Hacker News Reader

Comment by erdevs | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a quick backgrounder on what is going on here?

seems as if the twitter user that asked people to not use the hashtag "#shopedmond" unless they were a paying customer as his company had trademarked the rights to the hashtag "#shopedmond", the rest of the twitter users were then taking the piss out of him for his attempt to a) prevent people using the hashtag and b) for trying to trademark it.

Although to be fair he wanted to stop businesses using it not the public in general, but why let the facts get in the way of a good old fashioned rabble rousing.

Pretty sure "he" is female - or at least the contact for their advertising and social media sales is female - or at least was in 2014[1]

[1] https://issuu.com/edmondactive/docs/edmondactive_janfeb2014 (pg 3. Note down the bottom of that page they claim the trademark to #shopedmond"

As gender isn't an issue here, that I used he/him is irrelevant to the discussion. It wasn't meant as sexism.

The differences between businesses and public are not at all clear.

contractor - business?, employee acting on behalf of business, employee at work but not work related, self-employed person in unrelated field, person how use of hashtag gets them noticed and hired, etc.

Any of those who change over time. I hashtaged when I was the public but now I'm head of marketing at competitor.

Their post didn't make it even remotely clear that they were only talking to businesses and not the public at large. Maybe that was by design; this is giving them a huge amount of publicity.

TBH it sounds like they're just using reverse psychology to get their brand trending and it's working really well because now I'm reading about them on HackerNews.

Does this backfire if people start spreading #dontshopedmond ??

Reply on news.ycombinator.com