Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhebb | Hacker News Reader

I didn't take part in the previous thread, but I kind of took umbrage with the question. It's really hard to take a question like that seriously when it appears that the OP has put zero effort into researching the subject. How can you not be pessimistic about that? If you're not the kind of person that can do even the most basic research of how cable companies operate, then I don't have one iota of confidence that you would be successful building one. I'm not trying to be mean - just realistic.

View on HN

> If you're not the kind of person that can do even the most basic research of how cable companies operate

"Ask HN" doesn't qualify as most basic research?

In my opinion, no. In this day and age, there are far better ways of obtaining preliminary knowledge on a subject besides asking another person to fill you in. There's obviously Google and Wikipedia as starting points, and there are any number of paths those might lead to which would help you form a specific ? - e.g. "what would you have to do to make true a la carte channel options from a cable provider profitable?" That ? shows me that the person asking has done at least preliminary research and, if I have any thoughts, I don't have to start from square one.

Asking the community to spend its time doing preliminary research for you is, to put it bluntly, rude.

I don't see this as a shortcut for preliminary research. I saw it as an attempt to generate discussion about disrupting a sector with high barriers to entry.

That's ridiculous. RTFM isn't an attitude that arrose apropos of nothing. It comes from situations where newbies asking the same basic questions over and over again exhausting a community's patience with simple questions that can be easily looked up in a FAQ or manual. Asking an open ended question about starting a new kind of business isn't anything like that. There's no FAQ about starting an ISP* so it's difficult to know where to look for info. Asking people who know more than you is not an unreasonable form of preliminary research in most situations. My first stop would have been HN too.

*Amazingly, it looks like there is: http://cgi.amazing.com/isp/ but it's hard to tell how useful it really is.

HN in this case is what a salesperson would call an "unqualified lead". A good salesperson tries to make sure that they sell their product to someone who will potentially buy it. Similarly, the person who asks a question should try to ask someone who can potentially answer it. Just as the HN community would reject a posting that is a sales pitch for many products, the HN community will reject a question that is too vague to answer.

For reference, here is the original, way too vague question:

  > I want to build a cable company that centers around 
  > viewer types. Basically, it is my understanding that the 
  > majority of my cable costs centers around channels 
  > (like fox) that I just dont watch, if I wanted to build   
  > a system that let customers limit this, where would I 
  > get started?

Note that he didn't ask this question on a discussion forum about cable television. He didn't specify if he was looking for advice on the technical aspects, the regulatory aspects, or the business aspects. He didn't hunt around in the user profiles on HN to see if there were people with industry experience that he could approach directly. He didn't describe whether he was looking for high level answers like a list of websites that might have more information, or whether he was looking for very specific info. He did nothing to qualify HN as a good source for the answer to his question.

If I was trying to gloss a reason for the OP posting on HN, I would think he asked here was because of HN's particular focus on startups and 'disrupting' traditional industries. Seems to fit for creating a cable company. That being said, the question is still a poor fit because, like others said, it lacks a lot of initial effort.

No, it doesn't, because it's asking other people to do your research for you. Asking questions without first trying to learn as much as your can yourself is a minor faux pas on the internet (witness all the 'let me google that for you' replies to elementary questions). Of course, this doesn't mean that asking questions is bad (not at all), but it means that there is generally a social contract at work. It's something along the lines of "I'll answer your question because I assume my effort won't be wasted."

I disagree. I don't think he was asking everyone on HN to do his research for him. Rather, I think he made a reasonable guess that some people on HN work in the industry he'd like to disrupt, that they may feel the same way, and that they may have good suggestions.

> "Ask HN" doesn't qualify as most basic research?

I think it does in some cases, but not in a case of this magnitude. It's a matter of specificity.

I agree with this. It reminds me of the guy who, when his family members would as him fix their computers, he would ask them to drop it off. The idea was that he had them "put some skin in the game." It seems that OP did not do that.

Perhaps if OP worded it differently, he may have gotten different results.

If you have a problem with a market, like the cable industry, your first question should be 'Why is it the way it is?' not 'How do I disrupt it?'

Asking HN, for good sources that explain the economics of the cable industry or media distribution, or for a list of the key players in the space would have resulted in a much more positive response.

Asking HN about how YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc. successfully competed against established cable industry would probably have resulted in current or former employees and/or investors in those companies providing some direct insight.

But asking 'hey, how do I disrupt the cable industry?' is just lazy and resulted in the negative response it deserves.

Speaking of lazy, if you know that there's a better question to ask, why not say so to the person instead of dismissing them?

Q. "How do I start a rocket company?"

A. "Start by asking a different question, such as 'What are the economics of interplanetary exploration?'"

Q. "How do I start a rocket company?" A. "Teach man to yearn for the infinity of space?"

Thinking about it, Kennedy did this pretty well in the '60s.

The question is interesting in and of itself regardless of who the OP is or what research they did.

That's what I'm thinking. For all I know (or care) the OP may have just posed the question as a hypothetical. I'll never start a cable company but I'm interested in the answer.

exactly. The ideas this guy cites, like Elon Musk, are completely unrelated. Elon Musk actually researched these markets, figured out what to do and did it. To equate that with asking a completely unresearched question on Hacker News feels like the author was really grasping at straws here...

I agree

I'm just putting this as a data point to observe.

Looking back to my limited experience, most of the wins in my life was mostly because I was too naive to think "it's probably not all that difficult to do".

thanks you've put that rather nicely. there is no bonafide way to start a cable company. nobody could tell you how to do that, not even their executives. the cable providers operate in a market that heavily favours monopolies (because the entry barriers are so ridiculously high). OP failed to realize this and that's just a very bad precedent for any further discussions.

> I'm not trying to be mean - just realistic

I don't think there is any reason to criticize you personally for thinking/responding this way, but I find that that attitude leads to the comments on Hacker News that I think are most unhelpful and discouraging (other than blatant trolling).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com