Hacker News Reader

Comment by carlisle_ | Hacker News Reader

If you're going to tear down a competitor's product and shill your own you should probably be up front about it.

I think that if a blog shilling a company/product is hosted on said company's website, they're already sufficiently up-front about it.

I really don't think so, I've never heard of this company I didn't know what they sell. I had to poke around the website and read the comments here to realize. That's really the exact opposite of being up front.

I’ve never heard of Plausible either but the instant I browsed to the article I suspected they were a competitor. I skimmed the table of contents and saw the last item was recommending a product with the same name as the website, and my suspicion was confirmed. They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything.

>They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything.

Wtf, this is the opposite of "up front." You had to poke around and figure it out yourself based on a suspicion. Up front means that they just tell you, no figuring out required.

"Reading the link" isn't quite poking around, is it?

You don't know what it is from just reading the link. And even that itself is not upfront -- browsers have been trying to hide the URL for a while now. What if you read it on Google AMP? I agree with the other commenter that this is misleading.

I should have been more clear - reading the content of the link.

You mean at the very end of the article after they finish trashing GA?

No, just read the TOC. The last two items, especially the one that says “Give Plausible a Try”, make it clear when combined with the big “Plausible” logo in the top left of the website (or the “plausible.io” domain you can see in the HN submission title) that this is a blog post by the company Plausible listing reasons why their major competitor is flawed and advocating their own product as an alternative.

You don’t have to read to the end of the article to know this, it’s communicated in the TOC at the very start. They could hardly be more transparent if they tried. This is not a submarine article, people are knee-jerk making this into something it isn’t.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I didn't poke around. I knew by the time I finished reading the Table of Contents, before I even got to the content.

Even if they had said in their very first sentence of the content "Disclaimer: We are a competitor to Google Analytics", I would have already known before that.

It's blatantly obvious, they didn't need to spoon feed me. This isn't some submarine article.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Your comment reminds me of this: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/28/meta/

>"I am THE ONE. You only need to know me. I am better than all of you."

All the examples given in that article are people belittling complex programming tasks. But this was just a simple a reading comprehension and logical deduction task, not even remotely in the same league.

But maybe to you this was a similarly difficult task, so I apologize if I was being insulting by belittling it. Sorry!

Wow what a pretentious person you are.

i think the title is misleading. It says "Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website" but it's content means "Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website, and start using our software"

The blog seemed to very intentionally not mention the company's product until the very end. They should have led with that.

It's on the company's own blog under their own domain. It's not like this is a submarine article or the like.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Sure, but I had no idea the company was an analytics company until the last paragraph. I clicked on the article from HN.

You and me both. It's not obvious up front that this is a GA competitor if you just click on the link and read the blog post. You do have to delve a bit deeper, unless you know who Plausible.io is.

Seems like a fair number of articles on HN lately are of this vein. A pitch veiled as a criticism of another product.

I know a lot of people agree with the premise of ditching Google Analytics but don't necessarily want to read a biased pitch piece about it.

>lately

This has been the case as long as I've been here and probably long before.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com