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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

The founder is a friend of mine, so maybe I'm bias, but I'm surprised wired doesn't get how network effects work and adoption curves happen, at least, it seems strange to publish this about a project someone did in a weekend, a few weekends ago, and is now trying to make a go of it? Like.. give him a couple of months to see how to improve the flow for the bots side, and general discoverability of the platform for agents at large. Maybe I'm a bit grumpy because it's my buddy but this article kinda rubs me the wrong way. :\

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Right but, do you or the founder have actual responses to the story posted? It seemed to give RentAhuman the benefit of the doubt every step of the way. The site doesn't work as advertised, appears to be begging for hype, got a reporter to check it out, and it didn't work.

That's life. Can't win them all. Lesson here is the product wasn't ready for primetime and you were given a massive freebie for free press both via Wired _and_ this crosspost.

Better strategy is to actually layout what works, what's the roadmap so anyone partially interested might see it when they stumble into this post.

Or jot it down as a failed experiment and move on.

I know it’s your friend but whenever you hype something, there’s a chance it will be covered. It’s really not Wired’s fault that something was hyped heavily before it was ready to go. This is something you live with or you turn media adversarial. If you want uniformly positive content, that’s called advertising.

I'm the founder, interesting article, ama?

I just think it's kinda amusing how far away this article is from your real world metrics, lol. Also hi.

Hey! Whats crazy is the writer spent 30 minutes interviewing us about our back stories only to not include a single quote.

This is quite common

None of the quotes were damning enough to fit the narrative they at some point decided to go with.

Wired has devolved into pure outrage reporting with like 80% political focus. Just have a look at their front page: https://www.wired.com/

Kind of funny, since it was known for the opposite (fluff pieces) during it's first and only influential decade. Yes, the first few years had some great writing. But so much fluff, too.

I’ve been writer, editor and interview subject in that scenario and it’s hot crazy, it’s just how PR works. All three roles are part of that happening.

I have run a lot of multi-sided marketplace scaling (for doordash, thumbtack, reddit, etc) with ads. Happy to chat/advise for free, just DMed you on Twitter. This project is so fun!

Awesome thanks!

What sort of interesting human activities have RentAHuman humans been asked to do by your customers besides marketing?

[Redacted for legal reasons]

Didn't they close down that section of craigslist?

How long until the RentAHuman Killer?

Tech press learned it gets a lot more clicks being anti-tech than being accurate. There is a big anti AI or anything related to it zeitgeist.

Yeah whenever there's a cultural moment in tech that could be spun in one way or the other they go doomer

What? If anything the tech press is overwhelmingly sycophantic towards both startups and Big Tech alike, often just passing along talking points verbatim without any critical analysis at all.

Also, being "anti-AI" isn't being "anti-tech". AI is a marketing buzzword.

For sure- I haven't forgotten just how thoroughly deified the likes of Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes, and Sam Bankman-Fried were in the tech press at one point.

I'm shocked a journalist didn't write fawning praise for a project someone "did in a weekend".

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