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Comment by volaski | Hacker News Reader

It's not cool to criticize startups in silicon valley because that's what the place stands for. There's already enough people in the world who will say it's a stupid app (probably 99.9%), I don't see anything wrong with some encouragement from a small community. And like you observed, an app won't get traction no matter how famous the founder is if it's not good enough, so life is not exactly "unfair".

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> It's not cool to criticize startups in silicon valley because that's what the place stands for.

Fucking what? Would you say nobody in Hollywood should ever judge a movie script because the place is about making movies? "Well, whoever wrote this script obviously put a lot of effort into it, so here $50 million"

No investor says "Well, whoever wrote this script obviously put a lot of effort into it, so here $50 million". But I'm sure hollywood community also encourages each other for their creativity no matter how crazy something sounds. Encouragement and actually putting in $50million are very different things. Everyone outside of silicon valley will react the same way you do, and that's why silicon valley is necessary because it's one of the few places on earth where you can talk about ridiculous stuff and not worry about being judged, which encourages creativity. (For example, most people will think "AirBnB for pets" is an idiotic idea and it probably is, but the fact that people can talk about these things freely is a good thing)

> It's not cool to criticize startups in silicon valley because that's what the place stands for.

While I'm not "in" SV I do interact with many who do. I think SV it's more "cool" to give honest and direct feedback above anything else.

Though my observations are purely anecdotal as are yours (I'm assuming). But I don't think it's healthy to encourage if you think the app is stupid. Feel free to refrain from commenting at all but let the people who really like / use the app be the cheerleaders.

In my experience, people give direct feedback in terms of how they should execute (in constructive manner), but rarely criticizes and discourages the idea itself as being crazy. Over time people learn to cope with the fact that they really never know what will happen tomorrow to a guy they thought had the stupidest idea, so people are very open to crazy ideas.

Fair enough. There have certainly been plenty of ideas that seemed stupid then all of a sudden make it big.

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