Hacker News Reader

Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

The immaturity (or redditness) of their twitter is why I stopped following them. I don't want my feed filled with their memes and dumb questions, it does not add value for me, and gets in the way of other content that might.

View on HN

I'm overall fine with immaturity. I'm also overall fine with making references/memes/whathaveyou. Overall.

However. I think it's made people think they're funnier than they are. Recognizing a thing is funny and being funny are two different things. And sharing a meme is just recognizing. Even if you were the first person in some subsection of your group to have shared it, someone else still made it. You're still repeating, verbatim, someone else's words.

Now, there's also the case where responding with the right reference or meme can be funny. But it's not sharing Fry's "Shut up and take my money" meme when the Lego Group releases the next piece of buildable 80s nostalgia.

And I think that's the problem you are having overall as well. Because "wrong answers only" is just not funny the 501st time you've seen it. I think if there were a little more novelty, it would be different.

If someone is tweeting things you don't want to read then you unfollow them. That's how it's supposed to work. Everything is working here.

I'm more after the middle ground, and that is pretty broken (twitter's fault)

The problem is that accounts post a mix of content and I only want a subset. Mostly it's about what I don't want, food pics, family & vacation photos, memes... that's not why I'm on twitter. Unfortunately, their feedback mechanisms are woefully awful and cannot seem to grasp this concept, or basic user preference.

You can mute keywords or phrases.

I do and am (un)pleasantly surprised how they find interesting ways to get by them... it's pure text matching rather than regexp or semantics based. But still, this is limited to textual content, and they will still show you the tweet because of the reply or quote tweet...

however, I cannot say, "don't show me photos of food, family, and vacations" I've tried to say these tweets are not relevant, but they still push the same garbage to me

The hard part is when you're interesting in some things they say, but not others.

Seems like this "let's not be serious" is exactly why they resonate with folks imho.

their numbers seem to show that a ton of folks do like it.

Yea, as somebody who is bad at social media marketing in general it’s interesting to read. Things that appeal to me definitely do not translate into good marketing.

resonates with folks like you, and memes are typically more shared among people who like memes. But then you push away a lot of other users. Are the likes and interactions on twitter converting? Or are people just following for the hot takes and entertainment?

How do you know that is transitioning into a successful campaign with the type of users they need to cross the chasm? (tl;dr you'd have to be on the social / marketing team to see their private numbers)

Getting engagement is necessary, but not sufficient.

I don't know for sure, but from all the dev companies I saw on twitter, I bet on them doing well signup/results-wise.

I would bet the phrase "open source firebase" has been 10-100x better as a converter

Yep, quite sure you are right.

Solid positioning is key with dev tools.

All I'm saying is out of all companies trying to reach folks on Twitter Supabase is doing (imho) very good job.

Supabase has more than just solid positioning -- I don't see how they don't put almost every postgres-as-a-service company out of business and also remove the need for frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django, etc. They're basically solving an absolutely massive pain point for developers.

They are very cool, but when I did a technical comparison I landed on Directus [1].

[1] https://directus.io/

https://www.crunchydata.com/ This group deals in enterprise grade postgres only. Why would someone even consider replacing them with Supabase?

The main problem with adoption, I suspect, is that their self-hosting story is not great and their per-app pricing is not that friendly beyond a handful of apps. Might be one of the reasons their growth is no longer accelerating. They seem more focused on adding product lines than in making one really great.

Also, their main interfaces are "click buttons in a UI" or "write SQL". Why is this something a Rails, Django, or devs who code should consider changing too?

People might consider switching to supabase to get the real-time engine, the integrated auth, and the automatic REST API. They won’t lose any capability to write Rails/Django/whatever, but they’ll just have to do a lot less of it.

because you like memes, most people do not want the companies they are trying to build on to be unprofessional all the time, it's not a good look

hopefully the other commenters have helped fill in this broader perspective

we get it, you're a fun sponge

The problem, as others have pointed out, is that they are not being original and the fun is gone. How many times is a standup bit funny? Is the majority of content just posting memes? Do you have any technical content which doesn't throw a bunch of memes in for the imagery?

It's not that I don't enjoy memes, the Ukraine Meme Force is making epic ones, but I don't want this from the companies I purchase from dominating my feed.

Would be interesting to see engagement/people who like the current Twitter content assessed against customers/people with customer potential.

One would hope that have a better analytics and conversion tracking setup by now, which would go further to see how well they convert into actual users, paid or oss.

they do it even in their blogposts

https://supabase.com/blog/should-i-open-source-my-company

so annoying

There are some marketers out there selling memes as a strategy, seems more like a growth hack than real content strategy

For sure it's a tactic not a strategy.

But imho could be a good way of getting ppl to follow the account.

Come for the memes stay for the conversion/awareness bits.

It's a fallacy to think what you prefer extends to the general population.

By using tactics over strategy, you might get twitter users to follow your twitter account, but are they actually using the product, and the kind of user you really want? Are they going to convert into the high-value enterprise plans they need to sustain their business, or will it attract a bunch of freeloading users who take up support time? Does this meme tactic actually work against your business needs? (by turning away more professionally discorsed people)

Again (said that somewhere here), engagement is necessary, not sufficient.

I do believe their memes resonate with the very customer they are going for, yeah.

Any Twitter company accounts that you do like btw?

just looked up random companies on twitter and found @yeticoolers. looks like all the posts are about yeti products or sports stuff sponsored by yeti. no direct engagement bait.

if yeti imitated supabase, they might post vince mcmahon getting more excited the cooler a beverage gets, or drake doing a "no" gesture toward a warm beer, or "post your favorite thing to keep cool". does any of that sell you on a yeti cooler?

nope, not really, most use it only as a marketing tool, trying to force feed their garbage down our throats, rather than engaging with us as humans, in a conversation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com