Hacker News Reader

Comment by kareemm | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I’m just a grump but this class of article is painful: you’ve got hand-wavy unsubstantiated claims and nothing tactical a reader can take away to make their life better. You can simplify it to a short tweet: “prioritization is really important for founders”. I’m coming to dislike this kind of content-less content - it’s a waste of time to produce and consume.

View on HN

You fell for the ".substack.com' branding. Initially that used to be some kind of quality signifier when they were first posted to HN; a writer's oasis free from the editorial yoke of big media and the cruft of online advertising.

Now it's mostly Medium.com all over again.

It's better because Medium optimizes for clicks while substack optimizes for subscribers.

What does that mean in practice? I didn't subscribe to read this link and neither did you. So optimizing for subscribers didn't prevent a low quality article from slipping through.

Which means, given time, Substack will go the way of Medium. There is no cost to publishing, and Substack doesn't have a way to kick spammers, influencers and lowest-common denominator content out.

Thank you for pointing this out; I am definitely falling for the branding. Now that I realize it I’ll be more discriminating in what I read from substack.

Thanks again!

I agree. This article reminds me of the vacuous advice given to new investors: "buy low and sell high" :-)

I'm also a grump and I know it's useless when the word "superpower" is in the title. I'm just allergic to that word and anyone who uses it immediately loses credibility.

Hmm, I found it uplifting. I'm not in the startup space, but I feel like I have been struggling with prioritization, without really understanding what I was struggling with. In my case, the constant tugging from one operational crisis to another has made it difficult to focus on long-term goals, and I need to learn to let others fight their own fires from time to time so I can prioritize tasks I know will have an out-sized effect later. Guess it's just a matter of perspective!

good thing you brought that up. I have not read the article, so not sure if I like it. However, a lot people read articles not for thee information, rather style or flavour. I guess this is one those for you. Most stuff online don't really have anything new to say, it is also mostly PR or marketing sometimes.

Yeah, you're quite right; nothing new was said here. But, I think there is sometimes value in saying things again, or differently.

>I’m coming to dislike this kind of content-less content - it’s a waste of time to produce and consume.

Ah just skim the article. The first time says that he is a VC. I think one ought to expect that much from VCs. As you can see emy expectations for VC is not very hight.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com