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Comment by owlninja | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting the number of responses that had success after gathering e-mails. If your 'Show HN' asks for an e-mail here, everyone gets incredibly angry and lets you know they stopped looking at your product right away.

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I think too though for some submissions there's a discrepancy between readers vs commenters, I think in part because HN as a site is attractive to certain types of users (text only, more web 1.0-y and refreshing vs gamified forum experiences), which leads to some skew in the demographic of who choose to register as users and engage.

See for example the disproportionate number of comments on HN from users who disable Javascript and or (all) cookies and remark about a site experience based on it (can't read article, some aspect not working, etc), yet from general statistics represents a niche minority.

(Which isn't to say that any such critiques are invalid either, just an observation on perceived audience)

I just realized two implications of this HN demographic:

* Good: That side of HN is within the target for a little niche Web site I plan to launch in a few weeks.

* Bad: I used a Web framework that requires 10x the hosting resources that it should (resume-driven-development), so I might have to upgrade from free-tier hosting before HN mention, just to not be embarrassed by hug of death.

Even if you survive the hug, they'll probably complain anyway.

What framework? I'm getting into full stack and I was under the impression that all the shiny new stuff is focused on being more efficient, rather than less?

E*e*t*on, maybe.

Don’t forget about the comments regarding sites that hijack the scrolling.

Don't listen to what customers say, but look at what they do.

Asking for emails allows you to target people who are more likely to engage with your marketing, while people who find this annoying would probably be more critical of the product and in general are more picky. In the end they still give you engagement in a form of comments, so it's a win-win. Similar strategy is leaving easily spottable typos in your post so that nitpickers can't help but comment on it.

Need to keep annoyance balanced to avoid getting flagged/downvoted though.

Says a lot about the average HN reactionary commenter =)

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