This acquisition sends a disappointing message that growth hacking works.
I've made a ton of submissions in the past 8 months and experimented with various combinations of stories/titles that the HN audience might like, without always being successful. (Probably one out of every 4-5 submissions turned into an angry mob haha)
To speak specifically to your point about the titles, an essential element of Indie Hackers is that I require companies to share revenue numbers, because it really adds context to their stories (although it is certainly clickbaity, too). The mods actually okay'd me adding revenue numbers to submission titles[1], but I've mostly avoided it with recent submissions.
Source: First hand experience going down in flames for issues like being a woman on a predominantly male forum. I did not choose to be a woman for the purpose of pissing off men. I did not join HN for the purpose of pissing off men. There was a learning curve involved in figuring out how to write in a way that was not hollow and was also not just a magnet for drama. I seem to be the highest ranked woman here. My ability to tolerate some heat is probably a factor.
I am never sure whether to be amused or disgusted that a culture that so values market disruption has such a cow about socially "disruptive" behavior. The two things are pretty strongly related and neither one is inherently rooted in a desire to piss people off. They both typically grow out of someone thinking they have a better idea.
It does make me suspicious as to if HN admins treat YC alumni more equal than others.
If the voting data were available, one of us could prove the other wrong. As they are not, it is my opinion vs yours.
This sounds like an admission of guilt to me.
Stripe is but as far as I know HN admins can't see the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=csallen
"...and YC alum (W2011)"
1) its not disappointing that growth hacking works. Growth hacking is supposed to work. Growth hacking is just marketing 2.0.
2) it is disappointing that spam tactics get rewarded. But that has nothing to do with Stripe... mostly.
I also think IndieHackers is lite on legitimate content, but its a great content marketing play by Stripe. Anything to suggest otherwise is just jealousy induced bitterness.
Well done Stripe, congrats Courtland and Courtland's brother.
there was another, machine learning for company logos, the title was something like "50k monthly run rate after 3 months" but it was based off of sales after running a promotion which amounted to a couple grand in a few days.
the shitty part is that all the stories are great, they don't need to be sensationalized, but he over sells them and then your left feeling let down.
I find myself actually _liking_ the IndieHackers posts, because they are inspiring.
I know; there's no way I could be a real individual because all of the IndieHackers popularity is falsified. /s
Same here. Good stories with specific details that might give me ideas. I originally saw it on Barnacl.es: a site for bootstrappers regularly posting stuff like marketing strategies with low noise in comments. Then I saw it on HN.
The disappointing part was that Allen chose to be defensive instead of admitting a mistake on his submission vetting process.
I don't know enough about the voting manipulation detection implementation on HN, but I'd imagine a bunch of accounts hitting a direct link to an article and upvoting it could potentially be more suspicious than having them all click the article from /newest or just upvote from there.
FWIW as an anecdote, I've seen HN voting manipulation kick in quite hard when people link directly to submissions.
I don't have a reference for that, however, and I don't know if it is true or not.
Don't hate the player, hate game, though. welcome to the jungle.
EDIT: Apparently an exception was made in this case.
I constantly see submissions here that do not use the original title. In fact, I have noticed that some/most of the time (I regularly save links from here in a personal db) the altered titles do a better job of summarizing the article than the original title. It happens to me all the time that I choose to save the link using HN's title instead of the original (better results when using it as tags).
If there is such a rule, it might merit more/finer discussion.
> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
The mods have been pretty good about making edits when appropriate.
(If anything, vote manipulation / growth hacking is perfectly within the HN mindset: there's this entrenched organization that controls access for no other reason than that they got entrenched, and people are finding innovative technical means to get past the policies.)