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> Sigh. I am so disappointed in our industry that tools like this even need to exist.

But isn't this a valid concern? If we're at a stage that we have a thin client of a thin client we are correct to raise questions. This is Hacker news after all.

Why are the SV elites so quick to jump gun and claim victimhood when they face ridicule and criticism? We don't see the mom-n-pop shops that closed operations last week whine in such fashion.

>> I am so disappointed in our industry

> isn't this a valid concern?

"Valid" is such a low bar. It's supposed to not be mind-bogglingly boring, if there's a bar to pass. And I don't think it qualifies, but that's subjective.

> But isn't this a valid concern? If we're at a stage that we have a thin client of a thin client we are correct to raise questions. This is Hacker news after all.

"Raising questions" is fine. Using someone's product launch to throw a tantrum and say you "want to quit programming entirely" is not raising questions. The matter of why the web is slow is deep and complex. But I grew up with Windows 3.1, 95, etc, and they could be pretty slow too. All that is peripheral to the fact that Mighty has spent two years working on a product that is one possible remedy to this problem, which people can choose to use if they want to. Nobody has to use it.

> Why are the SV elites so quick to jump gun and claim victimhood

Most of the objections to this essay seem to paint the act of identifying "haters" as "claiming victimhood" or being unable to handle "valid criticism".

The YC partners and top founders all know that valid criticism is healthy and extremely important to listen to. YC's motto is "Make something people want" (they give you a t-shirt with it printed on it when you first walk through the door as a founder). The thing PG says to do more than anything else is "listen to your users".

Good investors/founders don't carry a victimhood mentality. If they do, they fail.

This essay is about understanding that some of the more extreme critics are not really critics but are "haters" and that where that is the case, it should be recognised, for the sake of the founder's sanity, which is a very precious commodity.

Retorting that founders should have a thicker skin about legitimate criticism is not refuting the essay.

I am focusing on Raising questions, whereas you are focusing on the rhetorical quip ("want to quit programming"). It is a well known fact that the web bloat has increased tremendously and instead of addressing this, you're worried about "tantrums". We, the public, can critique anything on this forums in accordance to the hacker spirit. The founders are free to take the feedback or ignore it, but it is not meant for them directly. It seems to me that you're emotionally involved with this topic, but please bear with me, I don't want any founder to be mobbed for their efforts.

The general analysis of this thread's comments show that people are not buying PG's simplistic arguments. A startup can have fanboys, haters, detractors, enemies, and many more types of critics but this article ignores that depth, nuance etc and goes on to paint an simplistic binary picture.

> " The thing PG says to do more than anything else is "listen to your users"."

Ctrl+F 'users' on article: 0 results found

I get what you're saying, and I don't much expect to win a debate over this as I know it's just a difference of perspective, but for the record:

> I am focusing on Raising questions, whereas you are focusing on the rhetorical quip

There is not a single question in that whole comment. It's just anger. "Rhetorical quip" is an interpretation that serves the argument you're trying to present, but it's hardly neutral.

> It is a well known fact that the web bloat....

The Mighty team is trying to address the issue of web bloat with a project that took two years, rather than trying to reprogram every website/webapp in the world, which would take somewhat longer. If people have actual practical ideas to share that would address the issue of web bloat rather than hating on one's own entire industry and spewing bile over another hacker's product launch, they should 100% share them and it would be great. I'd love to read good ideas on this topic. The comment I quoted didn't contain even an attempt to engage with this issue, it was venting and nothing else.

> in accordance to the hacker spirit

The hacker spirit I know of entails building things and improving things, and engaging seriously with other people's attempts to do so. The comments in the Mighty thread that do that are great. The ones I quoted/linked don't do that.

> you're emotionally involved with this topic

A few commenters have written variants of this, but it's deflection. My comments in this thread are mostly correcting factual errors. I'm happy to concede I have a soft spot for Suhail and hackers like him who build things that others think are crazy, because that's how important/difficult problems get solved. So, sure, that's my emotional investment in the topic. The comments I've quoted/linked are far more emotionally-charged than anything I've written.

> people are not buying PG's simplistic arguments

The emotionally charged, defensive nature of most of the negative comments are interesting, coming from people who are so keen to dismiss others as too emotional, but that aside, this isn't an essay that matters much if HN commenters agree or disagree; it's for people like Suhail and future founders, to help them discern between useful feedback and unhelpful noise.

> Ctrl+F 'users' on article: 0 results found

Terribly bad-faith comment. "Listen to your users" is the dominant theme of PG's essays and public comments for the 15+ years he's been writing/speaking about startups.

Anyway, my central point in my original comment was that we all need to reflect on the role we play when we critique others' work. We can help by engaging seriously with a fellow hacker's work and providing constructive feedback, or we can react with indignation and help them in a different way, by motivating them to prove the haters wrong. Either way we're still helping! It's up to us as to which path makes us feel good about ourselves.

If people really think they're living by the "hacker spirit" and offering constructive feedback with those comments I linked, that's fine, good luck to them!

The anonymity/distance of the internet leads to rudeness, but that's not a good reason to dismiss a valid criticism. Dismissing those people as haters is just enclosing yourself in a bubble.

If you're going to be launching stuff on the internet, you gotta have a thick skin for rudeness and personal insults. No amount of passive aggressive blog posts is going to change that fundamental aspect of the web/human nature.

This seems an unfair assessment - to consign those comments to coming from "haters" (though the one you quote is over the top, the first is fair comment to be debated), and not in keeping with the OP article here itself which is about those who attach themselves obsessively to particular people.

Nobody that saying everyone who questions or criticises is a hater. Just that there is an important difference between people who raise legitimate questions or objections and express them reasonably, vs saying they "root for [your] company to crash and burn on principle" and "hope [your company and others like it] fails and fails hard" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961051.

The thread had its share of both.

The top comment was reasonable and Suhail replied to it with an interesting perspective.

PG's point is that the more successful you are, the more "haters" you'll attract, in addition to fanboys, reasonable supporters and reasonable critics, and that a key to surviving the rollercoaster of commercial success is being able to identify the haters from the rest and avoiding letting them hold you back from doing good work.

EDIT: People are objecting to the sentence in the original version of my comment that the linked comment "wish[ed] for personal harm". Fair enough that that can be seen as an inflammatory interpretation.

For what it's worth I consider people angrily wishing for your company to go bust, which can often lead to personal impoverishment and career/reputational damage to the founder to be equivalent to a wish for harm to them, but I don't need others to agree with that.

Where in that comment does it advocate for personal harm? It seems to me to be an entirely valid (if somewhat extreme) ideological viewpoint about cloud computing applied to a product. This is absolutely a _reasonable_ critic, it's just that their criticism is fundamentally non-constructive because, by their analysis, the entire business model is in violation of some goodness criteria. Haters exist, but haters are fanatical. That threat had pretty much exclusively well reasoned and argued analysis, even if that analysis was remarkably critical.

That comment does not wish personal harm on the product's creator.

That comment is not wishing for "personal harm to a new product's creator." It's wishing that the market rejects a business. There's a deeply reasoned argument in that comment about the merits of the business model and it is anti-intellectual to dismiss it the way you would dismiss unhinged claims for violence.

I understand that a side effect of a business failing is that the people working for the business lose their jobs. But if anything, that argument would apply primarily to the employees of the new product, not the creator. The creator understands that a new business is a venture - an attempt, not a guarantee - and that for many reasons it could fail.

And, more generally, it seems like an awful slippery slope to characterize wanting some other business to not succeed as a desire to harm anyone. Suppose I agree with Suhail's goals but also I think I can execute on the idea better and I start a competitor. If there's only enough room in the market for one winner, and I want to be that winner, am I now wishing harm on Suhail too? Suppose I start a business that competes with some old-school giant ripe for disruption. Am I attempting to cause personal harm to the C-suite of that business?

This is exactly what people are concerned about with Paul's article. Once you get comfortable painting some critics as "haters," it's easy to dismiss all critics that way. Haters and fanboys do not spring up from the quantum foam; they might not present their arguments in the best way, but if you have an overwhelming number of one or the other, there's quite possibly a reason for it.

There's all the difference in the world between saying you hope the company "fails and fails hard", vs saying "I understand what the company is trying to do, here's how I think they can do it better". What could be more hateful that wishing someone "fails hard" vs hoping for them to find a way to succeed in a way you think is worthy?

Anyway, it doesn't matter what you or I think about this. As I said in another comment, the ability to discern between valid criticism and hate is one of the most important skills a founder/executive can have, so real world outcomes matter far more than arguments about it here.

All the essay is saying is that some critics cross over into being haters, and where that is the case they can be ignored. It's up to practitioners to discern what is and isn't hateful. People chiming in here saying "some criticism is valid and shouldn't all be dismissed as hate" are not disproving the article's thesis or saying anything PG would dispute.

OK, but what if the criticism is "I understand what the company is trying to do, and I think it simply should not be done and certainly should not be done better"? Is such criticism prima facie invalid? Why?

I think there's a clear answer for what can be more hateful - hoping that the person fails hard because of who they are. I saw none of that in the comment you linked. The hope is that the company fails. That is a valid position to hold!

Again - if I say that I'm going to enter your industry and do a better job of it than you have such that my company succeeds, is that "hateful"?

What Mighty is trying to do is make the web faster for people who really need it to be really fast, and offering people the opportunity to voluntarily pay a modest monthly fee for that service. If there is a reasonable way of saying this should not be done, sure have at it. Or just let customers decide. Whatever you like.

I get that much of the rage is focused on the some variant of the complaint that the web is slow because of JS cruft or advertising or whatever. Fine, there's a place for a discussion about that. Mighty didn't create that problem. They're just offering a solution that problem for people who need the solution enough to be willing to pay for it. No need to wish for Mighty to "crash and burn" just for trying to offer one kind of remedy.

As I said, it doesn't matter what you do - the good founders will either read your criticism as helpful feedback and improve, or they'll recognise it as being from a "hater" and ignore it - perhaps being a little bit more spurred on to succeed. It's just up to you as to what kind of help you want to offer that founder.

As for your last sentence: in this discussion we're talking specifically about the kind of feedback that is levelled at the founders of nascent products/companies when they launch, when they're just trying to offer something new to people who might want to try it. But even aside from that, in my experience, people running companies aren't usually hoping their competitors "crash and burn" - people who think like that are ego-driven and don't make it very far. There's generally a sense of respectful rivalry between competitors in an industry, and usually one company hopes to succeed at the products they make, whilst other companies in the space focus on different products or market segments.

I guess it's all about whether your outlook is constructive or destructive.

Ultimately, if we're generally in agreement that it's not commendable to be a "hater", then all other discussion is fairly arbitrary.

Sigh, if your nascent product can't sustain some basic scrutiny, than maybe, just maybe, it is not quite ready to be released worldwide. Dismissing claims as 'hateful' is a ridiculously retarded approach that could not have been envisioned in 90s. Everyone is a victim of cyberbullying now -- including poor founders, who will now have PTSD and cry themselves to bed as their ideas are being tested in real world ( which is exactly what they asked for ! ).

Maybe I just don't get it. Do I automatically get a right for praise for pitching VC on Twitter along the lines of:

"Here is a concept of our 4 dimensional quasi-pan-crypto forced into illusion matrix via blockchain to take advantage of your unused memory to store valuable pieces of information. You get paid, when you hide other people's secrets."

None of this is what the essay is about. See these comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27007027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27007576

You're not engaging with any of the well-reasoned criticism in that comment. You in fact do not get what the clearly-stated objection (not "rage") is about - it has nothing to do with JS cruft or advertising. That makes me think that any further effort on my part to try to repeat those claims is futile, and you are being "obsessive and uncritical" as the article puts it.

We agree that it is not commendable to be a hater, sure. I think it is also not commendable to be unable to distinguish critics from haters.

Fair enough, I conflated the other comments complaining about web bloat, with this one, complaining about centralisation and security. But isn't this just the problem when the actual substance of the comment is wrapped up in such a mean-spirited package.

So, the point that I can discern, and that you seem to be endorsing, is that this product has security and centralisation risks, and therefore it shouldn't exist and that we should hope that the company "fails and fails hard" and that they "crash and burn", and that the founders's work - years of hard work by a fellow hacker/creator - amounts to nothing.

OK, if that's the kind of critiquing that people think is beneficial and makes them feel good about themselves, good luck to them!

> I consider people angrily wishing for your company to go bust, which can often lead to personal impoverishment and career/reputational damage to the founder to be equivalent to a wish for harm to them

I believe this view (maybe pithily summarized as "people are corporations") is also the root of Graham's dumb article. If someone expends a lot of effort towards a bad idea and suffers "reputational damage" that's called consequences, not personal harm.

Meanwhile, I will continue hoping ~all of Peter Thiel's company's fail, which is not even a very controversial opinion on HN.

Good founders can accept failing if they were unable to build a product people want/need. That's hammered into you from the moment you join YC (and well before - PG has been writing essays about this since at least 2005).

This essay is not about that. It's about people who attack a product/company/founder for reasons that are not about a product's functionality but are about their own issues.

This can be presumed to be be true of a critic who actively desires to see a founder's company "crash and burn" (leading to financial damage to them and their family if they have one), rather than just thinking it would be better for the founder to change their product or company direction.

Your writing in this thread sounds consistently like a cult member. A completely closed world where YC is beyond reproach because YC does the things YC says make one beyond reproach.

YC doesn't need me to defend it, and nothing I've written is specific to YC. I have plenty of points of disagreement with YC, and people/companies connected to it. This essay/thread isn't about any of those things. It's just about "haters" vs valid criticism, and I keep replying to people who try and refute the essay by saying founders should be accepting of valid criticism, which the essay doesn't dispute. If you think I'm wrong about that, explain how I'm wrong. Refuting a person's contribution to a discussion by casting them as a "cult member" doesn't help your case in this of all topics.

For what it's worth, the personal bias I do have in this topic is in support of people like Suhail who are building products/ideas that seem crazy to most. The one I want to be working on, and that I earnestly believe could solve a lot of big problems over the long term, is one that even YC likely wouldn't fund/support, and that would certainly attract more resistance than Mighty. But that's for me to work through. I'm cool with where I'm at, but I’m going to keep having a soft spot for people like Suhail who spend years working on something that others think are crazy, as that’s the way the important problems (indeed, far bigger problems than slow websites) are going to be solved.

> what kind of "help" we want to offer to those who are expending effort to try and make something better.

This seems predicated on the assumption Mighty is trying to make something better, or even at one level removed the assumption that Suhail Doshi thinks Mighty is trying to make something better. That's before we get into the unstated assumption about what the "something" is and if it should be improved.

The HN thread did not seem "rude, mean spirited [or] dismissive" to me.

People are obviously skeptical about the product and price point, but the majority also seemed curious.

Fair enough - I just followed up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27006562

I think skepticism and dismay are understandable reactions to “we stream a remote web browser to a local web browser so you can browse while you browser, and it costs $50/m”

Doesn’t mean it’s not going to work. Doesn’t mean that, if it works, that’s not a harsh indictment of the industry, or that if it becomes the norm it won’t enable worse (spying of various sorts seems like an obvious application of this, which maybe people wouldn’t be so upset about if it weren’t so damn normal for tech companies to head that way)

None of that’s mean to express, under the circumstances.

Further to my comment above, to be fair to Suhail and HN, he didn't call out HN in his tweets, but he did point to the retweets of his launch tweet:

https://twitter.com/suhail/status/1387063023521595394/retwee...

That said, our future selves may look back with mirth at the HN commenters who wrote variants of "VNC can already do this".

moving the browser to the cloud to add compute power in order to deal with an ever expanding problem of front end code getting crappier, more complicated and slower reminds me of the classic "tape worm food" kids in the hall sketch.

it is a sad state of affairs that such a thing need exist. i think what we really need are browsers that limit resource usage thereby forcing front end people to actually think about performance.

“I’m so disappointed the tool needs to exist” is not a criticism of the tool, is it? The person you quoted seems to be complaining about the state of the web more broadly

> I suspect IRL they're much different.

Of course people would never say such a thing to you irl. But they do say such things about you.

> Today X tweeted -

You can stop right there - taking people on Twitter seriously is a bad idea.