Ask HN : What's the meanest thing that has been said about your startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN : What's the meanest thing that has been said about your startup?

41 pointsdan_sim91 comments

When you have a startup, you hear a lot of mean words about people who want you to fail. It's time to talk about it. Feel free to add a link.

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Several years ago I co-founded a small game company. We busted our butt working 80 hours a week for months on end to get stuff done. We had one game that we shipped and were proud of; it was a budget game, but it was superior to many other games at that price point ($20).

Anyway, one reviewer wrote: "I would prefer the soothing comfort of a spork being gouged in my eye rather than playing a few more minutes of this game." Still makes me laugh, actually.

You should have mailed him a letter saying that you were sorry that he didn't like the game and to please find enclosed one (1) plastic spork.

How did the game end up doing?

Badly. :|

It's hard to say if it was marketing or what, though. Plenty of budget games did well (not sure any more), but people don't usually buy budget games based on reviews. They buy it because they see it at Wal-mart for $20 and it looks fun based on the box.

Someone ported it to an arcade platform, though, and I still see it at most Chuck-e-cheese's, which is the coolest thing in the world. Way cooler than seeing it on the shelf at the store.

Was that a PC Accelerator editor, by chance? I loved that magazine- I always turned to the worst reviews first, just to see the crazy comments they had to say!

I've put significant work over the past 6 years into an open source programming language called Sleep. I have a small community and I love programming in it and that is enough of a reward to me.

That said, I've attracted my critics too:

Subject: better name would be STOP

From: NothingPersonal (62.132.1.121)

Date: September 27, 2004 at 10:08:34

Please. Just STOP. stop stop stop. don't inflict yet another half-baked, il-concieved abortion of a scripting language onto unsuspecting developers. Yes, you had fun writing it, but the only niche it fills is the one in your head that renders you incapable of mastering any of the other numerous scripting options already available to you.

I know I'm supposed to be nice to you because hey who are you really bothering, and selection of the fittest will surely see sleep sleep it's way to a quiet and peaceful death. But while on it's way to it's inevitable demise, sleep is bound to take with it some hapless developers, who will in turn inflict it on numerous doomed projects, and all that spells misery for all concerned.

While I'm at it, I also have to point out that the very last thing I want to read when browsing a language reference is pathetic, self-important humour.

I'm urging you to do the honourable thing. stop sleeping, and wake the f* up. Take down your cargo-cult website (it even has a wiki! it's _bound_ to be a success!) and spend (alot) more time researching your foundations before embarking on such follies again.

Why do intensely personal attacks start with "Nothing Personal?"

Because they don't really mean it personally, since they know nothing about the person behind things. They are not thinking at all about the founder/writer/developer. They are just thinking about how annoyed they were for the past 2 seconds.

Which is to say: We'd all be better people if, whenever we typed the phrase nothing personal, Clippy popped up on the screen with a message: "I see you're writing something that might be better left unsaid. Would you like to get some sleep before continuing?"

Dude, with a name like sleep and a thing called hoes how can you go wrong? It doesn't look that bad as a scripting language actually, I applaud you that you actually created the thing. :-)

I don’t think that mean criticism is all bad; I’m one of those people who think you should not be creating companies if you don’t have a thick skin. I found out some mean criticism actually push you back against the wall and give you a different prospective on the whole thing. Human ambition feed on challenges; some on the things I did in my life I did them because someone told me I could not do.

A personal story: In middle school, I was a chubby kid and my sport teacher made fun of me telling me I could not run a 5 miles contest because my heart may stop beating. I told my dad, my best friend, begging him not to complain at school. I saw the anger on his face and he told me one thing: prove him wrong son! I started running every day and lost tons of weight.

At my last year of high school the teacher was still around. One day I challenge him in front of a bunch of student and some teachers to run the five miles against him. He was dumb to accept because he failed to realize that I was no more the chubby kid, I was thinner and about 4 inches taller than him. I ran the first 4 miles right behind him and past him at the last mile. I remember the humiliation he put me in years back and called him names on the last stretch in front of everyone. He was crushed; I had my revenge and still feel good about it today.

This was a teacher?!

That is actually pretty mean. You finally took your life in your own hands and you blame your laziness, your sloth, your lack of motivation on someone that wanted to help you (albeit while being very uncouth).

That is incredibly mean. You may not be fat anymore, but you are still an asshole.

So mean.

WTF ... what are you talking about?

That's a really tragic story. Most awful part is the ending: "...[I] still feel good about it today."

LoL - it was all said here on Hacker News, even when I did not ask for feedback. I'd come here to read interesting things (no interest in talking up our product) and see a brigade of people talking really HARSH & trashing us.

In the end I listened to all words and used the feedback to evolve our product. Nowadays, we see more positive talk (not sure about here) about our product(still evolving) then we did prior to the HN feedback.

Find the various HN posts here http://searchyc.com/sleep.fm

Since we launched on Techcrunch, we were barraged with criticism. Some of it was constructive, some not so much. Honestly, none of it bothered me or my cofounder (tdavis) as we laughed up the ugly and took the rest as free consulting.

Except the comment about our passion - questioning how we could devote so much time to "making [tickets] a bit cheaper". As PG pointed out, it's never been about the tickets, it's about the event themselves. Think about the top 20 moments in your life, chances are one of them occurred at a sporting event, concert or show. That's why I love what I do. Oh and because all that stuff is now a tax write-off for me :).

Unfortunately, the link is to Hacker News:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268339

That one hurts! It's ok to attack ideas, functionalities, bad design, ugly UI but the guts of the founders... that is really really mean.

I don't think we've ever gotten a piece of "personal attack" criticism that I took seriously. The way I figure it, I know myself way better than anybody else and am more than capable of issuing personal criticism. I'd have felt a lot worse if he would have criticized my code or something.

One of worst thing I have ever experienced was this comment on my profile on versiontracker:

This was the lamest thing I've ever tried. It starts by popping up disjointed out of place overlapping windows then an alert box pops up telling me that I don't have a 64MB video card just to make it appear to be an advanced piece of software, sorry I only have a Radeon 7000 32MB and that my computer isn't good enough for this piece of shit software. The UI is crap, it's way too buggy to take seriously and it's down right ugly. I felt like I had a red headed step-child with head lice on my computer. It does work great with AppZapper.

You are no PhotoShop, keep dreaming. I really hate when people spew things that just aren't true.

If you want to see mean, try writing essays.

I never understood why people were doing that. Many Reddit comments about your essays were extremely vicious.

Human nature. They will love you first. Hate you second. And when you are gone, they will love you again, claiming that all those things you wrote/said were prophecies, visions.

I think the fundamental problem is that writing essays seems presumptuous to a lot of people. They're used to the old print media model in which the only people who got to publish essays were credentialled experts in whatever they were about. That restriction is now gone. Online anyone can publish whatever they want. But I think it still seems to a lot of people that anyone using the essay form is implicitly claiming some kind of authority.

The right approach, obviously, is to judge an essay by what it says instead of who wrote it. I think things will tend to move in that direction. But not too far, because it's more work.

Yes, you mentioned that in http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html

That explains the dismissive comments. The angry and really mean ones can be explained perhaps as people feeling threatened for whatever reason?

When in doubt, Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad theory probably applies: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

I agree, but why do they do that?

I dunno. I figured I'd done my job in providing a link to a funny picture on the Internet. If you ask me any more hard questions, you're gonna get a picture of a cat fixing a computer. I don't think either of us really wants that to happen.

You should try publishing under a different name next time and see what the response is. It would be an interesting experiment.

If he doesn't put a lot of effort into hiding his writing style, it should be pretty easy to tell.

I'd like to think I could tell as well, but only a trial would let us test your hypothesis.

Sometimes, an article is boring enough and the writer is interesting enough that the only logical thing to comment on is the writer.

It brings up a good question -- is an essayist obligated to read people's responses? Or do you hire someone to filter out negative responses? (Not necessarily opposing viewpoints, just reddit level commentary.)

I can understand how demoralizing it can be -- short of re-evolving the human race, what is a good way to deal with this so you can stay positive and energized?

I would say there's no obligation, but what is the point of writing otherwise? I've had a couple of times where the resulting dialogue has changed my mind at least partially. For me personally, writing is more an exercise in clarifying and detailing my thought process, so I consider the dialogue one of the most valuable aspects of writing publicly, and well worth deleting a few "you're a douchebag" posts every week. I think that's why Disqus has seen such success, it significantly improves the resulting dialogue.

I probably have thicker skin than most though. A lot of writers have low self-esteem, so might actually be damaged by the insults. I just feel bad for the person who writes a 500 word essay about why I'm an asshole in my comment section, partially because I know he (and it's always a he) must be an extremely unhappy person for that to seem like a valid use of his time, and partially because he spent a half hour writing something that I deleted with one click.

As a first approximation, you can discriminate by site. I never read comments on Reddit and always read them on News.YC.

This has truly baffled me over the 4-5 years I've been blogging. I just can't determine the thought process that leads to someone becoming personally offended over a blog post they didn't agree with.

And oddly, it happens more on the innocuous posts than ones I'd expect. For instance, I once called XKCD "about as funny as a partial birth abortion" and got a pretty good dialogue going with Randall Munroe. (Maybe I shouldn't be surprised a comic strip author took it in good humor.) Shortly after I wrote an article about why I think Android has a good shot at ending up on more smart phones than OSX and got death threats.

If you really want to see mean, try saving the world. That really offends people. I'm not joking.

I've got a whole collection of choice comments saved up in my quotesfile, but my all-time favorite is this one, from a bona-fide hater who actually meant it:

"I don't see how the US government could be so lax in its responsibility for providing for the national defense as to leave you at large." -- Alan Grimes

Heh-- people have called RescueTime evil, especially in a work setting. Never hurt our feelings much-- we try to not go tooo far down the evil path, but we've always felt like a manager/biz owner has the right to say, "How are you spending your time?" and get an honest (and CORRECT) answer. A lot of people say, "Well, if I get my work done in 2 hours every day, I have a RIGHT to screw off for the other 6"... While we think that folks deserve some "down-time", I think there's such a thing as under-tasked and under-utilized team members who just need to have more work thrown their way. For a knowledge worker, it's trivially easy to hide when you don't have much work to do.

> we try to not go tooo far down the evil path

So what have you done on the evil path so far?

Well, we've created a tool that a manager could put on an employees machine to see how they spend their time at work. We strongly market/urge managers to expose this data to their employees and allow them to see how they compare to the average on their team, but they don't HAVE to do that.

The "spectrums" of evil that we deal with are:

Open vs. stealth: Right now RescueTime can't be stealthy, but there are certainly settings (academic labs trying to understand utilization) where stealth might be appropriate.

and

Exposure of worker data to managers (customers): How much detail do we expose to the manager beyond the team averages/totals? Due to customer demand, we've exposed some high level individual data to managers.

and

How much data we collect in a workplace. We're not budging here and are sticking with time/attention data. There are services out there that literally log keystrokes, take screenshots, and blindly cc managers on all emails sent (including personal webmail). Yuck.

With an app whose main feature is to track people in one way, it's not surprising that it would end up tracking people in other ways too.

In any case, please try to turn back and head back up the evil path, or at the very least, stop where you are :)

Probably the meanest thing you can say about someone's start-up is something along the lines of "Wow, we are really stretching the definition of a start-up here, huh?"

"it's ashley, this website ROCKS ! haha jk !"

That "jk" was just devastating.

Don't take it so hard; the writer just meant "she" wasn't really "ashley".

I once had a startup which was basically an online database of professional actor and model videos. My all time favorite put-down came when we first got into model videos.

We did some test shoots for a couple established agencies (Elite, Q Models) and were looking to get into more doors. My partner's girlfriend at the time was a model so I asked her to get us a meeting with her bookers. Her [strong] opinion was that for a variety of seemingly good reasons (too long to list here) web video would never work in the modeling industry and we were pretty much wasting our time.

Five minutes later, on a completely unrelated topic, she mentioned that her best friend, also a model, was going on a video shoot that week. Turned out her agency (Wilhelmina) thought this new online video thing was, ya know, promising.

I am still scratching my head over that one. She wasn't your stereotypical 18-year old airhead and she was clearly sympathetic to our cause...

It's more start than up.

I Like this tweet a while back:

"MIBBIT SUCKS BIG TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

It's actually pretty cool to get criticism IMHO, It shows people care. Also cool when your app is broken, and people scream at you... You have to look past the anger, and see that they are lost without your app, and love it dearly.

"It's actually pretty cool to get criticism IMHO, It shows people care."

As Oscar Wilde said it: "There's only one thing worse than being talked about, and that's not being talked about."

This was not actually said about my startup but a good friend of mine’s startup, before he even got a chance to finish introducing his startup to his former class mates one of them said: ‘Wow that’s cute!’ They all replied ‘Yeah that’s very nice!’

2 years later he had $20M in the bank and had employed 3 of those friends.

The worst part of that story is that his friends probably didn't mean it. Probably the meanest thing is people that don't believe in what you're doing but don't want to say it. They think it will discourage you. So, you go on thinking "well, they liked it at least" when they didn't. That's bad.

Trying to charge for your service is one way to quickly find out what people thing.

thing -> think

[ Sorry. Too late to correct the original comment. ]

It's time to talk about it

Living well is the best revenge... but selling ~$30k of the app that would never have a single customer comes as a close second. :)

That's a classic though still very popular among mean people.

"Please disable my account."

Used to get hundreds of those requests when I had a prominently placed "feedback" link. Each one made me sad....

Then I changed the link to "feature requests" and nearly all of those requests when away:-) Then I made deactivating the account easier to find. The deactivation rates actually went down when people realized that they could do it themselves any time that they needed to.

"You're a cheep knockoff of [competitor]!" -- This one always got to me too. Spent months not advertising a site and changing it just to be different in fear of this one. I rarely ended up hearing this though.

we got this one: "IF YOU TYPE TO ME ONE MORE TIME I’LL SUE YOUR BUTT OFF OF THIS COUNTRY!!!"

Did you type to him one more time?

I swear I would have.

We got pretty chewed out about our acquisition by Monster.

http://www.cheezhead.com/2008/07/31/monster-acquires-trovix/

My favourite two parts:

"(Sidenote: Trovix ownership has to be farting rainbows and burping unicorns in complete bliss as I write this post.)"

and

"And as far as buzz goes - which does matter - Trovix is on no one’s hot list. Ever heard a company brag about its experience using this service? Me neither. They don’t exist. I don’t care how many company logos or Wall Street Journal clips Trovix puts on their site."

"Dear Sir:

If you wanted to discourage us, you probably should have done so BEFORE we became fabulously wealthy. Please remember this for next time.

Regards, ..."

I should note that when I say "we", sadly I was not a cofounder.

Not my startup, but I always think back to the initial Slashdot editor reaction to the iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257...

"But they already created that". To which I respond "how many pizzeria are out there, how many gas stations, how many shoe manufacturers, how many zoos, should we all settle for The One?"

I think this is the wrong question.

Fake praise does a lot more damage than mean-spirited criticism. Because fake praise has nothing but well-meaning behind it, while mean-spirited criticism can actually point out things that need fixing. In addition, fake praise can mask a lot of flaws that should be fixed.

I'm of the mind that the more mean criticism you get the better off you probably are -- people at least took time to rag on you. Apathy is what really sucks.

That was the case here : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441797

When I started the thread, I didn't want to say that criticism is bad or should be avoided. I just wanted to have fun at what people are saying about startups.

Fake praise does a lot more damage than mean-spirited criticism.

I don't think that's true. Bogus praise is self-correcting in a way that bogus criticism isn't. If bogus praise gives you an unduly high opinion of yourself, you at least keep working, and the resistance of the medium may push your opinion of yourself back down to where it should be. Whereas harsh critism can discourage you from working, so you never get the successes that would have corrected your opinion of yourself.

Can't it be said that undue praise will make the author work less hard, having achieved the dopamine high of accomplishment? Where as criticism can spur harder work from people set out to "prove themselves." I'm not saying either way is good or bad, I'm just saying both of our examples are anecdotal and either can have the desire effect. All depends on the criticism and the outlook and personality of the recipient.

It's not the opinion of yourself, it's the honest appraisal of whether your current efforts are worthwhile.

There are some that will tell you that you are doing a great job without thinking critically through whether you should be doing what you're doing.

I think the distinction here is whether you take the praise or criticism personally or just as a reflection on your current effort. If it's meant personally then sure, it's kind of hard to have too much praise.

The first web site I launched - I guess you could call it a start-up, though I didn't seek funding and tried to profit off of ads - had a bunch of criticisms, all of them true. Stuff like "This drop-down menu doesn't actually drop down" and "Your background is the exact color of my puking macaroni and cheese" and "I don't think 'error mySQL injection' counts as a web site." People would write stories and blog posts starring themselves valiantly killing me and freeing the users of the site. That was a fun project.

My current one hasn't publicly launched yet; the only complaint I've had is that the font looks icky on Internet Explorer. (We use Times New Roman as our base, tweaked to look nice; it actually looks quite good on everything other than IE. We might inject CSS that changes the font to Verdana or Helvetica, but most fonts in IE look pretty bad.) I did get a nice insult thread on Hacker News from one guy who told me something like "You're wasting your youth on a shitty idea that nobody likes" without knowing what my startup was.

that would be from a guy who called himself "crabapple," an account which has since been killed.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382107

Not so much about our startup per se, but this is definitely the worst feedback we've ever received about the site:

"I will be bringing this [site] to the attention of my attorney who maintains a list of abusive web practices."

"It looks like a thirteen year old cobbled it together while working his or her way through a "Learning Ruby on Rails" book."

Then followed by a backhanded compliment: http://smoorg.blogspot.com/2007/12/crowdvinecom.html

Alexis from Reddit has a hilarious site where you can send atrocious feedback: http://feedbackfail.com/

This is a great site for a sad day. (Cheered me up already)

> Add a link to your startup please.

What, you want others to exceed the meanness level? ;-)

When people are mean to your startup, it usually mean that you are working on something good. But you're right that someone may not want to link his product. I'll change it.

I don't think you're right there. When a person with no vested interest is mean to your startup, it usually means you are having a communication or branding problem.

Michael Arrington just wrote on TechCrunch about my latest project at http://grader.com and called it "beyond useless". Does that count?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/facebook-grader-for-the...

I got a lot of scathing criticism when I shifted my marching band web game away from competition and more toward a creative sandbox approach. People said my reasons were insulting, that there was no reason to use the site anymore, and that I was being utopian.

It was a rough period, but I stuck to it because it's something I believe in. Thankfully, in the end, the community became more positive and supportive of each other, the user-created content has improved a lot, and registrations keep climbing.

I've thought about writing an essay or two about the effects of competition on creativity and education in the arts. It will probably draw even more hate from the die-hard competition crowd, but I think it's important, and I have a pretty unique perspective on it.

Personally, the meanest thing that has been said about TimmyOnTime - http://www.timmyontime.com - (a project monitoring app that works with IM) is that it has an old smell of an IRC bots written back in 1998.

We had our firm get reviewed here on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347359). Actually the comments here were pretty good overall. I remember going to a tech meetup in town here... describing what we did seem to personally offend some people. I had people practically yelling at me that what we were doing was terrible and stupid. A few months later, we are featured on GigaOm with a pretty positive article (http://gigaom.com/2008/10/27/more-money-i-game-developers-wi...) :)

"What is it? I really have no idea."

I'll take any feedback, mean or otherwise, for http://ourdoings.com/ especially for features I've implemented recently.

i really don't take the mean comments too seriously, only the constructive ones where people actually want to help you out. filter everything else out.

the other day someone sent this message over a feedback box I have:

"either this site is fake or nothing works WTF"

The annoying part was they didnt use an email address and I could not contact them to see what the problem was. The bizarre part was that same user was the most active for the next 2 days...? Still not sure what the problem was...

pg said that our interface is bizarre :-P

http://stylous.com/

stylish

Btw, for me only on the third level (e.g. http://stylous.com/#/jewelry/charms_pendants ) the cursor turns into a pointing finger.

(Camino 1.6.6, OS X)

We're using Cappuccino which requires you to manually set the finger cursor in each place you want to use it. At first we were going to completely leave it out (since almost everything in the interface is clickable), but users were confused when it didn't appear. As such, we've decided to add it as we go.

We make money when someone clicks on a product and buys it, so product images were our first priority.

A lot of people talked trash on Powerset, but the following comment from wired was pretty awesome:

"i tried out the beta demo thing and this thing sucks. i would rather use a manual card catalog in a library staffed by josef stalin. seriously, i hate you people." --posted by jr

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