That this is the top comment on this post gives me a lot of faith in this community.
The general tone here can at times feel like an uncritical adoration of the valley ecosystem. I'm glad that some of us react differently.
The general tone here can at times feel like an uncritical adoration of the valley ecosystem. I'm glad that some of us react differently.
Just off the top of my head, I ask myself how much revenue TechCrunch pulls in, and what it originally started as - and I can see a path for PH to become a 'real' (as in meaningful, sustainable revenue) company. Just because it isn't full of whizbang tech doesn't mean it can't make plenty of money and be valuable to other properties.
And that's just with 20 seconds of thought put into it. I'm sure there are many other angles as well.
The not-sexy model of charging businesses for exposure and leads works (see http://www.capterra.com/) but is probably not nearly rich enough to satisfy Product Hunt's VCs.
Which makes this PH acquisition even more of a head scratcher.
Really? Hacker News comments are uncritical adoration?
I'd weight the cynicism and perma-contrarianism a tad bit higher.
In fact, I believe the success of a startup is inversely proportional to the amount of hate it gets in HN comments.
Theranos excluded from the sample, of course.
This is a classic perceptual bias. Everyone feels like HN is full of whatever they identify against, because those are the things we notice the most. Since you identify against "the valley ecosystem", HN seems full of uncritical adoration for it. It's a mirror of your own preferences.
There's also the enormous home-team advantage that anything "anti" has in the human brain, which gives rise to all the snark, cynicism, and rage-fests that take over online communities by default.
An exercise I've now decided to undertake is as follows:
Every time I see something that I feel is "uncritical adoration" I will challenge myself to look for evidence for the opposite of that in the same thread. I'll start with HN, but if this works I want to extend that elsewhere.
I stumbled on this because the moderation job involves reading tons of comments I wouldn't otherwise see, and the various descriptions of HN they contain are quite incompatible. But they all fit the pattern described above.
I think there are some very smart comments here about the toxicity of internet communities over time that, unfortunately, seem to be evidenced in this exact conversation.