You've been posting comments that break the site guidelines at an alarming rate. We've asked you several times to stop. Since you keep doing it. I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Really? A Wordpress "Linkbuildr" that automates spamming emails when you write posts? And nothing but praise in the comments? PH has become a joke and we definitely need some ethical competition in the product discovery space.
Couldn’t agree more. Yesterday I was browsing the top product of the day to see what future competition was like and the product was a color swatch that gave you similar colors for inspiration. It looked like they mashed together a codepen with a color swatch api I’ve starred but I won’t even bother linking to here. It’s sad for sure.
Thanks to these con artists and careless big investors like SoftBank, once the recession comes, blockchain, AI, etc... will go into another long winter
There's just too much money swimming around nowadays looking for good ROI (thanks to government austerity and quantitative easing..), so even stupid things like recipe subscriptions or illegal taxis are being valued at billions of dollars.
Arguably the world's economy is a Ponzi scheme anyway, but the people in control of it will do anything to keep the smoke-and-mirrors-show running.
you're not just an arts startup, you're in the classical music business so that's 10000x harder, most tech based startups that enter that business fail because they cannot grow as a usual startup should. There is a company called IDAGIO that was founded probably around 2013, it relaunched multiple times, they played with the pricing from free to 5$/month to 10$/month to free again, they raised around 20 million dollars and employed 100 people, they bribed and paid journalists under and over the table to get every possible positive coverage possible for more than 2 years now, they bought facebook, twitter followers, they did everything including the dirtiest growth tactics any marketing pro would think of, and they are still struggling with growth.
It's a very tough business and needs extreme patience and shamelessness alike. My recommendation is to do partnerships with other arts companies or institutions related to your market, most of such partnerships are fake anyway, but can somehow give you some boost. That's at least what IDAGIO, the longest surviving classical music company has been doing so far, beside bribing journalists of course :D.
> the skill of shamelessly shilling ... all day long, everyday until you make it.
It's one of the most important comments in the thread.
Not only is it an acquired skill (selling), it's bonded to an extraordinarily valuable character trait: perseverance.
A lot of people can't do the necessary sales to drive their product/platform/service because they either can't absorb the hits from doors being constantly shut in their face (hearing no all day long, or worse), or they feel shame from pushing the thing on other people (most of whom do not care and don't want to hear it and do not want you wasting their time, and certainly initially that will all be true).
Promoting is selling. Selling is promoting.
The best sales people are shameless. Not in the sense that they're abusive, rather, in the sense that they'll push their offering to every corner of the globe as necessary, getting 99 no answers to get to that one yes answer. Being told no a thousand times feels very shameful, low and hurtful to most people and they can't handle it.
Promoting your thing, is always about selling. Shilling is nothing more than the task of selling being categorized as a disparaged craft.
This reply resonates so much with me. I think it takes years of experience to understand something like this (at least it took me a long time).
I too started from this thinking that promoting is shilling, but it's not. Every successful company in the world does it and there is absolutely nothing wrong with promoting your product or yourself as long as you're not breaking the rules.
I think it's the part of geek culture that misunderstands selling as shilling, which is probably the reason why so many good but small startups fail. They just don't sell enough.
It's the same ideology that charging for a product or service is bad somehow. I remember that a blog that reviewed a website of mine (a movie making software in 2007) was all gaga over the product but as soon as we went from free to paid, it put us in a special section called "website hall of shame". Just because we decided to charge something for a product which users were making money off.
I takes a lot of skill to sell, get rejected and hear 99 Nos for that single Yes and sometimes that's the only thing missing between a win and a loss.
There were, not long ago, times when Assange was considered a saint of freedom after he exposed the corrupt Bush administration, the liberals everywhere were defending him and his case everywhere, they even made a Hollywood film about him. But he then made the mistake of his life, he exposed the corruption of the Clintons and got implicated in the Russia gate meme because Trump somehow won. Now he is totally on his own. Nobody will defend him even if these corrupt governments burnt him alive and broadcasted it live. Makes you think if these liberals actually give a single shit about freedom anyway.
I know that this is an ultra liberal community and I will get downvoted and flagged within a few minutes. But if someone is too scared to even lose a worthless website account to say what he sees as the right opinion, he should not live anyway.
They are not, but isn't it a weird coincidence that his alleged victims stayed silent with a fucking RAPE case until he decided to expose the most powerful people and governments in the world?
If you are going to take a stand say something worth taking a stand for. Provide some proof. Just saying that the liberals will not hear it will not gain any new listeners. Assuming that your audience is hostile and will not listen will just give you a hostile audience.
That’s actually a pretty interesting example — is this some sort of stick-it-to-the-man anti-corporation performance art?
“[...] lawyers are infuriated that the dot-sucks registry was charging trademark holders $2500 for domains and everyone else $10.“
“The .sucks domain registrar has been described as "predatory, exploitive and coercive" by the Intellectual Property Constituency that advises the ICANN board. When the .sucks registry announced their pricing model, "most brand owners were upset and felt like they were being penalized by having to pay more to protect their brands." Because of the low utility of the ".sucks" domain, most fees come from "Brand Protection" customers registering their trademarks to prevent domains being registered.”
It feels like many of the new TLDs are a shakedown on brands to force them to land-grab their trademarks. At least .SUCKS is honest about it?
EDIT: oh my, this is juicy! Some real internet counter culture. This excerpt from a letter of complaint from the .SUCKS registry to ICANN:
“[...] ICANN appears concerned that registrations on the .SUCKS registry will be used to aggregate uncomplimentary commentary about companies and products--the very purpose for the registry that Vox Populi
identified in the application it submitted to ICANN, and that ICANN approved.”
EDIT2: I am reminded of some more domain history here, regarding Diageo seizing the Guinness-Sucks.com domain names (also a nice blast from the past: who remembers the Your Rights Online section of SlashDot?)
The idea that the expansion of TLDs, sold as some sort of democratization of domain names, was anything other than a money grab is a joke. It's exemplified by ".sucks" forcing trademark owners being extorted to pay to protect their brand. As soon as ".sucks" is played out financially, look for ".isshit", ".killsbabies", ".molestspets", etc., etc., to spring up to monetize hedging haters.
Almost every post that links to brave.com makes it to the frontpage withing minutes. And all criticism is buried with lots of shilling. This company has been compromising HN for years now, as well as other influential online communites like Reddit and 4chan.
Brave is a scam just like most "privacy centered" parasite products like DDG and VPN providers. All these companies are run by shameless and aggressive useless parasites who actually offer nothing but a rebranded product made by others. It's sad that a community supposedly filled by software engineers fall for and promote such scams
