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Comment by finkin1 | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice blog post - what's with all the hate? So it's basically a marketing tool, but isn't that what blogs are for? As a customer of Soylent, I appreciate that they are writing blog posts about their thought process. It feels nice to be communicated with. Also, I highly doubt a detailed blog post like this is going to convert many new customers - seems like it's mainly for existing ones.

FYI, the new bottles are a nice improvement. There's no wrapper at the top anymore, which is sometimes annoying to open and creates extra trash, and the shape of the bottle is more space efficient for packaging and storage.

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It's an old problem. There's a neat book, Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet, published by the EFF back in 1990. There's a quote from it[1] that comes to mind when I see people vehemently disagreeing online:

    Something about online communications seems to make some people particularly irritable. Perhaps it's the 
    immediacy and semi-anonymity of it all. Whatever it is, there are whole classes of people you will soon 
    think seem to exist to make you miserable.

    Rather than pausing and reflecting on a message as one might do with a letter received on paper, it's 
    just so easy to hit your R key and tell somebody you don't really know what you really think of them. 
    Even otherwise calm people sometimes find themselves turning into raving madmen. When this happens, 
    flames erupt.

And of course, Usenet was around long before this book was published. So now, when I see people being righteously indignant on HN or Reddit, I try to take it in stride. They're just carrying on the time honored internet flaming tradition. :)

[1] https://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/bdgtti/bdgtti_8.html

> So it's basically a marketing tool, but isn't that what blogs are for

depressing thought

True for "corporate blogs" but remember there are still plenty of people (maybe more than ever?) maintaining personal blogs for their own less nefarious purposes as well.

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