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Comment by liquidise | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure i've ever read an HN comment i find as distasteful as this.

The OP is building an app to help people meet, yet by their own admission have managed to attract one user. They asked a question about a common issue engineers face: onboarding and marketing. Your comment ignores nearly every shred of this substance. Instead you accuse them of "getting [users] killed"? Patently absurd. To cut them down at the knees in this way is counter productive at best.

In the greater context of American society, Urban Isolationism is a real problem. You can argue that it is a less urgent issue during covid, but the dangers remain all the same. I applaud the OP for trying to chip away at this problem. Crazy to think your comment is the HN-upvoted response to their efforts.

What a place this has become.

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Hey Ben! Thanks for the feedback. If it wasn't in the middle of a pandemic where people are dying, you'd be right – negativity on HN toward makers sucks, and is way too prevalent.

You can check my comment history, I spend a LOT of time helping people who are building things. I love makers, and like yourself, I'm a founder. I'm pretty sure this is the first time on HN/Twitter/etc I've been negative about someone putting something out into the world.

But it is a pandemic, and this app is trying to get people to do something that will endanger themselves and others. I'd even be supportive if he was just building it for when COVID slows down, but this whole post is about getting people to USE it. Right now.

People are dying... even if not directly due to the author. If they built something that helped people connect virtually, I wouldn't have said something "distasteful". But context is relevant here.

Ethics are as important to technology as code is.

(And on a personal note, I know you've heard this before... we were at RIT at the same time, and you had to take the same ethics classes I did to graduate.)

I think that it would be more helpful instead of shaming Ryan into not building a meetup app at all to instead offer the suggestion I'm about to.

Why not spin the meetup app to be a way to connect people virtually to reduce isolation? I know everything is bigger in Texas, but there is a huge target audience (maybe even bigger:)) outside of Texas.

Just look at netflix party as an example.

> I'm not sure i've ever read an HN comment i find as distasteful as this.

I see rude, snarky comments on HN without a good motivation, so that's surprising. Health and safety is probably the best motivation for calling anyone out that I can think of? Do we whisper gently that the building is on fire?

> Instead you accuse them of "getting [users] killed"? Patently absurd.

Balderdash! Here's an example of people getting together for a social event. And several dying.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/3-deaths-147-coronaviru...

I'd be more upset if someone didn't say something, and I'm sad to see them being shamed for saying something.

Listen the poster should have never made this app. He just didn’t have any friends or family to give him honest feedback. There isn’t some deeper intellectual learning here.

He’s lucky the lesson learned was relatively inexpensive. Everyone needs honest and realistic feedback.

Their comment addresses the fundamental substance of the submission. It's as if someone started their sunscreen door to door business in January: The fundamental timing is broken.

Except if you started the sunscreen door to door business development in peak selling months you wouldn't have a company built to actually supply the sunscreen.

The submission is about trying to draw in users for a meat-world social application during a pandemic.

In the sunscreen example, someone could absolutely be designing packaging, securing suppliers, building a workforce, etc, during the winter, but if they went to the door to door phase at the same time it would be a completely disastrous exercise. It was the door to door phase that I was comparing to.

Let’s not get lost in a terrible metaphor that has nothing to do with scientific reality

What’s wrong with demanding tech addicted randos check their privilege given a scientific reality of both a pandemic and the ease at which these gadgets can influence decisions?

Is that not offering alternatives? Oh sure maybe the most cynical, but it’s nonetheless an alternative option.

Why is avoiding a blunt conversation so taboo? In a forum where open debate of all ideas is supposedly allowable, in a community largely built originally by a nation where free speech is supposedly the holiest of holies? Would the open web have worked in China or much of the rest of the world in the prior decades?

What is the goal with the rhetorical circles and shallow emotional boosting except to continually exist in Saturday morning cartoon levels of concern and maturity for reality outside of ones own immediate attention?

Startup types are a statistical minority of the human doer market. Take it on the chin that mathematically you’re ultimately as important as the child political prisoners we ignore.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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