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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Yeah the pattern of:

- Find thing that gets traction and growth.

- Demand more growth than the thing you do well is providing.

- Focus not on the thing you do well....

Seems to happen time and again. I always think of the story on HN about the guy who bought back his startup from the VCs for $1 after it "failed" and he went and ran it without the same expectations, and it is doing just fine.

There are maybe just some good ideas out there that aren't meant to be unicorns, but are productive none the less but they get buried in other expectations.

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Bringing in outside management away from the original company founders is a common way this happens. Especially if they come from another traditional public company that only cares about share prices as the key metric.

I can’t imagine someone messing up Stackoverflow, but Digg managed to do it so there’s always a way (although SO doesn’t have a high quality direct competitor like Reddit...yet.). The best time to take on a business is when they’ve peaked and get distracted, they forget about being the best in the market. I should note I don’t think SO is near that point yet.

Digg was so long ago now, I think it losing its relevance as an example. Has to be nearly a decade ago.

Digg was longer ago than that..

Joel has already killed Stack Overflow beyond repair.

Prashanth is a grave robber trying to find a few valuables to snatch for investors.

I don't really use Stackoverflow besides coming across answers in Google like everyone else. Not familiar with any internal community problems, so I can't comment. Can you share the story here?

Stack Overflow has a much smaller version of Wikipedia's God-complex moderator nerd problem, where some people with no life moderate and focus on their own vanity metrics rather than the quality of what they moderate.

But SO is still pretty damn useful, like Wikipedia.

Yeah, definitely. A bunch of thoroughly dickish moderation persuaded me to never contribute content again. And honestly, I'm done doing free labor for for-profit companies. I'll still edit Wikipedia despite all its issues, as it's all for the public good. But anybody after "hyper growth" can pay me for my labor.

Was this a moderator for a particular tag or one that oversees answers in general? How does it favour vanity metrics over value? Aren't the best answers chosen by the end users?

I'm genuinely curious, I'm not familiar with SO besides having answered a few top questions and getting some points long ago.

A good answer cannot be chosen by an end user if they do not get to see it because Mod-without-a-life deleted it 15 seconds after it was written.

Saying SO is “useful” is vastly understated. The developer world is filled with memes such as “coding is 99% looking up thing on SO”. World’s one of the highest paid profession is powered by SO. They have rigid community rules that everyone likes to complain but it is exactly what has kept quality standards up.

Not necessarily agreeing with the parent, but here's one recent issue: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/332974/is-se-allowi...

Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say “Prashanth is a grave robber trying to find valuables to snatch”?

I don't know if Joel has done anything, it seems to me that the users have killed SO more than anything. The quality of most accepted and upvoted answers is so low relative to even the worst documentation or IRC channel that I find it barely worth using.

The environment selects the users.

> Focus not on the thing you do well

Except SO for businesses could probably work quite well. I work for BIGTECHCO and the natural language query interface into institutional knowledge is very ad-hoc, being distributed amongst Slack histories, internal mailing list archives, etc. It would definitely be improved if consolidated with a decent UI.

We use it at work. It keeps me sane... search is very good, tons of people internally use it, and teams tend to do a decent job of monitoring for questions tagged with their component.

We have it running at work as well. It had some traction but now we have an enterprise chat software that everyone gravitates to and it has become a ghost town.

I always think of the story on HN about the guy who bought back his startup from the VCs for $1 after it "failed" and he went and ran it without the same expectations, and it is doing just fine.

Agree with the general point, but the guy burned 8 million dollars in investor money to get to the point where the business is "just fine". It's not really a good example IMO.

Anyone have a link for that?

I found it:

https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...

Also here is where the project started on Show HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614

https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...

thats an interesting story..could you share the link for the 1$ startup

https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-....

Also here is where the project started on Show HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614

Really to cool to see a Show HN and know the story years later.

FYI, The medium link 404s.

Try https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-...

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