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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

IMHO the core point is John Gruber equity, so it is basically a business promotion not an article: "Not only was my feedback warmly received, it begat a series of discussions that culminated in my gladly accepting a position as an official adviser to the company, in exchange for a small amount of equity. I’m happy to disclose this now, and will continue to disclose it when writing about Wavelength henceforth.".

The disclosure was made almost exactly in the middle of a long article. Not at the beginning.

Excuse me but gentlemen don't do that.

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Wait, let me make sure I understand -- you're objecting to his promoting of a business interest on his own blog? By telling a story about he got involved? I dunno about you, but if I had a blog with a gazillion loyal readers, I would promote the hell out of my own projects. What, uh, else is something like that for? I'm with gruber on this

I considered that, but it felt like a spoiler. I wanted to tell a story, and it felt natural and fair to me to put that advisory disclaimer in the chronology. I don’t think it’s misleading, because anyone who lost interest before getting to that point almost certainly wasn’t going to download and try out Wavelength.

Put another way: do you really think there are people who read my article who downloaded and installed Wavelength based on the fact that I wrote about it, but who didn’t read that far into the article? And if they had seen the disclaimer, wouldn’t have downloaded it on the basis that they no longer trust my word about it? I don’t.

It's never too late to address it. I stopped reading and decided not to try wavelength on this shady behavior.

Exactly. He should have started the article with "Disclaimer: [...]".

Disclosure, not disclaimer.

That’s a stylistic choice. It’s not a universal rule.

> That’s a stylistic choice. It’s not a universal rule.

It's universal rule if you want people to actually read disclaimer. Similar method of burying the lead is used to promote quackery, info that's it's based on a online poll that five people took is "hidden" in later parts of article.

burying the *lede

John Gruber seems not to be a gentleman after reading about his behaviour in the story of CommonMark’s name: https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

Jeff Atwood instead is remarkably compliant. I personally would have been instisting on „Common Markdown“. Especially with the reasoning, with John Gruber just not-replying until publishing and then being a child and applying double standards, when he himself caused the need for CommonMark due to the inconsistent description of Markdown’s grammar.

I remember that story differently. No one is obligated to respond to Atwood questions just because. But gentleman don't need to start digging into unrelated stories to discredit someone. Let's stick to point here.

Don't gentlemen do whatever necessary to earn money? Except stealing from another gentlemen, of course.

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