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Comment by itistoday | Hacker News Reader

The Color bashing is amusing, really, but at this point it's quite literally becoming marketing for them (perhaps that was their real genius). The more Yes upvotes it gets to flunk, the less likely that is it seems.

If this app is really so outrageously bad, then it seems odd to devote several of the top stories on HN to it; perhaps leave that to Reddit. ;)

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The "no publicity is bad publicity" marketing strategy doesn't actually work if your product is crap. Take Cuil for example: they launched with a disastrous product with massive hype, and became the target of endless jokes. Regaining credibility after that must have been impossible, even if they'd managed to fix their search engine.

It's even worse if your product depends on network effects; poison the well early on, and you reduce the chances of going viral later even if the issues are fixed. It seems a safe bet that whatever chance Google Buzz had died with the initial privacy controversies.

Is it really HN's place to attempt to influence the fate of Color? I'm not a fan of the app by any means, but I'm not sitting here hoping for it to fail.

> Is it really HN's place to attempt to influence the fate of Color?

Certainly that is not HN's place or purpose. HN's purpose is to provide high-quality Hacker News. Its readership gets to decide what that is.

(Sidenote: A side effect of that is, yes, a force that can influence the fate of one project or another.)

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