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Comment by nemesisj | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be that (negative) guy, but I'm starting to get really tired of Dalton constantly pissing all over twitter. Particularly because he's competing against them. I'm an App.net backer, and I think it's cool what he's doing, but FFS, let someone else carry the water, if it even needs carrying at all. This all just feels really petty and whiney, particularly when you're already at work solving the problem.

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I had no idea who he is, and that he is competing with Twitter. I would have welcomed a disclaimer about his conflict of interests somewhere in the post.

That's not what a conflict of interests is. There's only one interest there.

Things are going to get very tiresome if everybody is going to be expected to preface every published opinion with their entire background so you can decide whether their argument has merit without reading it.

Thanks for bringing this up. The present trend of prefixing everything with "full disclosure" seems to me to misunderstand the whole issue, and dilutes the legitimate cases where disclosure is needed.

Wouldn't need so much. The sidebar could say 'founder of app.net' instead of the machismo bullshit that's there now.

I think it's generally considered bad form do dump on your competitors, even when you do disclose your financial interests in the matter.

I mean, it's certainly not illegal, and one could argue that it isn't even unethical. But it's definitely in bad form. Rude. Vulgar.

This adds news (Chernin's involvement) and knowledgeable analysis in context.

And, for an insurgent platform/viewpoint to succeed, it needs tireless promotion. (Graphomania, even.)

Skip his blog posts if you don't like them, others find them valuable.

>And, for an insurgent platform/viewpoint to succeed, it needs tireless promotion.

Then I need to ramp up my userscript for client-side filtering Hacker News.

https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/NoBitcoin

Much appreciated but the "ramping up" refers to the need to add more content when stuff gets removed per page in this case.

I can not upvote this enough.

Look, his post may be insightful and interesting, but the point is that if any other startup on here spent post after post publicly criticising their direct competitor, it would hopefully be viewed as a negative thing. Why is App.net any different? There are plenty of ways to promote your scrappy and noble insurgency without sticking it in the eye of your competitor.

Again, I think what app.net is doing is interesting and great, just not these types of blog posts.

>Look, his post may be insightful and interesting

>I think what app.net is doing is interesting and great, just not these types of blog posts.

Nice contradiction. And perspective from someone who knows what he's talking about as a result of building a competitor is invaluable insight and quite interesting to me.

I don't get why you think Dalton is doing this solely for promotional purposes, but hey, you're entitled to your opinion.

Oh, and in response to your previous post: plenty of people are "carrying the water" and are calling Twitter out on their bullshit.

DuckDuckGo publicly blogs about what they feel are the shortcomings of Google. I've seen similar feedback in the comments of the DDG articles.

Yep, that was me http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4744621

I think marketing your product by criticizing your competitor is fine, but constantly blogging about how bad/evil your competitor is can be tiring and people just don't care anymore "oh, it's X criticizing Y again to promote his product, how novel!".

Why should a company criticising competition be viewed as a negative thing? Content quality trumps everything else. When something smart is being said, why does it matter who said it?

Not necessarily negative, but certainly suspect. He has financial a stake in the outcome of his criticism.

Compare this to someone knocking Apple for something about iOS with the explicit hope that they fix it to his liking.

If the problems on iOS being criticized are real, I don't see a problem.

Can't you judge for yourself the content you are reading?

But the predations of the Facebook/Twitter business model are both the founding impetus and sustaining animus of App.net. They're always on topic for Caldwell, and especially when new information advancing and refining the critique comes up.

And the analogy of 'spending' posts isn't quite right. There is no budget constraint on internet writing to advance your cause: in many cases more is better as long as you're not repeating the exact same points. (And as I mentioned: I see both new news and analysis in this post, even though it advances a familiar theme/viewpoint.)

Eh, maybe. Twitter got started after Facebook, but I don't remember seeing Twitter talking about Facebook.

That's because Twitter didn't know what they were or were trying to become. They probably didn't see themselves as a competitor to Facebook, but as a complement.

Facebook didn't try to become Twitter-like until later on, when Twitter was already becoming popular, IIRC. It was more of a "Twitter is social-network-ish, maybe we should incorporate Twitter-like features into our product."

Why would Twitter's communications strategy be a normative baseline? (And especially for App.net?)

Lots of successes have been marketed as a contrast to an established competitor: Avis Tries Harder, The Pepsi Challenge, MCI vs. AT&T, Mac vs. PC.

I don't follow the social media space very carefully, so I had no idea who he was. I read the article, and thought it was insightful.

Perhaps it was old news from a same source if you follow the space carefully, but I suspect most readers are in my position.

And it's hard to fault a posting that is genuinely insightful for most readers.

I guess that a majority of HN regulars read Dalton's posts closely, and found this to be news. Peter Chernin's appointment was certainly news for me, and it added flesh to his account of what Twitter's pivot is looking like.

I'm halfway to where you are but at least he's not coming out and saying "THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD SWITCH TO APP.NET EVERYBODY" he's just commenting on twitters changes. I clicked this article knowing he was going to be bashing Twitter again but just for spending his time working on app.net he must have some perspective.

Agreed, these posts (have been far too many lately) are annoying for three reasons.

1) There are better apps to build with Twitter's api than boring twitter clients.

2) There are plenty other clients to build for other web services if that's your thing.

3) As repeated by many people before, if you use someone's API they have control of how you use it. No point in whining, it's not like there is anything hidden or hard to understand here.

  > if you use someone's API they have control of how
  > you use it

"You have no right to complain about my behavior, because I'm perfectly within my rights to be an asshole."

Somehow I don't think this fits with the way the world works.

No, a direct translation would be

"There's no point in whinging about my behavior, because I'm perfectly within my rights to be an asshole"

Which is entirely different to what you stated.

Or back to:

"There's no point in trying to sway public opinion against me, because I'm perfectly within my rights to be an asshole"

With regards 1), as an end user of a given communication protocol, I would like there to be a plurality of clients available for that protocol. C.f. email, usenet, irc, ftp, etc.

Its called marketing. App.net is still small. It needs to be constantly looking for ways to be in the spotlight. I do understand your point, and can sense that you are just tired of how it seems to get too much attention. Maybe its time that App.net got the attention of hackers by writing technical posts or maybe releasing some code? It is always refreshing when companies forget about pure marketing for a moment and focus on creating interesting things.

Even I agree with you when you say that author comes across as negative towards Twitter. Also, I hate the way he hates brand advertisers and advertising. C'mon, we all need advertising. We all need effective channels to market our products and companies. The problem being digital advertising is completely broken. But that doesn't make whole brand advertising bad!

How does how it feel to you have anything to do with the merits of the post? He naturally blogs about what he's obsessed with, and his opinions aren't any less valid because of who he is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

He didn't say the opinions were invalid. He says it sounds whiny, and it does. He says it's insidiously self-promoting, and it is.

That's all stuff best left unsaid. And does it need to be pointed out that all this complaining about someone's tone is a bit whiny? Because it is.

That's ridiculous. Dalton is the natural expert to point out just how far Twitter has sunk. Twitter's a metaphor for broken Silicon Valley "ethics".

Dalton is building disruptive infrastructure. Since when is debunking a bad idea .. negative?

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