Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bjarnee | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I agree the popup was annoying. I used a template I found, and understand it was annoying, stupid, disrespectful etc. I have now removed it. It is clearly stated on top of every page that there are affiliate links on the site. I spend 20+ hours weekly finding deals and updating the deal list. If it turns out the world hates this, I can stop doing it, close the site down, and do something else with my time. It seemed however some people found it useful, so I thought why not see if people found it useful.

View on HN

I'd also be interested in why some of your external scripts are (very badly and slowly) trying to fingerprint the browser and do persistent tracking. Your aiva thing is triggering "site is attempting to load adobe flash" notice bars.

It also tries to spin up the GPU, ruining battery life.

I am curious if you've actually tried all of these, or if you're just going with whatever offers affiliate money, because a decent number are either pretty much ad-packed open source projects being sold with a windows GUI/the type of stuff you see on clickbank with a landing page that looks like spam/actual garbage/run by criminals.

I am not a programmer, so I tried to find a tool for email signups, and Aiva looked nice at the time. Guessing from your reply, it is bad in some way, so I have turned it off. I do not need it. As for the rest of your question, I have made it clearer in the text on the deal dashboard. I borrowed your text, hope you don't mind.

My main idea is to find every single deal online that is labeled lifetime deal, and share it in a simple, searchable, sortable overview list. The list will contain my affiliate links, so I can hopefully some day earn more money from the site than I spend. If you have other suggestions to how to label things so people do not get fooled, let me know. If you think the best thing is to delete the site from existance, then I will actually think about doing so. I had a hope it was possible to show a list of links online, be they affiliate links, in some way so that it could still be useful. But maybe it is not.

Personally, my belief is that a completely unvetted, uncurated list of links is not very useful. Maybe others may differ.

It would be more work but I would much rather look at a list of curated services that are also affiliate links that tell me why they are good and maybe a pros/cons/alternative-to-x table. If I am looking for a completely uncurated list I could go to stacksocial and search for the word lifetime. A short 1-2 sentences would at least tide me over as to what the product does.

It is less about the fooled, but more that quite a lot of that list is garbage software, the kind you see included in adware installers as trials - like the PDF converters, the lying VPN providers that won't actually last a lifetime, I'm trying to find a list of deals that specifically removes these.

I guess it comes down to a difference it what people look for. When I set about creating this site, it was because I like getting these deals and try out new software myself, but I found myself missing some of the best deals. So I set up alerts, signed up for lots of fb groups, and checked lots of sites, but it took a lot of time, and suddenly I hade made myself a dashboard. As it is right now, the site does what I personally like, it shows a list of ongoing lifetime deals from any source I can find, and one can get the same info in email alerts or rss subscribtion. Personally I hate comparison tables, because how can I know the person who made them has tested all tools compared and know them well enough to make a fair comparison. So I actually thought it more fair to just post the links. But these comments have given me some food for thought, so I think I need to make things clearer in writing on each page.

Don't let me get you down. After all, look at what HN users said about Dropbox when it launched :)

As a dev I am sick of marketing bullshit and believe none of it, prefer spec sheets and seeing the code myself, competent engineer support, when I see a newsletter popup I immediately exit, when I see adblock telling me it's blocking a hundred things and also seeing stuff trying to run flash my first thought is malware. When I see "unlimited backup storage for life" my first thought is that bandwidth and power and cooling is a recurring cost and that unlimited doesn't exist.

I would assume a "normal user" would convert better to newsletter things (otherwise why would they keep getting used), social media liking and group chat (I block all like buttons, follow buttons, etc.), click through happily and upload 3 GB to their "unlimited backup" plan..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com