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Comment by eastdakota | Hacker News Reader

I’m smiling thinking of the reaction I’d get on our marketing team if I suggested: “Hey, I have an idea, let’s post a negative story on Hacker News so then people in the comments will say things and I can reply.”

John (our CTO) and I care about HN because we’re engineers at heart. Unfortunately, most the people we sell to today have never even heard of let alone participated in this community. But, over time, I hope as many of the people in this community get C’s in front of their titles and manage hundred million dollar IT budgets, I hope you’ll stay engaged here. More engineers in the C-suite would be great.

Though what you’ll find, sadly, is there’s still lots and lots of chaos.

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There is a legend about an online store on the eve of the 2000s, which behaved very badly towards customers, and on forums everyone discussed how bad they are.

But their mentions performed very good for SEO and sales.

It's a [m-word] textbook story, I don't believe you don't know it.

There are no "negative stories", there are newsworthy occasions.

Reminders that we're still alive, that we're still working.

And comments about how great we are, which for some reason are far more numerous (and upvoted) in this thread than Hacker's technical discussions.

I would bet the scale and scope of Cloudflare's business would make HN a complete waste of time over and over, even if it were some marketing conspiracy. The CEO of an org like CF has way better things to do with his company-time than shill on HN. Plus, if you took 2 minutes to look at eastdakota's comment history and/or mine, you'll see we are longtime active HN users. So if we're somehow in cahoots to drum up some good marketing PR on HN, then we've put more than 10 years of effort into building fake profiles with comment history and have carefully made sure to hide our affiliation, just so I could compliment Cloudflare on HN and hope that the Gods of random actually got it noticed and upvoted, just so the CEO could come in and leave a comment.

Or, maybe we're just people that like and use HN that happen to believe what we say.

> The CEO of an org like CF has way better things to do with his company-time than shill on HN. Plus, if you took 2 minutes to look at eastdakota's comment history

If we took 2 minute to look at eastdakota's comment history (put aside its authenticity), we can see that he has no better things to do than to flame with us in this branch hidden by mods from the rest of the world besides us three (how this topic seen by others: http://archive.is/1VgPM)

On the other hand, a lot of users on HN are probably very different and probably are the ones that advice on what technical changes should do.

Having a presence and even just replying quickly gives a sense of, 'if something goes wrong, I'll know and if I need someone, posting there works'.

It took time to realize what "big C" could refer besides the obvious "Comsomol". Structurally the same, though :)

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