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Comment by iamben | Hacker News Reader

The Twitter 'thick skin' part made me laugh.

A past startup had the same experience with Reddit ads. The initial replies were so negative ("I could do this 3x cheaper myself" etc), and often negative for the sake of negativity. It took a little time, but we replied to most of them with gentle words along the lines of "thank you for your thoughts and comments; we're a small business trying to do things ethically; getting it from us saves you the time/cost of leaving the house and we know how valuable your time is" - and it actually ended up quite a decent ad.

People just love to hate, especially when there's no human face to something. Or, I think in the case of places/networks where the community is tight and niche, if you're going to interject your product you'd better have enough of an understanding to answer as if you belong/have been a silent part of it all along.

Complete aside - I'm glad I've never had to market to devs, haha.

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Go a step further, write some company blog posts outlining how to do it yourself. Do a good job, honestly show how easy it is to host your own alternative, you're making the world a better place by doing so.

You want readers to think "that would be easy, maybe I'll do it". They start to believe it's important they have what you're offering and they think they'll do it themselves.

Well, we know how attention spans are these days, if something takes 30 minutes of work it will probably never get done. Most of the people will give up, and a lot of them will buy your hosted service instead because they've already convinced themselves it's important. If it's important enough to someone that they would spend their time on it, they'll spend money on it too. You want people willing to spend time / money on something to have good will towards your company.

I think this really works. While at Datadog, at one point I would write deep dives on monitoring applications like HAProxy, OpenStack and others. I would start with what to look for, how to monitor those things with off-the-shelf tooling, and finally how to do it with Datadog. The response from the community was overall very positive, regardless of whether or not they ended up converting to users (though many did).

That's a really great bridge into "hey here is the fairly functional / maybe naive path" that lets the dev imagine "oh but all the exceptions and the ... oh yeah this is more than <just logging or something else/>".

Now we're on a track where we understand the value more than the front page of a website that "hey we sell <boiled down product description that to a dev doesn't sound like much>".

As long as it's tastefully done. I forgot what it was but I was reading something like this to learn and they plugged their product like every 2 paragraphs. It came off really incincere and I wasn't even sure if the content was trustworthy at that point.

People are going to hate it just because it’s an ad that they don’t want to see while scrolling their feeds. You could have the greatest product on earth and simply because it’s an advertisement it will receive negative feedback, and snarky replies.

Advertising on social media platforms is horrendous - no one wants to see an ad, ever, for any product or service. You’re already at a disadvantage by being the source of the end user’s ire, so winning them over is extra hard.

>Advertising on social media platforms is horrendous - no one wants to see an ad, ever, //

Something like Instagram is all ads, isn't it. But people do want to see the ads because they're mostly "content". I devour ads for Creality 3D printers which look like "how to make this neat gizmo". Similarly I love ads for outdoor gear that are couched as "how to tie this knot" or "how to make a Swedish candle fire without wire". And the "how to make this pottery" which is really, 'my pots are awesome, buy some'.

Just recently I've been into adverts for comedian's tours on Facebook, which are little 2-5 minute excerpts from their routine.

So, yeah. I don't think I'm an outlier.

I'm with the person suggesting "show them how to do it for themselves" as a pretty good advert, but I've not looked at the OP yet, maybe they'll give away the crown jewels.

Not dissimilar to HN then :)

‘Show HN’ posts often have a mix of different comparatively negative comments: from the (classic) I could do this quicker/cheaper/easily, alternatives being posted, genuine criticisms (+/- misunderstandings) of the offering, criticism of the underlying website due to choices made around design/fonts/contrast/processor utilisation/JS use…

It’s such a nice surprise when there’s a ‘Show HN’ and the comments are predominantly supportive and/or positive!

A buddy of mine actually shared his product on Show HN and I was worried he would more or less get dumped on because I know how the HN crowd can be so negative towards stuff. To my surprise the feedback was actually very supportive and any criticism he received was constructive and not hateful.

Truth is, you're more likely to get positive feedback if you're posting something genuine or at least useful. Negativity is often a (justified) response to ads, marketing fluff, and lazy attempts at "growth hacking".

Unless the HN crowd is the customer base the feedback can be relative anyways.

Lots of people don’t end up shipping and sometimes the allergic reaction to someone else shipping says more about the commenter than what’s being shared.

I like the mixed reviews. A lot of times there is truth in the non-positive feedback. It's the authors ego that gets hurt and to that I say, deal with it.

Totally with you - feedback is a gift. The challenge (in all fora, not just HN!) is parsing out the well-meaning, helpful, truthful feedback from the other noise.

I value the alternatives - it gets all the tools of the same class on the same page. If I was putting up a "Show HN" post, I'd definitely add all the similar tools I'd found in a follow-up comment.

>"I could do this 3x cheaper myself"

Such an easy thing to say.

Then when I say it and think "I really just need a little bit of what this does, and this API is kinda complicated for that." and I go and start creating the thing it evolves and changes and "Hey this looks a lot like that complicated API ... ooooooohhhhh I see why that is what it is... this is going to take a long while."

It's just so easy to boil down something into something simple and think that's all it is, but do even that thing reliably and all the corner cases and other things you need, suddenly you find it is way more than your initial poo pooing if whatever the thing is.

"I could do this 3x cheaper myself if I set my hourly rate at 0$/hour" is a more accurate description of reality.

"We do these things, not because they are easy, but because we think they are easy"

> Such an easy thing to say.

Everything is easy for the people who don't have to do it!

I’m fairly sure the Twitter portion is because they named their product synonymous to a common social media expression for “share a picture of your (male) genitalia”.

It’s an unfortunate scenario for anyone who had to look at those tweets, I’m sure.

It's 100% this, the only place I've heard about this thing before seeing it on hn is people making fun of the name.

Then again, I've seen memes about it several times from completely outside of the dev/tech sphere because of this, so maybe in a way it works since it made me look up the company.

I'm confused, do you mean "PostHog"? I've never heard of this being used that way.

I assume they are converted Muslims who observe the Quran.

If you search twitter for “post hog,” the very first result is a person sharing a photograph of their erect penis.

Yes, "hog" is slang for penis. Telling someone to "post hog" is a particularly common expression among more... online leftists. A degradation of their character, basically telling them that their opinions are worthless so they had better have a large member to make up for it.

That’s super ideal as opposed to what I’ve got on Reddit, which is extremely graphic porn comments on an Ad for a product designed for parents for their children. The comments were basically phantasies of girls in different circumstances. I’ve reported the comment to Reddit and they came back and said “yeah, we’re not going to be removing that as it doesn’t violate our community guidelines”. I closed the account then and there. Apart from that, I would get about 5 or 6 real users per hundred clicks from them, where the clicks costed something like 20-30 cents. Money out the window.

The first rule in enterprise sales is that the first human reaction will always be “No.”

The former CEO of Routeware before he sold it to Vista Equity Partners said that he required his sales team to secure three clear “No’s” for each buyer within an organization before fully disqualifying a lead.

So if you’re selling to a “software architect” and the CTO has to provide the final sign off.

- three no’s from the architect

- three no’s from the CTO

It’s funny how easily we give up on potentially successful concepts by not getting to a “No” faster or even at all.

It’s completely foreign to software engineers.

Wow, that would piss me the fuck off.

I hope they're counting each individual instance of a "no", so that if I say "no" three times during the same cold call, they'll GTFO and never call again.

One could say you're doing the exact same thing to Redditors that you say they do. Being negative for the sake of being negative. Just love to hate when there is no human face - or even someone to reply. But oops, here one is ;)

Redditors are entitled and they are demanding and they are quick to jump all over you. And they can be wrong. But it's not for the sake of negativity and it's not because there is no human there.

That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts. If you want to bring Redditors some overpriced vaporware you are absolutely right they're going to rip you apart. They're just doing what Redditors do - calling out bullshit.

Bring them a product worthy of praising and they'll make entire subreddits dedicated to your awesome product.

> That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts.

Lol, that’s not at all what the culture is good at. It’s an internet mob with famous examples of false accusations, doxxing and harassment. Any subreddit that isn’t severely moderated is gamed by people who know how to appeal to the local crowd.

Being cynical and anti-business is not about “getting to the facts”. It just means they need a different type of marketing.

I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the community, I'm sorry.

> It just means they need a different type of marketing.

That's correct. And Step #1 is to have a product which will make it past the collective bullshit detector. Step #2 is to provide real and actual value. To have a legitimately good product.

So much of marketing is built on deception. If you try to deceive Redditors, you're going to get told to fk urself.

People who can't complete step 1 or 2 and want to employ deception-based marketing often tell a tail like yours. It's our fault for not just taking what you tell us at face value and handing over our money.

However all of the people appending 'Reddit' to their search queries instead of reading the deception-based marketing pages that fill up Google results, may understand where I'm coming from.

> I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the community, I'm sorry.

Dude doesn't seem hurt, they're just spitting facts.

That was an extremely biased and jaded characterization that focuses only on a narrow set of negatives.

Have those things happened on Reddit? Ya. Was that in any way an accurate summary of what Reddit is? No. And it's absurd to claim that it is.

"But look at this example and this one"

I could make a huge list of the times Reddit has been bad, too. That doesn't change a single thing about what I just said.

I think the problem is that we're talking about "reddit" like it's one group of people who have the same characteristic responses to things across time. But the whole point of reddit is for there to be disparate communities who may or may not communicate with each other and may or may not share or hold diametrically opposing views on any topic that can be written in words.

When submitting to reddit, you elplicitely cannot submit just to "reddit", you have to choose a subreddit. These subreddit can be as varied in response as humans can, even when apparently sharing the same topic/goal. Subreddits turn toxic sometimes, sometimes they're made that way intentionally. Some are hard fought places of positive intent with strong moderation and some are 'wild west'. Sometimes places get toxic enough that someone else creates a similarly named subreddit with an identical goal but attempts to cultivate and moderate a positive environment. If you didn't know about this you'd see 2 identical subreddits, when you post you'll get 2 very different receptions.

"Reddit"s response is entirely dependent upon subreddit. We cannot argue about how "reddit" reacts, and it's impractical to talk about individual redditors, the communities within, the subreddits, are the unit about which we can have meaningful conversation. There's no point in arguing about whether reddit has hurt someone or not or whether their reception was beneficial or degrading the community without knowing _which_ Community. There are places that will hurt everyone, there are places that will reject every product, there are places that won't. They are different places

> These subreddit can be as varied in response as humans can

I've never been anywhere on Reddit that doesn't have the specific characteristic that I'm referring to. If people think you are wrong, they tell you. If they think you're lying or spinning bullshit, they say so. If they think your method is suboptimal, they let you know the way they think is best.

This also applies to people on HN. We're engaged in it right now.

I've been a reddit user for a number of years, and while there are indeed some good subreddits, by and large my experience lines up with kortilla's.

You have way too much faith in reddit and it’s given you a huge blind spot.

It’s trivial for companies to get past Reddit’s “bullshit detector”. Just sound like a scrappy small business that cares deeply about users and not money.

There is a trail of overfunded kickstarters with nothing to show years later that demonstrates how gullible redditors are.

Your overconfidence in a bunch of armchair experts is exactly why they are so gullible. Being susceptible to marketing is one thing. Thinking you’re not is so much worse.

> I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the community, I'm sorry.

You don’t speak for the community of which I’m a part. They also didn’t hurt me, they hurt the people they doxxed and I watched it happen years ago. That’s why there are strict doxxing bans now.

Redditors as a collective are as dumb as the average population (everyone gets equal votes), which doesn’t make for a good SNR.

> However all of the people appending 'Reddit' to their search queries instead of reading the deception-based marketing pages that fill up Google results, may understand where I'm coming from.

I do this too, but what you’re failing to grasp is that you don’t realize you’re also reading deception-based marketing pages. Corporations wised up to social media a decade ago and have armies of social media experts that know exactly how to target various online communities.

> Lol, that’s not at all what the culture is good at. It’s an internet mob with famous examples of false accusations, doxxing and harassment.

You're both wrong :). There is no "Reddit culture"; on Reddit, culture is scoped to a subreddit. You and GP are likely hanging out on different kinds of subreddits - but if your experience is that of "an internet mob with famous examples of false accusations, doxxing and harassment", I strongly suggest you rethink which subreddits you follow. Yes, they probably need a different type of marketing, but they're probably also not worth it for technical products.

> Being cynical and anti-business is not about “getting to the facts”.

It's hard to tell, because cynicism and healthy realism overlap nearly 100% when it comes to modern business.

> There is no "Reddit culture"; on Reddit, culture is scoped to a subreddit.

There is both.

For example, anonymity. There is nothing stopping people from using their real name as their username or openly revealing who they are, where they live and work etc. But the Reddit culture is to be anonymous.

Are there exceptions? Yes. But those exceptions don't change that it's an anonymous culture.

Oh I’m aware different subreddits have different cultures, but doxxing and mob behavior emerge from any large enough online anonymous crowd. Humans at scale are petty and vindictive. HN even has to have rules about it because it’s been a problem here even when the site was much smaller.

Any particular subreddit will have a specific ideological soft spot that a dedicated marketer will be able to identify and craft turf to exploit. It’s a fundamental flaw to anonymity.

> That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts.

That’s not my experience at all. I’m curious what makes you think that?

> I’m curious what makes you think that?

15+ years of living on Reddit.

Is it perfect at those things? Of course not. Can you and I and others provide a bunch of examples of those things not happening? Of course. It's still damned good at them.

I expanded at length here on how this works with regard to people trying to promote their products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37703112

But it applies to all sorts of stuff, depending on the subreddit. Investing advice, sports trivia, historical facts, whatever.

That link didn’t really explain anything.

Are you talking about specific subreddits or topics?

I’ve found the negativity on Reddit to be more likely as to come from completely ignorant sources as anyone with actual knowledge. I'm pretty surprised anyone on there for a long period of time would be so trusting of the community there.

> Are you talking about specific subreddits or topics?

I'm talking about the culture of the entire site. From tiny subreddits to huge ones and every topic.

> I’ve found the negativity on Reddit to be more likely as to come from completely ignorant sources as anyone with actual knowledge.

Maybe we're talking about different things here. You seem to be referring to jerks. I was referring to people calling stuff out. People can call things out politely. One could say you're doing it right now - you disagree with me and you're explaining why. You're not being negative but what you're doing would be an example of what I mean. Redditors do this. If they see something they think is wrong, they say so. Sometimes in great numbers. Sometimes politely, sometimes very rude. Sometimes with the IQ of a hamster and sometimes it's a genius. But they let you know.

> I'm pretty surprised anyone on there for a long period of time would be so trusting of the community there.

I don't know what you mean by trusting. They're not always right. I don't automatically believe whatever they say. It's like in Jackie Brown. 'You can't trust melanie, but you can always trust melanie to be melanie.' I trust Reddit to be Reddit. If they see something they don't agree with or think is false or think is misleading or think is not the best way - they're gonna let you know.

Same, in my experience it’s the opposite. The downvoting and moderation creates an echo chamber where there are certain things get accepted as obvious facts that don’t have much (or any) basis. Once that happens, almost everyone seems to uncritically repeat that without bothering to see if it’s actually true, and anyone who questions it is downvoted off the page (or in more extreme cases, the posts are removed/the user is blocked).

Reddit also seems to suffer from something you see in a lot of online communities, where in the valley of the blind the one eyed man is king. People with a slight amount experience (or even hobbyists that just post a lot) get taken as authoritative sources that can’t be questioned. Working on your history degree? You can go to Reddit and be treated with more authority than most people even give accomplished historians. One of the many individuals who served as a squad leader in the army? You can get treated as if you’re an expert on all things military and are able to more accurately predict the outcome of conflicts than the Defense Department is.

>That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts.

Meanwhile the “inverse Reddit” investing strategy works even better than “inverse Cramer”

Reddit comments are the whiskey to YouTube comment’s beer on the stupidity index.

I guess it depends at what point you buy. A lot of people on Reddit got generational fuck you money betting on GME, Bitcoin and a lot of other stuff. But if you're getting your Reddit tips from CNN then ya you're probably too late.

Have you seen the receipts or are you just parroting what they are saying on social media?

I'm suspecting this other user has some naive / ideological-ish belief in the reddit community or something.

Probably what's happening is I'm doing a poor job of communicating what I mean. To me if I say 'they aren't always right' that's enough and I have clearly articulated that Reddit can be and is on a regular basis, completely idiotic, absurdly wrong and all flavor of other bad things. But evidently not as people keep saying things like you just did.

lol parroting what they say on social media.

Very interesting way you put that and sorta gets to the heart of the matter.

To me it doesn't even make sense, like, why would I get my information on social media. I'm telling you what I've seen on Reddit. But you went to what people say other places. Which is clearly how a lot of you are getting your information.

And ya, I've seen the receipts. I've got some receipts of my own.

Just for context, your responses read here as full of sarcasm and self assurance. I think your ideas might be more well received if you communicated them with a kinder and more accepting tone. For what it's worth it does sound like you spend a lot of time in toxic online communities, and i believe you have an expertise in those areas.

Man, HN has sure changed. Clearly I'm not among fellow hackers if people are worried about tone rather than truth.

If someone needs their ass kissed to recognize I'm right, that's on them. Not me.

HN is one of the few places on the internet that there's even the slightest chance at having a substantive discussion that isn't full of short, mocking, casually dismissive comments ala Reddit and Twitter. Tone is crucial to HN's quality. Encouraging a sincere and charitable tone is one of HN's founding principles and is the main focus of the posting guidelines.

The poster you're replying to is 100% correct.

Yeah, right. Strangely you didn’t mention BBBY.

One example that came to mind was Apollo app where their users came to bat for them during that whole third-party apps fiasco.

> That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts.

No idea how anyone can say this earnestly about Reddit while having spent as much time there as you claim you have. It's a horrible corner of the internet rife with all kinds of bigotry and hatred and negativity for the sake of it. Not to mention it's the easiest place to astroturf ever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

I think you just set the World Record for most strawmen in one comment. Congratulations.

If you took what I said to be some type of blanket 'Reddit is a perfect and wonderful place' you misunderstood.

Also keep in mind that people tend to be in a bad mood when you do the digital equivalent of tapping them on the shoulder while they are wearing headphones and concentrating.

> People just love to hate

no, people are suffering themselves, competitive pressures, personal failure and doubt, but more the external F-U response.. drugs like alcohol also play a part.. What is true is that without actual interaction, the social filters change quickly

Yea, it’s pretty normal - people are rightfully try to poke at your solution before they spend money on it.

Sometimes they are simply not the target market (yet) and that’s okay.

> "I could do this 3x cheaper myself"

There is always someone that think they can do it faster and better but happens to never do anything that anybody buys.

That is how they can do it 3x cheaper. When you do not spend your time dealing with the business, marketing, etc. that frees up a lot of time and thus cost.

If one was looking to open it up to a wider audience, it would see their costs rise 3x too, but if one is only looking to use something for internal use there isn't much need to incur any of those additional costs.

Redditors are a cancer on society. Terrible people.

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