Since you're probably wondering whence downvotes: You seem to be talking about going into a thread with a confusing headline and not understanding the topic. You're not meant to wade in with nothing more than the headline as a guide. Commenting on a story without reading it is a really annoying practice that leads to some very frustrating discussions.
EDIT: Wow, downvoted into the ground for trying to be nice and explain constructively what I disagreed with. I don't mean to complain, but I would like to suggest that readers consider what kind of discourse they'd like to see before blindly downvoting.
Then again (and recognizing you make a good point), there have been plenty of times when I read the site, have no idea what is going on, check the comments for some enlightenment, and feel like I'm the only one who still has no idea what the article is supposed to be about.
5 upvotes came out of nowhere in 30 seconds so I'm not too worried.
But I'll point out two examples from just this week where article+headline completely failed. First is Aaron Winburn; I had no idea of why this was on HN until a commenter helpfully pointed out he was a Drupal developer. Second is "Trello is now half-million strong." The headline, nor the article, told me what the heck Trello was.
Maybe this is conscious decision on the part of the HN moderators to keep out newbs.
> Second is "Trello is now half-million strong." The headline, nor the article, told me what the heck Trello was.
How is that a problem in that particular case? This was not an introductory post for Trello. Introducing you to the product was not its purpose. This was an update on the product's blog telling you that Trello now has 500k subscribers. But if you for some reason clicked on the article wanting to know what Trello is, I'm pretty sure they have a link to the actual product right there. Including an introduction to Trello in the article text would have been a waste of most people's time.
Agreed. In this case I didn't even bother with the link & went straight to the comments. Usually the first few comments point out some flaw of the product __in clear language__ and from that one can work out what the product being criticized is. Much faster than trying to figure out the product from the company's marketing speak.
Complaining that a one-off video joke doesn't work with flashblock is awesome and contributing to the conversation; pointing out the absurdity of such a comment is downvote material.
Very entertaining. Hey, can the Vooza guys tell me how you guys did your video? What equipment did you use? How did you get the black background with lighting done well?
I'm a bit confused. I feel like this is an extremely old joke at this point. Aren't we all pretty keenly aware of the memes and absurdities that crowd the startup industry? Am I missing some unique or new observation being made that hasn't been made 50 times already by pretty much everyone?
Truth can be stranger than fiction, what you described already happened. Back when everybody was going gaga for Kevin Rose's "Milk" startup a parody mobile app beta that pre-oink'd Oink called Jotly put out a video kind of like the Vooza one. The developer of the parody vid actually went on to release the app.
The first video satirizing the Apple-style "design process" promotional videos was great.
The second video making fun of buzz words (cloud, social, local), acronyms (RSS, API) and startups being oblivious to making money is a really tired and overdone joke.
Ha, something like that wouldn't surprise me these days. Of course I signed up for the mailing list, looking forward to more exciting 'product announcements'.
"We believe in the power of iteration, we originally started out as StumbleMonkey, which was like AirBnb but for online-dating, so when you left town you could rent out your spouse or partner. Great idea, but then we found out it was illegal, so we had to pivot.. So we changed our name to Googoprrrrrr. That's 6 r's. And that app was like Spotify, meets Grindr, but for rental cars, but ran as if it were for a hotel. "
They forgot one item in the list of things they make fun of: "Create a landing page and collect emails without telling why/what they are signing up for, because it will be awesome".
Vooza is cool, but I feel for other startups like http://zombo.com that have been working that niche for much longer. Hopefully, there's enough investment capital for everyone.
This is like Lorem Ipsum for startup pitches. They should make the site title changeable via the URL, so you could use it to pitch any lame ass startup and get them VC monies.
72 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadBased on the way headlines are edited, this seems to be on purpose.
EDIT: Wow, downvoted into the ground for trying to be nice and explain constructively what I disagreed with. I don't mean to complain, but I would like to suggest that readers consider what kind of discourse they'd like to see before blindly downvoting.
But I'll point out two examples from just this week where article+headline completely failed. First is Aaron Winburn; I had no idea of why this was on HN until a commenter helpfully pointed out he was a Drupal developer. Second is "Trello is now half-million strong." The headline, nor the article, told me what the heck Trello was.
Maybe this is conscious decision on the part of the HN moderators to keep out newbs.
How is that a problem in that particular case? This was not an introductory post for Trello. Introducing you to the product was not its purpose. This was an update on the product's blog telling you that Trello now has 500k subscribers. But if you for some reason clicked on the article wanting to know what Trello is, I'm pretty sure they have a link to the actual product right there. Including an introduction to Trello in the article text would have been a waste of most people's time.
Get a grip.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/18/jotly-parodies-our-mobile-l...
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/13/jotly-lives-parody-app-goes...
The second video making fun of buzz words (cloud, social, local), acronyms (RSS, API) and startups being oblivious to making money is a really tired and overdone joke.
Or, another way of putting it, 'Hasn't everyone on Hacker news been exposed to the same articles/knowledge/humor I have been exposed to?'
If something seems old and tired to you, yet is still getting upvotes, the answer is probably 'no'.
I laughed, a lot. Win!
"We believe in the power of iteration, we originally started out as StumbleMonkey, which was like AirBnb but for online-dating, so when you left town you could rent out your spouse or partner. Great idea, but then we found out it was illegal, so we had to pivot.. So we changed our name to Googoprrrrrr. That's 6 r's. And that app was like Spotify, meets Grindr, but for rental cars, but ran as if it were for a hotel. "