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Comment by bobf | Hacker News Reader

The funny part, as TC mentions, is that PayPal pulled a similar guerrilla marketing stunt in its early days by paying people to wear PayPal t-shirts at an eBay conference. Could we say... revenge is a dish best served cold?

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This wouldn't be revenge unless eBay did which of course wouldn't make any sense. This more of a "taste of your medicine" sort of situation.

That's very true, but "taste of your own medicine" and frozen/cold didn't have a funny punch line. However, it could be considered revenge by proxy -- WePay assisting with consumers' revenge against PayPal for freezing accounts.

> Could we say... revenge is a dish best served cold?

...and resolved by acquisitions?

Paypal is owned by eBay if I recall correctly,

and one of WePay's investors is Max Levchin, former CTO of PayPal

I think you mean PayPal pulled a similar guerilla marketing stunt, unless the people wearing the t-shirts were trained monkeys. ;)

You mean guerrilla (thanks, edited the original).

If you want to be nitpicky, gorillas aren't monkeys.

edit: Really, people? You modded me up to 17 for making a nitpick about simian taxonomy?

You forget your place, sir.

"Really, people? You modded me up to 17 for making a nitpick about simian taxonomy?"

If it makes you feel better, I gave you a point just for that comment...

Ook, ook.

[Edit: Erm its a reference to the librarian of unseen university from Terry Prattchet, an Urang-utan which attack people who mistake him for a monkey.]

Yes. If you look at my recent comment history, you'll see that, by far, the most effective strategy I've found for getting comments with lots of upvotes is to find a factual error in somebody else's comment and correct it in a clear and unambiguous fashion; and within that constraint, the shorter the better. You'll see that I got a comment consisting entirely of "[citation needed]" voted up to 7.

Long comments have essentially no chance of being voted up significantly. Other things that have very little chance: speculations about the implications of something, wild and surprising analogies, speculation on others' motives, advocacy of norms. This is really unfortunate, because those are the comments I most value reading. I really get no value, beyond a little humor, from reading that gorillas aren't monkeys, since I already know that.

Depends on who you are. If you look at my comment history, you'll find several very long comments with many, many upvotes. On the other hand, when I tried to do the "quick one line correction" thing in this thread, it didn't turn out too well! (though at least it was a nice setup for hugh3)

More like an unprovoked incident. eBay and PayPal were involved in a serious war back then.

WePay wants to be in a serious war with Paypal.

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