Developers In Denial: The Seesmic Case Study | Hacker News Reader

Developers In Denial: The Seesmic Case Study

techcrunch.com

31 pointsterpua11 comments

Open articleView on HN

This comment thread is interesting:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/10/developers-in-denial-the-se...

Seriously. Is this normal for investors to be a major dick like Arrington?

"Oh you made a prediction and it was wrong. IN YOUR FACE! haha!"

What the hell?

"... Seriously. Is this normal for investors to be a major dick like Arrington? ..."

Not pandering has it's drawbacks ~ http://paulgraham.com/discover.html

What pandering?

He is an investor of Seesmic. He is also the founder of TC. He used TC to promote Seesmic. Seesmic founder made some predictions which didn't come true (like millions of other people who makes predictions that doesn't come true).

A rational, reasonable, sane investor would chalk it out as an investment not working out the way they hoped for. But MA has to single him out, of all the people who were wrong, in public and ridicule him.

After this and crunchpad incident, why would any reasonable person would want to do business with this unstable individual? You have to be extremely desperate or stupid to do business with him.

IMO YMMV.

ps. You can chalk out my reaction towards him as not pandering to TC and everything Arrington like most of HN.

I think Arrington confuses being a dick with being a hard-hitting journalist.

I'm not a big fan of Loic but I agree with you here, Arrington is being a jerk on that one. I've never got what the business model of twitter clients was (except the paid ones on the appstore, although even those must not be doing that much) and Arrington was pretty stupid to invest in one, now he must be pissed at himself and decided to take it all on Loic.

Arrington has two roles (investor and journalist)

On TechCrunch, he plays the role of journalist and I think he did the right thing by pointing out that some developers are in denial.

As a writer for TechCrunch, unless Arrington promised "favorable" treatment to Seesmic, I see absolutely nothing wrong in him criticizing Seesmic based on publicly available information.

If Seesmic didn't want to be criticized on TC, they should have made that a pre-condition for funding (and I'm sure Arrington wouldn't have contributed to funding the company)

Just so we are clear, Arrington is not a journalist. He has a (popular) tech blog where he writes half-baked, regurgitated & over-simplified news, ethically questionable and often factually incorrect blog posts.

He is also an investor.

Even this 'gotcha' is ultimately a favor to LeMeur/Seesmic -- helping them stand out from the crowd.

>Anyone who didn’t see this coming was in denial. Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur is one developer who sure didn’t see it coming (disclosure: I’m an investor in Seesmic)

If Arrington truly saw it coming, as he implies that any rational person would have, wouldn't he have had a chat with the founder of a company he invested in letting him know he should prepare for this?

My favourite part is this:

"As long as we keep moving and innovating and both partners treat each other in a fair way, I think we will all be safe, the hole is big enough and there are many other holes."

Now that everyone can see it coming even if they're not Arrington .... the solution is to be agile and build other things on top of their platform.

Seems a little nitpicky. Arrington was one of many investors in Seesmic a long time ago, when the idea was video comments. I actually think its pretty cool that he's not pulling any punches here.

And "seeing it coming" or not, the Twitter client seems like its working much better for Seesmic than the video comments idea ever did. I think they should just keep plugging away, doing things that Twitter won't do (such as running a ping.fm-like service).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com