Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

I can get brutal honesty on Reddit for free. (And polite honesty, also for free, from Dear Abby.)

Reddit sprung to mind for me too.

This is a bad idea. Fine, you pay $10 for someone's honest opinion, but it's just one person's opinion, you really want to consult multiple sources to get a balanced view, otherwise you could make a bad decision based on another person being in a shitty mood (for whatever reason).

Plus, I find friends will be honest with you if you expressly give them permission to be, and promise not to take it personally.

Exactly, it's one person's opinion, and you know next to nothing about him, so why should you value his opinion.

But if he makes money from giving people unqualified advice on random subjects, good for him I guess.

You aren't legally prevented from spending $10 at other honesty vendors in addition to this one, or required to follow the advice in order to avoid a penalty.

There are other honesty vendors? Who else is doing this?

Plus, like vlunkr said, I don't know the guy, if I wanted the honest feedback of random strangers I can already get that for free on the Internet. It's not exactly like brutal honesty is in short supply, and if you target the right places it can be articulate as well.

Seems counterproductive to claim that this is a "bad idea". The only point you prove is why you're not going to be his customer. Lets see how many people take him up on this to wait and see if its a bad idea.

Yeah sure, let's see how many insecure people he can find to charge before we class it as a bad idea.

But will it be a thoughtful, well written response?

exactly what kind of thoughtful, well written response can I expect from the landing page's example question of "Am I socially awkward?" or "Why isn't she texting me back?"

What kind of a stranger could give me actual answers to those questions?

I can imagine a few good (applicable) answers to someone who'd pay ten dollars to email someone those questions... but I can't imagine any answers that are actually worth than ten bucks.

> But will it be a thoughtful, well written response?

/r/subredditdrama

It's full of self-righteous people who enjoy watching other people fight. On the other hand, they tend to be people who are less interested in fighting and rather enjoy engaging conversation. I've had some brilliant belief-altering discussions in there, and most importantly, situations where both parties "respectfully agree to disagree."

You just have to find the sweet spots in Reddit - it takes a fair amount of participation to finds those places (but SRD is a good start).

Holy shit, of all the subs you could've mentioned. SRD is incredibly biased in certain topics, they ALWAYS brigade the subs they are against, and have the most awful crowd of the site. Seriously, the whole metasphere is incredibly toxic.

What you can't get, not easily, is brutal honesty and privacy about your eponymous self. This is typically what psychologists do, although they're more reassuring and comforting, not telling you the hard truths.

judge.me (YC16), specializing in honesty-as-a-service, is hiring!

Pitch: Bringing experts and non-experts together, making non-experts feel bad and sucky.

Also specializing in questions starting with "If you're such an expert... " to totally undermine the claimed expertise of said experts.

I'll give him this much. Have you seen /r/rateme? People there are way too supportive. Doesn't seem to matter that every post starts with "give me the brutal truth". That or there's always survivorship bias in those who think she's hot and choose to reply.

But Reddit is not private - it's a public forum.

(unless you're sending [unsolicited?] private messages there)

That's the most important thing. It's private. Also, redditors tend to tell others they are the most beautiful unique flower in the world, when everyone else sees a hideous ogre. This is why a service like this is so much better.

Not really. /r/amiugly will never tell you you're ugly. 4chan, though, will.

I imagine Hot or Not would do as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com