat in the next cube over from me and I wasn’t surprised in the slightest when I heard about it.
- wiseowise 2y ago> sending this to a woman we worked with that he had a grudge against for some reason or another Sometimes I wonder what the hell is going on in people's head.
- anal_reactor 2y agoA happy person and an upset person meet. Their emotional statuses are wildly different, therefore drama ensues.
- walrus01 2y agoThe profane joke in the bag of dicks made me think which head he was thinking with.
- johnisgood 2y agoI'm not sure it had any sexual relevance, so that does not make sense to me.
- bandrami 2y agoI've had to let a few reports go for inappropriate statements. Without exception, whatever they got in trouble for saying they prefaced with "I probably shouldn't say this, but..." For the love of God if you can put that into words just don't say whatever the thing in question was
- wat10000 2y agoTranslated from Moron to English: “look at how brave I am, admire me and despair at how pathetic you are for censoring yourself.”
- RonaldDump 2y ago[dead]
- dakiol 2y agoPerhaps I missed it, but at what point the author sets an LLC or something similar? For me, that’s the main blocker: in Europe it costs money to start a business, some paperwork and taxes is involved, even if you don’t make a single sale. Also, for selling online you kinda have to show in your website your “business id” (or tax id or similar)… otherwise how do people know you are a legit business? For example, I’m not giving my credit card details to any random website to buy silly stuff unless they are properly identified
- tiffanyh 2y agoNot everyone shares your rigor to not buying from strangers. Pieter Levels is a one-person show that has started multiple businesses with just a single page & a Stripe Checkout earning millions per year and I don’t believe he’s incorporated. https://x.com/levelsio https://x.com/levelsio
- scrollaway 2y agoA stripe account requires a legal entity of some sort behind it. This can be a "physical person" (eg a freelance activity), depending on the country, but that still requires registration -- and if it's millions per year, it's usually a terrible idea to do it as a freelancer. The money has to go somewhere. That somewhere needs to be banked. That banked entity needs to be incorporated, or treatable as a corporation.
- lmm 2y ago> This can be a "physical person" (eg a freelance activity), depending on the country, but that still requires registration Not necessarily. Many countries do not require sole proprietors to be registered. > if it's millions per year, it's usually a terrible idea to do it as a freelancer. In the US with its liability lawsuit culture yes. Elsewhere operating as a sole proprietor is not always such a terrible idea. > That banked entity needs to be incorporated, or treatable as a corporation. It really doesn't.
- 2y ago
- jcpham2 2y agoI feel like the origin of this joke is a Louis CK stand up routine IIRC but I’m unable to locate the source.
- acer4666 2y agoThe routine is here https://youtu.be/jgcGEIfE9kE https://youtu.be/jgcGEIfE9kE but I don't think that's the origin of the phrase and doesn't mention mailing candy ones to people
- TexanFeller 2y agoI'm pretty sure I head that phrase sometime in the 90s, maybe early 2000s. It's been around a while.
- jcpham2 2y agoI see. Thank you for this I couldn’t remember the first time I heard this but I’m pretty sure this is what I saw and am referring to.
- hasbot 2y agoGlitter, poop, and now a bag of dicks can be easily sent anonymously. What other similar services exist? Asking for a friend. Found this: https://prankpackage.com/collections/all https://prankpackage.com/collections/all
- walrus01 2y agoYou can mail a message on a potato https://potatoparcel.com/ https://potatoparcel.com/
- hehbot 2y agoIsn't this the premise of Silicon Valley (the show)?
- oaththrowaway 2y agoI sold a laptop on eBay once long, long ago. Someone did the "Buy it now" option but never paid. I'm trying to remember the exact situation (probably more than 10 years ago), but I had exchanged messages with him several times and he always had an excuse to not pay. Then I noticed he was selling the exact same model of laptop so it was easy for me to realize that he had just "bought" my laptop to remove the listing so it wouldn't compete against his. I messaged ebay support to accuse him but they didn't do anything about it. Since he had made the order, eBay did show me his shipping information so I ordered a "glitter bomb" which was basically glitter in a tube with a spring. I got a very nasty accusatory email from him, but it was very vague. He wouldn't specify what he received, but that he was smart enough to not open it. That's how I knew he got the full effect. I just replied something to the effect of "You never paid me. Why would I send something to you?"
- cozzyd 2y agoI wonder if he was trying to resell your laptop and wasn't going to pay until he got an order for your laptop
- seattle_spring 2y agoThat’s what I was thinking too. There are whole subreddits setup to work this kind of hustle. These people see nothing wrong with what they do, even going so far as to claim that they’re doing a service to the world. In my eyes, they’re bottom-feeding scum no better than scalpers, car salespeople, or MLM huns.
- lalalali 2y ago…or financial assets arbitrage! (Not /s)
- potato3732842 2y ago"Pure" flippers and drop shippers who do none of the value adding work of buying large lots and retailing them, holding things over time, etc are both a worthless drag on the economy and a great argument against equivalent financial products.
- probably_wrong 2y agoI don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market". Therefore I feel vindicated when a moderately-upvoted post says the quiet part out loud, namely, "Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it became the top post of the day." Remember, kids: lying is only wrong when it's unprofitable.
- oaththrowaway 2y agoJust makes me more cynical about everything I see posted. Marketers ruin everything eventually
- lotsofpulp 2y agoYou can extend that to stories people tell and images they portray in real life.
- MrMcCall 2y agoDishonesty is rampant in our world. That's why Merlin says honesty is the most important virtue.
- aziaziazi 2y agoI don’t see ruined value in fables telling though, usually the meaning and mind perspectives provides a benefit to the reader. Same with portray and most images shown in museum.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoI am not talking about fables, I am referring to lying in order to sell one’s self, perhaps for business, or love, or networking, or even just for a laugh. Maybe even because people are lying to themselves.
- catsma21 2y agoyou've got to have the eye of a hawk to achieve something like this
- nickjj 2y agoThat reminds me of the toilet paper calculator during peak covid. He put up a site in about half an hour and it ended up getting coverage on TV which led to ~10 million visitors and it making $5,000 a day in ads for a while. The core logic of the app is 6 lines of JavaScript to take a few inputs and do basic math on them. I ended up chatting with the creator on how he built and hosted it back in 2020: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/35-determine-what-your-toilet-paper-supply-is-based-on-your-usage https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/35-determine-what-yo...
- giarc 2y agoThanks for sharing, just downloaded and will listen today.
- giarc 2y agoListened today. Nice work, I really like these kind of stories (small time internet success stories). I don't know if your podcast has others, as it seems like you're mostly focused on the tech stack of sites. Some of my favourite HN posts are the common "What's your tech side hustle?" posts. I love hearing the stories of people making a bit of side cash on small little sites. Some examples I can think of (however, both are much bigger now) is the Vileda Onions guy, bingo card creator and the wedding table name tag site.
- nickjj 2y agoThanks. If I had to estimate, I'd say about 2/3rds of the episodes are solo developers putting up some type of site (SAAS app, selling a product, etc.).
- buildsjets 2y agoI love eating a bag of Dicks on a sunny summer day. https://keyw.com/dicks-burgers-changes-french-fries/ https://keyw.com/dicks-burgers-changes-french-fries/
- indigoabstract 2y agoI must say I quite enjoyed reading up on this great business idea. It speaks to that 14 year old that's still inside us, regardless of age.
- TexanFeller 2y agoHaliey Welch showed us there's profit to be had. VCs funding genitalia joke cryptocurrencies and ecommerce sites is my prediction for 2025.
- dr_kiszonka 2y agoI suggest edible hats for your next project.
- Dwedit 2y agoThe Gummi Lighthouses are infamous for looking more like dicks than the products actually sold as such.
- AndyKelley 2y ago> Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it became the top post of the day. this is why we need better societal guardrails in place against lies... people will just do this kind of crap otherwise. I mean look at politics right now, it's a complete disaster in terms of information accuracy. lies are too powerful to be (un)regulated by the free market.
- gklitz 2y agoYou mean ban advertisement?
- robertlagrant 2y agoWhat you need is a ministry of truth to tell what's true and what's not.
- Abhisman 2y agoHAHAH! Loved this. I am so looking forward to replicate this in my country
- geuis 2y agoI really hate Imgur these days. It's yet another site that treats landscape mode as some alien thing that no one uses. More importantly, whoever bought them is so focused on "showing the next thing" that the wrong swipe in the wrong area just obliterated whatever you're looking at or trying to read. It's just a giant bag of dicks in terms of poor interface programming and testing. Seriously wish the author published this story as a GitHub readme or Wordpress blog. At least it would be readable without fighting the website to view the current damned content I'm trying to look at.
- pragmatick 2y agoI liked Imgur when it came up as a free, simple image hoster. It still kinda works as that. This is the first time I've seen a blog-type entry there. I understand the appeal, though, as it doesn't even require an account to create it.
- beAbU 2y agoIf I recall correctly Imgur was initially the de-facto image host for Reddit, if you wanted to post an image on Reddit, you had to post it on Imgur and share the link. It had a great interface for that, super easy, and you could get links that go straight to the image, no in-between bullshit. I'm not sure how they made money though. And I think there was some drama between Imgur and Reddit, with Reddit going off doing their own thing in terms of image hosting. I think they went as far as breaking Imgur links in Reddit as well? This left Imgur in the lurch a bit, scrambling to find a reason to exist. It's like asking the pass-the-butter-robot from Rick&Morty to find something else to justify it's existence with. They just tried to become another social media site a-la 9gag et al and the weird part for me is there are people that actually use it non ironically.
- grodriguez100 2y agoAlso the default image host for stackoverflow.
- fitsumbelay 2y agoEvery couple of months I cycle back to a similar but digital-only idea I have for prank service but always worried about being sued for causing some kind of mental or psychological stress, especially from an anonymous source. I see now that with enough sugar, you can get all up in any one's mandibular pocket and just chill til you're done with it
- donatj 2y agoA fair number of years ago now, I had a business idea and bought a domain. Within a couple hours I had a person email me offering me $250 for the domain. I countered with $2,000 saying I would have to rebrand. I'd really done literally nothing but buy the domain at that point, but I wasn't interested in selling and it was a "Go Away" price. They accepted. Used a well known Escrow site. Took a couple days to settle. Quickest $2,000 I ever made. I found out later they were some crypto company with a similar name. They bought it from me just to squat. They still squat it. I probably could have made way more if I had pushed the issue, oh well. Never really built much more than a proof of concept for my business idea and never found another domain I liked enough to buy for it.
- throwaway290 2y agoTL;DR it's great to have a dad who can "borrow" you 10k bucks on very short notice!
- paxys 2y agoI can guarantee that you have an instant >$10K line of credit from every major bank in the country. Where are all your successful businesses then?
- throwaway290 2y agoI'll let you know once I degrade to making dick sites and calling them "successful businesses":) But if we stop with trolling yeah I have some ideas that could benefit from instant $10k and I don't have a rich dad or credit and I gotta live with it as one does!
- gorgoiler 2y agoI get that this is all fun and I don’t want to jump on the purity spiral but the letter accompanying the glitter prank really is really horrible. If I received one of those I would definitely give serious consideration to finding the nearest bathroom and having a good cry. When it’s impossible to know whether you’re exacting glitter justice or amplifying a bully, why not just take a neutral stance? (For all I know though, send your enemies glitter is running an arbitration service and only sends glitter to the truly awful?)
- veunes 2y agoSHIPYOURENEMIESGLITTER is amazing idea!!! I already hav a list of people who would really "enjoy" such a letter!
- agmater 2y agoNot so amazing, you're essentially earning money by helping people bully others anonymously. Probably some collateral damage (i.e. delivery) as well. Its just mean. OPs product is much better in that it can be seen by the recipient as funny, and edible at the least.
- veunes 2y agoIt’s all about intent... Sent to a friend with a shared sense of humor, it could spark a laugh rather than any negativity
- gadders 2y agoTime to try harder to monetise fullofcr.app Maybe I could ship these to people with "Someone thinks you're full of crap." https://chocolate-shop.co.uk/products/novelty-chocolate-stinky-emoji-50g https://chocolate-shop.co.uk/products/novelty-chocolate-stin...
- jrmg 2y agoThis really surprised me: from a paragraph near the end: It's one of the reasons I've stuck around Imgur so long - there's an extremely diverse, and supportive community. I had no idea that there was this kind of community on Imgur.
- fckgw 2y agoImgur is basically an image based social media site now, similar to Instagram but with a more Reddit style lean to it.
- spartanatreyu 2y agoImgur is Instagram, but selfies are banned (with specific exceptions on xmas day, injury images, or improving health / rehabilitation images). Because of that one single rule, most of the vain attention seekers don't stay on imgur. It's so much better without them.
- doublerabbit 2y agoImgur used to be an image hosting service for reddit for many years. Without reddit, it wouldn't be. However like any image hosting service this wasn't very profitable. So Imgur made itself a social network like Reddit and which then started removing the ability to direct-link to images. The link you clicked than redirected to their own platform of image and comment discussion. Reddit then caught on and shunned Imgur out of Reddit and Imgur expanded to it own social media thing. Some History: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595212
- Sohcahtoa82 2y agoWhat's ironic is that when Imgur was first created, it branded itself as the image host that doesn't suck. The enshittification was inevitable. Being an image host, especially one that allows direct linking, is expensive. Side note: RIP Gfycat. They join the ranks of ImageShack and Photobucket of causing millions of links on the Internet to suddenly become dead. Imgur did a purge of porn, which now means a whole bunch of images on the porn subreddits are now dead.
- hoseja 2y agoThe rare Imgur-as-an-independent-social-site post.
- easterncalculus 2y agoPart of me was hoping the guy with the offer that fell through would receive the product on the mail at the end.
- pattibreeze 2y agoeBay locked me out of my seller acct on Dec 3. Almost all the times I called them, the automated system tells me to go to help and then hangs up. I tried contacting them to verify who I was. The questions they asked had nothing to do with me. I asked to speak to a manager, she said no and hung up on me. The problem is that all of my listings are still public. People are buying things. I cannot ship if I cannot access my acct. One lady filed a case because she did not receive the book she bought from me. I had setup a new acct so I could access community help. Then I figured out that I could message her because her user name was on the notifications. I told her about what eBay did to me. She closed the case. This is all so unfair. I did nothing wrong. I have 100% and no bad reviews. Sales were picking up.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y agoFun fact: I got one of those in the mail from a friend a couple days after my dad died. He felt terrible for the timing, but it wasn't his fault. He placed the order, and the next day I announced that my dad was in the hospital after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke. A couple days later, he passed, and then a couple days after that, I got the bag of dicks. I still appreciated it. I thought it was funny.