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Comment by irrigation | Hacker News Reader

I hinted at this a while back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9482269

There is, I think, an awful lot of bullshit that is paraded as fact on HN -- an endless series of aspirational stories of unending success and riches, then segued into pitching a book or web product/startup.

I am a skeptical sort, and just because I think someone is seemingly a nice guy, or a part of the clique, doesn't turn me from the natural skepticism about incredible claims.

People lie. People embellish. Many people can even contrive rationale for why doing that is okay. Human nature.

I'm not trying to be overly negative, but I think these dreamy, sometimes delusional posts can lead people astray, thinking that they're missing out on some great riches that everyone else is claiming to be achieving.

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This feels like a thinly-veiled attack on Patrick McKenzie's character, backed up with zero factual evidence.

I've known Patio11 personally for going on 5 years. He's one of the most honest people I know and I've seen him donate countless hours to helping fellow bootstrappers.

If you don't know him or his story first-hand, and haven't seen the hundreds (thousands?) of hours he's donated to the bootstrapper community, you should familiarize yourself with his story before commenting on this thread.

I've only met patio11 in person very briefly (thaks to rwalling's MicroConf), but everything I saw confirmed the idea that he's a very nice, helpful person.

It's not at all thinly veiled. The account to which you're replying seems to have been created solely to harass him with.

Harass him? What an outrageously transparent attempt to prejudice the audience, which in this case happens to also be for your own benefit as well: Good judgment would have been that you should stay away from these threads (for those who don't know, tptacek is a cofounder, with patio11, of their "turn HN fame into value" startup), but instead you come rushing in guns blazing.

I found the consulting story incredibly dubious. None of the facts meshed, and I find those sorts of pie in the sky stories to actually be destructive to people entering or in the industry. If you find skepticism "harassment" -- does fame on HN make one untouchable -- you have a very perverse sentiment of what that is.

> awful lot of bullshit

> endless series of aspirational stories

One of the strange things about the software business is that software is an iterative process where the rate of iteration can go from linear to polynomial to exponential very fast. Another strange thing is that if you are a software guy, the whole world is your customer. The third strange thing is the constant reinvention of old wisdom, repackaged in new frameworks, languages, platforms. These three strange things then combine in weird ways to take on a life of their own.

Had BCC been written in a prior era, it would have been some MFC code that ran only on windows 95 boxes, shipped on a dozen floppies, and purchased by atmost a few dozen people who bought a printed copy of Dr.Dobbs and looked at an ad for BCC and said, Hey, I need to make my own bingo cards.

But because he had a web app and priced it right and iterated upon feedback, the whole world came knocking on his door.

To be fair, when he first started writing about BCC it wasn't a web app. The web app came as part of the iterative process (not that this detracts from your argument).

>the whole world came knocking on his door

That's... a bit of a stretch. How big do you think the market for bingo card generators is?

The reality is aspirational marketing works when you are building a personal brand.

I wouldn't really say Patio11 embellishes or lies, I'd say he employs standard marketing techniques.

I realize you may thing this as a "rationale" for why its okay but I don't think it is. Marketing and selective disclosure is a fact of life. If you don't read between the lines, it really is on you for most things in life regardless of the reality of the situation.

Its a large part of why I'm in favor of regulation. Many, many people get screwed precisely because they can't read between the lines.

I think you're going a bit too far about criticising "standard marketing techniques". What will you do if you want to contract for others? Why is it not "Publish as much information about your research and skills as possible"? (this is the standard marketing technique here)

I'm not really sure what is wrong with this. It's not like he's just publishing infomercial with no experience. He's got lots of experience we see (BCC, conferences, published software, all the blogs) and don't see (contracting) and lots of exposure in programming community. Realistically, he's probably one of the reasons many people on HN know what A/B testing is. It's a huge personal brand... and what exactly is wrong with it?

I'm not even sure what kind of regulation would apply in this case.

> I'm not really sure what is wrong with this.

I didn't say it was wrong. You may want to read the comment I was responding to.

I did say it was naive to take everything someone else tells you at face value without reading between the lines.

I did read your comment. You said the quoted rationale is not ok. So what's wrong with it?

> I realize you may thing this as a "rationale" for why its okay but I don't think it is.

Also if you write that we should read between the lines as a comment on something, I'll will read between the lines that you've got some negative opinion here, but you didn't share it.

Its a large part of why I'm in favor of regulation. Many, many people get screwed precisely because they can't read between the lines.

Yes, that is a common reason for supporting regulations - a well-meaning disdain for the intelligence of others.

Yeah, about that, you realize that all those people suckered into ARM loans they couldn't afford during the housing crisis was precisely because they couldn't read between the lines?

>you realize that all those people suckered into ARM loans they couldn't afford during the housing crisis was precisely because they couldn't read between the lines?

Maybe, just maybe, there were a few who said, "I'm going to flip this house before the interest rates adjust, so who cares what it says between those lines?" or "I'll live in this house while I can afford it, and when I can't I'll mail in the keys and leave the bank hanging for a loan I agreed to pay back in good faith."

All the bad guys aren't on one side.

I never said they were. But requiring clear, obvious warnings on things is a large fraction of regulation and the relevant part to "helping people who can't read between the lines".

Regulation is rarely an outright ban, especially in this context.

Or he had somewhat passive success with some SEO/other tricks and excitedly shared them to a good feedback loop. Works as marketing but I doubt marketing was his first thought.

...yeah. No offense, but that stuff doesn't "happen" organically like that except with lottery winner odds.

I've had to grow traffic for sites before. Generally, even if its good content, you have to put some effort into driving traffic to it. Which is marketing. At which point, you are doing it to market something. The first thought is marketing.

Not the SEO, the talking about BCC.

Yeah, its marketing.

I have had profitable side projects but I never talk about them on HN or other sites.

Self promotion is inherently about marketing and even at the start that is precisely what he did.

My response to this is already in another branch of this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9602791

Explains how it wasn't necessarily his first thought. In the beginning, it was HN comments where the first thought is more sharing content you feel is relevant, or the gamification of karma.

I'm responding to you and at no point do I feel like I am marketing "prawn" or anything I do online. I'd use a relevant username for one thing!

> Works as marketing but I doubt marketing was his first thought.

The fact anybody cares about this at all is a testament to Patrick's masterful manipulation of online audiences.

The fact you believe "I doubt marketing was his first thought" is why it works so well. You don't realize you're being manipulated into internalizing the personal brand of someone more clever than you.

Few years back I had a side project start making $20-30k/yr passive from about an hour's worth of effort, total. I don't talk about it (or wouldn't talk about it further) to market it or me, but just because it's a novel story that people find interesting. From the early days of talking about BCC, I recognised the same wonder in patio11.

> I'm not trying to be overly negative, but I think these dreamy, sometimes delusional posts can lead people astray, thinking that they're missing out on some great riches that everyone else is claiming to be achieving.

I'm not a psychologist, and I don't know you personally, but is it possible that maybe you feel a bit misled because you think you might be missing out on some great riches that everyone else is claiming to be achieving?

I think that, at the end of the day, everyone has a bullshit detector, but everyone's bullshit threshold is going to be determined by how close they are to greatness (whether they themsleves are achieving it, or the people around them are achieving it). For me, HN represents a rare intersection of do'ers and dreamers. Are all the people who claim to be "doing" actually doing it? Of course not, but there are still valuable lessons here. There are enough lessons in Patio11's posts that even if he were exaggeratting his claims to promote his brand (and I don't perosnally think that he is), I'd still consider his contributions to be worthwhile reading.

Skepticism is a healthy thing in moderation, but I for one, would rather be surrounded by a lot of people who are optimistic (if a bit boastful), then a lot of people who are pessimistic and critical, but I'd trade them both for genuine friends with efficacy and cogency.

This sounds like a variation of the "you're just jealous" reply, which is an easy, convenient retort to virtually all skepticism for even the most incredible claims. When we want something to be true, the easiest way to undermine doubts are to cry jealousy.

Super weight loss regime. Visit with aliens. Top secret NSA/CIA/FBI/FSB clearance. Quintuple black belt. No-effort muscle building technique. Endless success with the ladies. Exponential stock market success. All demonstrated by just words?

Doubts and questions = jealousy. It is the charlatan's ally among human denial techniques.

Two wrongs don't make a right, so whatever follows here notwithstanding: your point is fair.

But the GP did say this:

People lie. People embellish. Many people can even contrive rationale for why doing that is okay. Human nature.

That can reasonably be inferred, from context, as an attack on Patrick's personality. Not saying it is for sure, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to interpret it that way.

In that light, shifting the personality blame game back on GP is less damning than you make it sound. It's still not the golden standard of rhetoric, sure. But there is something to be said for it.

Consider it "defending a friend." Patrick's being personally attacked, OP attacks back.

Again, two wrongs don't make a right. But this one is defensible.

You're not "being overly negative" or being "a skeptical sort". You are launching an ad-hominem attack; you are attempting (knowingly or not) to character assassinate patio11 without any basis in fact.

Just because you think there is a lot of bullshit paraded as fact on HN, does not give you a license to do so without people calling you out on it or down voting you - even if you hide behind the "hopefully people aren't uncivilized enough to just down vote here".

I have a very simple heuristic* I use to screen for the BS-factor. More transparency -> less likely to be BSing. Mostly backed up by people that you can see are closely related to the person in question -> more likely to be BS. So in this case I'd say the BS-potential is very low (from just following on the sidelines).

*it was developed to screen poker coaching in the high days of online poker. Turns out many people made wild claims about their winrates that weren't true to paddle coaching. Shocking, I know but very transferable to business consulting, agile coaching and the like.

This is what has always worked in Patrick's favour.

He shared the details of how and why the revenues of BCC grew for many years, figures which were sufficiently normal for them not to appear to be the product of luck or lies.

Similarly he's never pretended to be a proficient corporate ladder climber when writing about salary negotiations; we know his advice comes from reading about best practices and selling consulting rather than his experience of honouring his salaryman agreement. And we know he's more effective amateur than Aaron Ross when it comes to turning some inbound leads into enterprise contracts for Appointment Reminder.

And afaik he doesn't even have a $300 eBook on special offer today at only $199, or a $999 business opportunity also including six webinars totally free. But apparently many people have found his publicly accessible and gimmick-free blog to be worth their time reading.

If it doesn't walk like a duck or quack like a duck, but does weigh in with an awful lot of useful free advice...

> ... on HN -- an endless series of aspirational stories of unending success and riches, then segued into pitching a book or web product/startup.

I've wasted many hours on HN and recall zero stories here of unending riches that segued into pitching a book. Perhaps you could enlighten me with one example?

I've been following Patrick for many years here on HN. Many people have. So many of the things you've written in this thread are wrong, and even worse, incredibly mean or mean-spirited.

This comment is for anyone else who might not have been around HN a long time, and isn't sure what's going on here. Here's the rub - Patrick is a very well known member of this community, has helped an incredible amount of people, and over the last few years has had a lot of success in consulting and building products.

I'm not sure if the parent (irrigation) is "just trolling" or sincerely believes that Patrick is lying about his success (and although irrigation doesn't say so in this comment, irrigation clearly claims that Patrick is lying in other comments).

irrigation - if you really think Patrick is lying, then remember that he's been around these forums (and others!) for many years, many people here know him personally, the engagements he's had have been with other very well known companies - are they all lying? Or is Patrick just somehow manipulating everyone to make these incredible claims, by somehow getting engagements with well known companies, writing about them, the companies themselves writing about them, but he's manipulating all the numbers?

And all this multi-year effort is for what? To market a startup that has nothing to do with his main expertise anyway? Seriously, that is really ridiculous.

Agreed, I think amongst HNers the idea that success can be achieved simply by using focused "analytics" and one's own smarts is particularly appealing.

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