Jason Calacanis: A message to the Mahalo community | Hacker News Reader

Jason Calacanis: A message to the Mahalo community

mahalo.com

14 pointschris2425 comments

"Mahalo dollars"? What's the conversion rate to USD, or to Shrute Bucks for that matter?

1 Mahalo Dollar ~= 0.68 USD, based on the price of iPod nano in their store.

Or 1 Mahalo Dollar ~= 0.57 USD, based on their $25 gift cards.

1 Mahalo dollar is equal to $0.75 USD, if you have 150 Mahalo Dollars or more. If you don't have that much, then you have to buy something with the 'Mahalo Store', which offers a very limited number of items for an even lower exchange rate.

I'm sorry, why is this on Hacker News exactly?

Isn't there a more interesting story about another deserving startup or individual we can focus on?

really.... I'm bored with seeing Calacanis on the front page of HN.

There's a Mahalo 'community'?

Sure, in the sense that there is also a Demand Media 'community'.

I was about to make the exact same quip :)

At least it's not a message to the Hacker News community.

I love how snarky comments are downvoted on HN UNLESS they're about Mahalo. 30 more karma to go, then I'm going to come back and downvote you and everyone else making the same comment on this thread.

HN has a general disdain towards anything which is detrimental to the online landscape (spam, bad pieces of legislation, etc).

No one really gives a crap about Jason or Mahalo, the consensus just seems to be that it operates in the gray areas of SEO with little value added to the content they vacuum in.

Feel free to correct the perception though.

Not arguing about the dubiousness of Mahalo. I agree with the assessment. But I don't see why we're lowering the bar for the quality of comments when it's re: a maligned entity. Sorry, it's still HN, when I read a thread about Mahalo I'm not looking for a me-too dogpile of jokes or zings. I want to read some real analysis.

Actually, there is a really solid community of folks building pages, asking questions, providing answers, etc.

I'm inclined to believe this. Check out this question titled "Do your family members or friends criticize you for the amount of time you spend on Mahalo?"

http://www.mahalo.com/answers/do-your-family-members-or-frie...

Well that's certainly confusing.

I agree, he keeps using "community" and "mahalo" in the same sentence.

How long has Mahalo been using Dora the Explorer as their mascot?

How can they afford to pay 50+ people $1000/month. Do they really pull in that much from advertising?

www.mahalo.com/type-anything-here

http://www.mahalo.com/mahalo-is-a-trap

Looks like they are willing to pay me to make that page. I may take them up on it.

I get that they're making good money by embedding ads in every inch of the site. Is this really a 'good' and respectable business model though? Something about it doesn't sit well with me, especially when the site doesn't offer quality content to the user.

That's your conscience speaking. The fact that it bothers you is a good thing.

Things aren't always so cut and dry. There's probably some people - a large number in fact - that does derive benefit from some of Mahalo's pages. You also have the fact that the revenue generated by Mahalo is going towards paying people which lets them live and feed themselves, etc.

In terms of the grand scheme of things, what Mahalo is doing isn't that "bad".

It's also not the ideal case either. As a savvy web user a Mahalo page is one of the last pages I'd want to visit, but I'm also savvy enough to know how to avoid it.

Suggest taking a look at these pages, which get a lot of traffic, that people stay on for a long time and that provide a lot of value:

http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-play-guitar-chords http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-make-strawberry-shortcake http://www.mahalo.com/star-wars-the-force-unleashed-walkthro...

I don't doubt that there are diamonds in the rough. However, when I search and see a random Mahalo page in Google I have no way to know if this is one of the diamonds, or one of the thousands of "rough". Why take that chance when I can go to a more reliable site that I trust more?

Significantly more.

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