Posterous Lets You Import Data from Dying Network Posterous | Hacker News Reader

Posterous Lets You Import Data from Dying Network Posterous

andrewhy.de

79 pointsandrewhyde32 comments

I love it. Posterous' attack stance has left a really bad taste in my mouth. Sorry guys, the service is not "all that." I mean, I start little random blogs for things all the time and I still use Tumblr more often than not. Posterous might have a couple nice features, but it's hardly in another class. What is has in features it gives up in the austerity of its theming, an obtuse web interface, and just general lack of "soul". I know it's not quantifiable, but I feel like Tumblr has a soul (it is, after all, self-social, so it comes with a community, some humanity), and Posterous feels like it's trying to make charts go up and to the right. Don't forget the vglink fiasco. Looking at that compete traffic growth, and you know the VC's must be turning up the heat on Posterous now.

I think they got drunk on their own popularity and are now feeling the pain of that ... potentially fatal mistake ... there's a lesson there for everyone.

...potentially fatal mistake...

I'd withhold judgement until the dust settles.

If this marketing campaign results in more active users for Posterous, from whatever source, then I think they would call it a success.

On the other hand, if they've alienated everyone and all the users leave then in hindsight, it'll just be considered a dumb move.

This whole 'Posterous vs everyone' reminds me of an Oscar Wilde quote -- The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

I think Posterous took 5 steps forward and 1 step backward with their campaign. Their diction was a small blemish, not a mortal wound.

I think that it is alienating some users; but I suspect the loudest noise is from people attached to the so called [by Posterous] "dying" platforms (makes sense?). Whereas Posterous is aiming for the disgruntled Tumblr (et al) users who may see it as a dying platform (and who knows if that is working). It is a powerful market to pitch into.

At the end of the day it comes down to metrics; does this wording reach more people and is it worth (to them) the bad karma from the rest of us?

Time will tell (or, probably, not).

Bad karma has a longer half-life than a bump in conversions for one month. Doesn't mean that they may not prosper for a while, but if they persist in bad mouthing all of their competitors as "dying platforms" there will be consequences that are likely to overwhelm any benefit.

Well, exactly. Therein is the crux. Is that worth the extra conversions (which may mean more active users, an important metric to consider)?

As I said I don't know.

But you know. In my experience bad Karma has a funny way of fizzling out. Remember Climategate? Mostly fizzled out. I bet plenty of people have forgotten all but the broadest details as they read the latest climate blog - give it a few months and people won't bring it up any more. The Parliamentary expenses scandal in the UK? All fizzled out after a couple of months despite being pretty much wide scale "fraud". It's no longer as interesting as the budget. Last years financial melt down - pretty much the biggest example of "bad karma" we could pick. Where are all the vocal "we must punish the bankers" people now? (I realise there are vocal people still - and good on them - but the general public isn't all that interested now, they are still choosing to use Barclays etc.) How much is the Oil spill on national news right now?

Point is: heat lasts for a short while. The play you have to make (and I make this as a general point, I have no idea of Posterous' aims) is whether once that heat dies everyone sorta forgets it. If in a month the only people still bringing it up are the Tumblr fans then they will have succeeded. Sure someone in a few months might think "actually I will use Wordpress, I remember Posterous were jerks" - the play is how many are left thinking that.

And, finally, "there is no such thing as bad press" (certainly not bad press like this)

Disclaimer: I don't approve of what they are saying.

This article is not that great. I think he means "drivel" instead of "dribble". I find that rants tend to be written in the "heat of the moment", and that copyediting suffers as a result. It would be good for the author to take a deep breath, re-read his writing, and trim it down a bit. It says the same thing over and over, and the "jokes" aren't funny.

It could even be trimmed down to a tweet: "Posterous is offering tools from migrating away from "dead platforms", but these dead platforms seem to have more users than Posterous!"

I also think that the graph is irrelevant. The graph only reflects the number of users with spyware installed. I have a feeling that Posterous appeals to more technical users than Tumblr does, and those users don't browse with tracking enabled. I use Posterous... and use privoxy and have my browser remove Google Analytics code. How many other users are like me? Probably more for Posterous than for Tumblr.

(I also don't post to Posterous from the web interface. I rarely visit my own "blog", although others probably do when I link to it.)

Anyway, choice is always good. Maybe the word "dying" is unnecessary in Posterous' ad copy, but they have a product to sell. Words aside, it's great to be able to get all your old content and bring it somewhere else. The other tools should allow importing from Posterous, and then people can switch back to Tumblr when they find that the grass isn't greener on Posterous' side. But the fact that Tumblr is behind with respect to data migration doesn't mean Posterous is "preposterous" or whatever. It just means they have a clue.

Where did Posterous claim that Tumblr is dying, btw? Their original blog post says "A lot of you have asked for help moving your old blog, photos or videos to Posterous. You grouched about dying platforms that haven't added new features in ages, sites that have made it too complex to perform the most basic tasks and places that smother your content in ads."

You have to read things way too literally to interpret that as "all sites we're going to mention over the next few weeks suffer from all these flaws".

I also don't post to Posterous from the web interface

That's an interesting point. I wonder if that has any effect on the compete data. Specifically, if Tumblr users visit the site themselves more often than Posterous users visit theirs.

Compete does not work via Spyware alone. They're using a lot of ISP data as well.

Compete is horribly inaccurate. It's not even good for getting trends most of the time.

Fortunately, with both these sites we don't even have to guess, they're both directly measured on Quantcast:

http://www.quantcast.com/search.jsp?domain=posterous.com

http://www.quantcast.com/search.jsp?domain=tumblr.com

They're both trending upwards, but Tumblr is going up faster and is far larger than Posterous.

How does Quantcast directly measure?

Tumblr and Posterous insert Quantcast Javascript into their pages, and it includes their unique Quantcast ID in it. The same way Google Analytics works.

From Posterous:

    <!-- Start Quantcast tag --> 
    <script type="text/javascript"> 
        qoptions={ qacct:"p-16ewveTurfCCM" };
    </script>

    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://edge.quantserve.com/quant.js"></script> 
    <noscript> 
    <a href="http://www.quantcast.com/p-16ewveTurfCCM" target="_blank">
    <img src="http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-16ewveTurfCCM.gif" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt="Quantcast"/></a> 
    </noscript>	

    <!-- End Quantcast tag -->

I've read so much about how posterous is awesome, incredible and wonderful for building something so simple and turning it into a product but all I see is a almost feature-free blogging platform that got an incredibly disproportionate amount of press because of who founded it and who its early users were.

That the rest of the net outside the silicon valley echo chamber has noticed the emperor has no clothes does not surprise me.

Lets make fun of them with pointless dribble in hopes that this isn’t a leading indicator that we were picked last for the dodgeball team.

Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a blogging platform. Not worth it.

If everyone followed that advice, how many posts would be left on HN? :)

I think there would be fewer, more interesting posts.

I didn't expect to see the birth of a new meme on HN.

hahah.. nice one rmorrison

I'm sorry to say but calling Posterous "Preposterous" isn't really a dig... the word was the inspiration for the current name and the reason they pronounce it like they do, with a short o instead of a long o. I remember some such tag line from the guys like "blogging made preposterously easy - Posterous."

That said, yeah, they've obviously hit a nerve with their competitor bashing. And the sad thing is they didn't really need the bashing at all... just continue on the nice guy route with "if you're not happy, we're making it easy to move over to Posterous."

I wish there was a rule that every chart used as any kind of argument must have both its axes described. If not, it's worthless. This one is. (Not to mention that you should also mention the source.)

Got lazy with the screenshot from compete, sorry about that.

You realize the extent to which that chart is useless, right? My Posterous blog is at post.danieljackoway.com. Compete's not going count that towards Posterous's numbers.

I might be wrong, but it seems like Posterous users are more likely to use custom domains--Tumblr is more of a social network, so it makes more sense to be on a subdomain of tumblr.com (just as your facebook and twitter pages are on facebook.com and twitter.com). Posterous is more for stand-alone blogging, so having it be on your own domain makes sense.

I think it does a good job proving the point that tumblr isn't dying, which was the only intent.

Your right on the data accuracy.

Here's an accureate graph from Quantcast, both services are quantified, and yes, your postergous blog does count towards this graph.

http://www.quantcast.com/profile/embed?img=http://www.quantc...

This is hilarious. It's fun to watch marketing sparks.

while the later critiques are somewhat valid, it seems kind of disingenuous to suddenly launch this snark-filled rant after the release of a tumblr importer.

it totally ignores the other ones released that do address dying systems, or the other systems that aren't dying. it tints the arguments of a negative tumblr fanboy reaction, more than a valid critique, especially given the amount of effort put into tumblr vs posterous, instead of posterous vs all the other platforms it now imports.

I say this as someone who loves Posterous, but I agree with this 100%. Personally, I'm just annoyed by the fact that this will be the butt of everyone who hates posterous's jokes for quite some time ("Posterous did <insert random screw-up here> wrong? At least they aren't one of those dying platforms. Har har har").

Both tumblr and posterous have verified quantcast numbers too, ouch..

Interesting...I wonder if he picked up that compete link from the previous Hacker News post discussing this.

I've been telling everyone I know that uses Posterous of this lame move. A couple I know have moved away from Posterous, most think it's a pretty poor move, a few couldn't care less.

Certainly though I won't be recommending Posterous to anyone. Referring to them as Preposterous is a great idea!

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