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Comment by hluska | Hacker News Reader

You know, at the risk of heaping on the negativity, I read their Yelp ratings and while some are excellent, others are genuinely a sign of a restaurant in crisis.

Consider the gentleman from New Zealand who made reservations via an email to the owner five weeks in advance, spent the afternoon walking around downtown LA to avoid rush hour traffic, and then showed up only to be told that they were closed for a wine tasting. Or, there was the reviewer who got the point of the restaurant, but still found the flavours rather difficult. Or heck, consider the endless comments about how poor the service was.

I take a couple of things away from this:

- No matter how interesting your product is, you still need to please your customers.

- When you're emotionally invested in something, it is tempting to set aside criticism as being gratuitously negative. But, sometimes your critics are your best advisers.

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I don't think that actually speaks against the story, though. The story is: we started small to do our own thing, then a national review blew us up and we couldn't handle the stress in order to scale the business. A lot of the yelp reviews sound like scaling issues, especially since the great reviews are interspersed with the bad: they were capable of delivering great experiences just not consistently.

The second paragraph says "the restaurant was never, ever full." So it seems like they expected to handle more business, and in fact the lack of business shut them down. Maybe they had problems with the growth, but if they were never full then they really shouldn't have. Restaurants with growth problems need to serve food quickly so they can get people in and out to make room for more people, this restaurant apparently never had those problems.

The negative reviews could be why it was never full. I wonder if there are consultants in the restaurant business that can help places like this through the wave of people that are more interested in eating at an acclaimed restaurant than trying some small new place that opened up nearby.

You pay the Yelp ransom and make the problematic reviews disappear.

there's number of tables and then there's number of people working there and how much they can handle.

there can be too many customers with half the tables empty.

Reminds me of a local restaurant here. First time I went, shortly after they opened there where hardly any people there and I had one of the better meals I've had at that (low) price point. I promptly told everybody how awesome the place was and they got a glowing review in a local paper. A few month later they had tripled the number of tables they had, where packed, and the food and service was dire. Haven't been back since.

Yeah, that's a fair point, actually.

A "not full" restaurant scenario can be a scheduling algorithm issue -- "we need a 4 top at 7:30 pm;" meaning everyone who comes in between opening and 7:30 pm sees it empty. Multiply across the entire space, and you can get bad utilization while "100% booked."

Yeah. I mean, loving to do one aspect of the business is a huge advantage when running that business... but it's not the whole of the business. there's still all that other bullshit.

And... my experience? when you are small, if you are really good at that one thing you do, it's mostly okay that you suck at the other aspects of the business. As you scale, this becomes less and less true, you need someone at least minimally competent in the other business stuff, and "just hiring someone" is a lot harder than it sounds, when you are hiring for a skillset that you don't have. Scaling is hard to the point where it sometimes make sense to set a limit and try not to scale above a certain point.

I've generally been growing to the idea that I want to hear all criticism towards my projects, whether it's good or bad, whether it's constructive or not. People suck at communicating, but when they leave criticism, there is always a reason somewhere at the core. It's the old saying that it is apathy, not hate, that is the opposite of love.

So when people are heaping hate on one of my projects, I am now starting to think of it as a failure of messaging on my behalf. If someone says something like "don't reinvent the wheel", it's because I've failed to explain my constraints that prevent me from using existing systems. Maybe one of those constraints is "I don't like that particular system". But whatever it is, it probably needs to be explained if someone is bitching about it.

I might rather people hated my projects than completely ignored them. Getting ignored sucks a lot. Receiving hate tells me people were actually excited by the idea and I was on to something, but that I didn't do something right. I can't figure anything out from getting ignored. It's just blowing in the breeze at that point.

On your homepage seanmcbeth.com the javascript (or whatever does the animation) is totally choking my Firefox (latest) running on a Mac Pro Desktop (latest). Infact when I tried to write this comment it was literally like 300 baud until I closed your website page.

(All of this is to your point and ironically..)

Btw it looks cool but if I can't easily scroll your homepage you have lost me as a potential client.

This is indeed a defect, so your criticism wasn't negative or unwarranted :)

Filing a defect report is one thing, complaining about the very idea of having an animated background, yelling at me for being a "typical front-end dev, doesn't test in Firefox" or something like that, that's the sort of negative criticism I'm talking about.

My point was, even the people who are engaging in dismissive, negative criticism need to at least be a cause for consideration. You might not take them at their word, but it should trigger a process of introspection.

People hate animated backgrounds for the reason you just mentioned, it causes a slow experience. But I didn't know it was causing a slow experience for you. You are correct that it is better to not have a slow experience than to have an animated background, but maybe I can have both. I wouldn't have known there was a problem until you complained (not that I don't test my projects, just that particular site is not very high on my priority list because it is not and has never been a source of business for me). So now I get to make the choice of either improving the animation or removing it entirely, just because someone complained and I didn't just dismiss it as "haters gonna hate".

Hi Sean--I sent you an email related to this issue. Thanks for being so open to feedback! It's one of my favorite qualities for someone to have!

Thanks for getting Taylor Swift stuck in my head for the next hour, by the way! Not the worst problem to have in my book, though! ;)

You've got one heck of a good attitude and I really enjoyed reading your website. Best of luck in all of your projects!! :)

Thanks. I don't know if I have a good attitude about it all the time. I do still get upset by it and I do still end up making my own dismissive comments sometimes. It's a daily struggle. I just hope I can learn more lessons than I miss, and not let egotism get in the way of "success". Do what is important, not what you want. Telling the difference between the two can be hard.

An iPad mini 2 running iOS 9.2 is similarly unhappy scrolling text against the animated badkground.

I tend to be in the same boat, but I feel there's an important caveat: the person providing the criticism needs to be reachable if the criticism itself lacks substance. A complaint just for the sake of venting does no good.

Take, for example, a recent review on my iPad app:

    As a creative professional I can tell you that this is junk. Today I had an important meeting and this app acted up to the point the client laughed hard for how bad it was. Stay away!

There is nothing specific in there that I can use to improve the experience. Not one user in thousands of daily active users on this version has reported anything I could possibly assume might be what the reviewer is talking about. Further, because it's on the iOS App Store, it's impossible for me to reach the person.

That's one of the best parts of the google play store; the developer can directly respond to a review. It's pretty handy, and to me, as a user, it says the app is actively being worked on.

Somewhat ironic that a "creative professional" doesn't know how to leave a proper critique given that it's a valuable part of the role.

Jeez, that sounds like a very modern and frustrating problem.

Totally!! People giving you negative feedback are giving you the keys to their heart. They're telling you how to make a product they'd love! If I sell anything on Amazon, I or someone on my staff will be writing responses to every single piece of feedback we get on Amazon. It's obviously important to address the unhappy people, but you should appreciate the positive feedback just as much!

EDIT: Anazon->Amazon. Feedback to Apple: Really? Really?

> So when people are heaping hate on one of my projects, I am now starting to think of it as a failure of messaging on my behalf.

I tried that, but I got really burned out.

Someone writes a one-liner "I hate byuu's idea for X", and I write up an article explaining my motivations and rationale, spending three hours on it, listing a dozen cases where I explain why what I am doing is essential, and not just whimsical fancy. They ignore my response. And two weeks later, I see the same person with the same one-liner posting it somewhere else.

I find most people don't want to understand your reasoning. They simply want things exactly as they want it, or they're not happy. I never get anyone willing to have an open dialogue where they're actually open to trying new things, even though I am open to hearing any true criticisms that go beyond appeal to tradition (we'd all be using DOS if that were a valid argument.)

Very thankfully, in my case, I'm not selling a product, and I'm not funded by advertisements. And as such, I can get away with choosing to ignore certain types of criticism. I'm very empathetic to those who can't.

Yes, it is hard.

I have a very good friend who quit his job in finance three years ago to focus on photography. (It's been a significant improvement to his health and happiness, but that's a story for a different day.) He has been doing a lot of very abstract photography, lately. He shoots and develops his own film in a pinhole camera he built, and the imagery is intentionally motion-blurred. He gets heaps of praise from other photographers, and tons of vitriol from randos on the internet. It's all of the very predictable, "this is bullshit, anyone could do this," kind. That's not true at all, the images are much harder to make than you would think. But he has not replied to the critics directly. Instead he works on making the images more obviously about the sort of dream- or ghost-like qualities he's chasing.

It is so easy to just dismiss a critic. "They don't understand what I'm trying to do." What's harder is building that explanation of what you're trying to do in what you're trying to do. It makes us better to not completely dismiss the critics.

And you do it for the next person. You've pretty much lost a person forever if they get to the level of vitriol. Don't bother with replying to them.

For me, I have a project that I care very much about. I want to make it work, because it has things in it that I want in my life. I haven't ever cared about my side projects as much as this one--which has more to say about this particular project than my past projects, I cared very much about some of them. Which is why I have to be honest about it. I can't delude myself about it, because I certainly won't be able to delude anyone else about it. I don't have that kind of social media power.

> He shoots and develops his own film in a pinhole camera he built, and the imagery is intentionally motion-blurred.

Oh neat, I have a friend who develops his own pinhole photography as well! Here's one of his:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/12035849/Pinhole-Photography

I don't think he builds his own cameras, but he definitely tweaks the hell out of them. I can't really understand most of what he says about it, but he clearly knows his stuff.

> What's harder is building that explanation of what you're trying to do in what you're trying to do.

Oh, definitely. I have a really hard time with explaining my intentions in a way that promotes their strengths without it coming off as arrogance. And dealing with negativity only seems to amplify my desire to stress the strengths, so it's kind of a negative feedback loop.

Nonetheless, I gave it a shot and tried writing up another article about my niche. We'll see how it goes I guess.

Perhaps the New Zealander reviewer wouldn't have invested so much time and preparation into one meal if he didn't have high expectations? Sure it's bad if they didn't respect his reservation, but you don't reserve a seat at McDonalds that far in advance so you don't have the opportunity to suffer that problem.

How much time and preparation did the NZ reviewer invest?

He basically planned his holiday in advance, sensible if you want to make the best use of limited time in an unfamiliar location.

I'm not sure what you mean wrt McDonalds...

> restaurant in crisis

Then you talk about an example where they forgot to cancel a reservation, and one where the restaurant was closed and a customer didn't call ahead to check before driving for an hour (why is driving for an hour through rush hour something that reflects on the restaurant?). Then one guy who didn't like the food style.

None of those point even remotely to a restaurant being in crisis, so let's look at your last piece of evidence - claims of poor service. Is the service poorly rated on average compared to other similar restaurants? How did you check? Based on how much more poor their service is compared to other similar restaurants, how did you determine that it is a sign of crisis rather than a weakness of the restaurant? (There are many places with good food, but weaker service, which we do not call 'in crisis')

Why would you call ahead? It's a reservation! By definition, you have already called ahead! I have never in my life heard of anyone calling ahead to check on their reservation.

Depends on how far in advance the customer made the reservation. I sometimes call places to double-check, particularly if I placed the reservation weeks in advance.

Also worth noting is that I live in LA, where Alma is (was). LA is basically a "nothing is set until you call to confirm it" kind of town. It's the entertainment industry culture, and its effect on places like hotels and restaurants. There is always a danger that aomeone more important calls and bumps you off the list. Especially at hot restaurants. (Hell, I'd bet at least half the maitres d' in this city are on the take.)

Not saying I blame the customer at all in this case. I really don't know the circumstances. Just saying that reservations in LA are weird.

My wife grew up in LA and she had the same reaction I did.

You're right I misread - I thought parent was talking about 2 separate occasions. Nevertheless, I am still waiting to hear about how them forgetting to cancel reservations means the restaurant is in crisis mode.

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