Hmm, at first glance this seems misleading. They removed all of Jonathan's posts. One of his posts was congratulating Google. Maybe that was the reason, maybe not. Maybe one of the others posts was the reason. Maybe they just removed all these old posts for reasons that had nothing to do with the content of any of the posts.
It wasn't just Amazon, but also sites owned by Amazon, including Audible. Amazon and Audible were my two sources of revenue for my site thestartupdaily.com
Yesterday both accounts were closed with no advanced notice and my business model is effectively broken. While I support Amazon for taking a stand, I'm angry at Amazon for not giving some sort of warning to affiliates. It also seems like they wasted a good opportunity to get people who are most passionate about the issue to make some noise for them. The could have sent emails to affiliates as the issue was unfolding, and instead of the short and rather unfriendly letter to affiliates saying "your contract has been terminated". They should have used that notice to give people more information and phone numbers and other contact details about who is behind this.
Seems to me like big chain stores buying protectionist legislation and selling it to voters as "protecting small business", while in reality they are protecting yesterday's dinosaurs and screwing forward thinking Internet based businesses.
You've had years of notice. Amazon did exactly the same thing with Illinois, Colorado, Hawaii, North Carolina... Amazon has publicly said it would do the same thing in Connecticut for months.
Of course I knew it was a possibility, but my point is that "saying publicly" in press releases or court rooms is a lot different from having a conversation with your customers or partners.
Telling people that the affiliate program will be closed to them in 30 days would have been a lot nicer than telling people that their income stops effective immediately.
Then they'd have to collect sales tax from Connecticut customers for 30 days. They'd piss off a lot more people than their affiliates, including their customers for suddenly collecting taxes they didn't used to collect, to their shareholders for creating mass customer confusion just to be nice to affiliates.
Couldn't they simply tell their affiliates they were considering terminating the program as early as possible? I have to believe they were aware of the situation, and monitoring patiently as it unfolded. For example, I knew it was imminent in Colorado. yet I've never collected a penny in affiliate revenue. It was debated quite a bit before it passed.
Edit: I guess what I'm asking is: am I missing something, or is there some reason why the affiliates couldn't have been alerted to the possibility earlier? Or, does alerting them at all require Amazon to pay sales tax?
I can't disagree that sending out an e-mail would've been nice, though it'd also not be good to stir up all the affiliates when it wasn't yet known if the bill would be made law. That aside, anyone who made a significant portion of their income as an affiliate should've been aware of the impending bill for months and have been watching whether it would pass at the same time Amazon was watching it. It's not an Amazon bill, it affects every affiliate in the state for all companies... Overstock is another big company that severed its affiliate relationships with everyone in the state when the bill passed.
I'm glad you like it. Just to clarify, they are sometimes summaries, and sometimes just something from the book that seemed useful, and may have little to do with the theme of the book.
(I need to improve my messaging or I'm going to get people emailing me "you completed missed the point of that book!")
You're right that it is dangerous advice if used as an excuse. One of the points that Seth Godin makes—that I didn't have space to go into in that short writeup—is that it's a good habit to determine what would make you quit something before you even start, this way you never quit because the short term pain is too great. This also helps prevent you from getting blinded by pride and sticking with something too long (He uses the example of Nixon and the Vietnam war in the book).
I think the book does look at it in a objectified way, and in the signature Seth Godin way that is both simple and deep for his fans, and too obvious to his critics.
Note that The Dip is actually a super short book, maybe 75-80 pages.
To veer off topic a bit I think this in itself is interesting, and a trend I'd like to see more of. Not just because people are busier than ever, but because publishers push writers to "fill out" so many business books when the core point could be made in less than 100 pages. Some ideas are complex and require 1000 pages, many could be done justice in a few chapters.
Get home, check Hacker News, see your own site listed = sweet!
I launched this just over 3 weeks ago so it's still a little sloppy, but improving as fast as I can.
I would love any feedback from HN people.
I flew twice Concorde twice while working on an early telepresence project back in 1999-2000. Once on Air France and once on British Airways.
Things that stood out for me:
It is REALLY small inside, I bumped my head both times getting into the plane, and they just laugh and said "first time?"
Passengers were all 50-70 year old white men, no women at all on either flight I was on, I was the youngest person on both flights.
Takeoff is violent, Landing is more Violent, the Concorde was just not designed for low speeds. I thought something was wrong both landings, but that is just the way it lands. It felt like slamming into the ground at 100 MPH.
The windows were really tiny, just a few inches wide and probably thicker than they were wide. The view outside was amazing and you really had a sense of being at the edge of the atmosphere, but it was so hard to see it through the tiny little windows.
It was pretty amazing to be at a 9AM meeting in Europe and then make it back to New York for a 10 AM meeting.
