How is it obnoxious to expect to be able to log in and add a payment plan yourself? Literally every other Saas that serves business customers does that. None glibly say “oh yeah and your data’s queued for deletion, but you can ASK to be let in to add a payment plan”
Sorry, I shouldn't have said that you are obnoxious. I originally thought that a free tier customer shouldn't load harsh criticism onto customer support when you know they can't ever respond.
But when I thought it over, I believe that industry rules will eventually catch up to your customer expectations. I would never expect a mainstream company that deals with data, such as Notion or Airbase, to replicate the same behavior as Ghost.
This is a really fun idea. Obviously when you do real user tests, they’re too professional to curse but finding and fixing UI friction by curses per minute is very appealing!
Here’s the tweet you claim is racist — I know bc it’s the only time anyone has called me racist. I complained that Etsy w searches were dominated by mass produced goods from China. Not a slur on Chinese craft or people, but dismay at the amount of AliExpress-type items.
Yes she also willfully misread “mass produced goods” and asked me why I didn’t think Chinese artisans should use etsy for their handmade goods, a classic loaded question and a position I have never taken.
The mass produced goods — that didn’t belong on Etsy — were literally from China. Calling something Chinese doesn’t make it racist.
I don't know where to dm you, so I'll do this here:
I really shouldn't have posted this submission.
Ghost is a relatively big platform that I've always kept in consideration for projects. I was so shocked by the situation and the discovery that something similar happened in the past that I went "people need to know this!" disregarding how out of place it'd be to blast the thread here. Thankfully it was flagged quickly, but it shouldn't have been up to begin with.
I really appreciate you saying that. Don’t worry about it, it’s not causing me any distress and I’m too sick to do anything productive right now anyway.
But this place is a cesspit. This is actually a better experience than I would’ve expected from years before, and it’s still terrible. Just something to take away from the experience.
As I said at the time, I don't think she was willfully misreading you; I think she was suggesting you might be fallible. Because I said that, you've had me blocked on Twitter for eight years, which kind of amounts to conceding Star's original point.
I'm sort of puzzled about where you think the mass-produced artisan goods on AliExpress come from. Like, presumably we're not talking about goods like "one ton of calcium chloride" or "1MW supercritical steam generator", right? We're talking about the kinds of goods that Chinese artisans hand-make en masse and sell on AliExpress, things like furniture and decorations, right?
“mass produced hand made artisan goods” is not a thing. You’re inventing things and putting words in my mouth, just like you did originally, which is why you’re blocked. No, you can’t put words in someone’s mouth and say “you blocked me so it’s true” either.
I didn't put any words in your mouth in the original thread. If anyone had a legitimate complaint about that, it would be Star; you did put words in her mouth, and I suggested that you might be mistaken about your interpretation. Here are my tweets in full:
> Is it possible @starsandrobots did read your tweet, and simply thought you were fallible?
> I thought her point was actually pretty interesting: is Etsy a reasonable outlet for Chinese artisans? Could it be? How?
And then, in response to your accusations against Star:
> It's possible that might be in her heart, but doesn't seem certain to me.
And then (though this was hard to find) I posted this, but I'm not sure what it refers to; maybe someone said "for shame" in a tweet that's been deleted:
> I mean, it's possible that Chinese artisans who mass-handmake things and post them on Etsy will run into "for shame" even if not yet
And then, in response to a now-lost tweet from an extremely bizarre account that I now suspect was a Russian troll (flip-flopped from fervent support of Black Lives Matter to suddenly being some kind of alt-right account):
> @AmyStephen You're using these terms as if they're opposites, but I don't think they are. cc @amyhoy
(I just found those last two tweets and added them to this comment.)
That's the whole thread!
After that, you blocked us both, apparently for eight years.
Anyone can read this (at least, if they log into HN and turn on "showdead" in their profile, since my comments are getting flagged) and see that what I'm saying is true and what you're saying is not true, and moreover that you were doing what you falsely accused me of doing, so I don't know why you are posting these comments. Maybe you just think people are really easy to fool?
As for mass-produced handmade artisan goods, I'm not sure how you think mass production works in factories, but it generally involves a great deal of handmaking, much of which is done by artisans. There are exceptions, like JLCPCB and chemical plants, but I think their goods are not the kind that would sell best on Etsy. A lot of the totally unskilled assembly-line work, like what I did when I worked in a bubblebath factory, has been long since automated. What's left is largely skilled artisan work like investment casting.
Factory-created mass-produced handmade artisan goods? You're working really hard to misinterpret their tweet.
Do you expect people to think of skilled artisans working on handmade goods when they hear mass production? Because upon reading Wikipedia [1] or a dictionary [2], I'd think of factories, assembly lines, machinery and automation.
Etsy is a site that advertises carefully crafted handmade goods from independent creators, that are often custom and unique. They were looking for non-mass-produced handmade goods and found mass-produced goods from China instead. That's a mundane factual observation that couldn't be made clearer.
You're not really making your case here. Reading your flagged comments is not as flattering as you seem to believe.
> Factory-created mass-produced handmade artisan goods? You're working really hard to misinterpret their tweet.
You seem to have seized on a minor peripheral point and worked very hard to rebut it, I suppose because you want to take Hoy's side. But the entire original tweet thread except for Hoy's first tweet was about non-mass-produced goods from China, so the question of whether we should count mass-produced goods produced by skilled artisans working on an assembly line as "handmade artisan goods" is pretty much entirely beside the point.
In fact, the whole factual question there is beside the point. The reason this is at all relevant is that we're talking about Hoy's conflict with Ghost; her tendency to go nuclear and treat people very poorly over minor issues, as amply demonstrated here, is the relevant thing. There are people who applaud that sort of thing, which probably explains most of the appeal of Twitter. It looks like you're one of them.
Me, I'm sick of it, and I don't think this kind of behavior should be welcome here.
> But the entire original tweet thread except for Hoy's first tweet was about non-mass-produced goods from China
If I tweeted something and then a bunch of randoms started reply-guy arguing in my notifications about a straw man they'd made up, I'd block the lot of them forever too.
Every post you've made here is making you look even worse.
Minor peripheral point? The whole original thread was arguing about a point that wasn't made in the first tweet. They never claimed nor implied non-mass-produced goods from China were an issue. Replies created that point out of nowhere and you are using the fabricated discussion to paint them as somehow problematic.
Etsy (certainly back then, afaik they've sort-of given up on that by now: hard to police and bad for growth - turns out mass-production gives more turnover) was very much about things hand-made by seller. The promise was that you don't get people selling stuff they bought from factories on Ali[baba|Express] and claiming it's something they've handmade - in 2013 they had just allowed outsourcing production steps for the first time, if you documented who did exactly what step, so no buying things (handmade or not) and just reselling them. Nevertheless, that's what you get, X shops selling the exact same thing they supposedly made (or selling them with small customizations done, which was OK according to the rules but plenty people still disliked), and Etsy was pushing "integrity updates" and promising to better police this. And that wasn't in any way about Chinese people, because obviously if people are reselling massproduced stuff the problem is not the worker who made them. Nor are Chinese artisans selling their own product a problem, but I don't think that was a large group on the market anyways.
Of course nobody should resell things on Etsy that they merely bought, but there was nothing to suggest that Hoy was complaining about reselling; instead, she seemed to be suggesting that Chinese artisans who mass-produced things shouldn't sell them on Etsy. My reading of Hoy's reasoning at the time was "artisan = white person", so I tried to provoke some questioning of that assumption, and got blocked for my trouble. Certainly she had the opportunity to clarify at the time if that wasn't what she was talking about.
Rejecting the leading question clarified that quite nicely. And really, the jump of "could she be talking about the main Etsy point of complaints right now? No, way more likely she's just racist" is a crap starting assumption to make.
How am I supposed to know what the "main Etsy point of complaints" is, or was? I haven't talked to Kellan in years, I don't know if he even still works there.
I do pretty frequently see people making the "Chinese = impure" association, though. Maybe I should spend less time on places like this website, which would diminish my exposure to that kind of crap.
I don't think "reread what I wrote" clarifies anything. It leaves the interpretation entirely up to the reader, which is helpful when you're dog-whistling racism, counterproductive if you're trying to clearly express an idea that someone actually misunderstood.
So, I think your interpretation of the original tweet is plausible, particularly given the context you have—which I didn't have. But Hoy's response undermines your interpretation pretty strongly.
> so I tried to provoke some questioning of that assumption, and got blocked for my trouble. Certainly she had the opportunity to clarify at the time if that wasn't what she was talking about.
What would be the point of clarifying to you if you jumped in with those assumptions? She doesn’t owe you anything. Blocking someone like that seems like the right call.
You asked, "So you purposely provoked her instead of asking for reasonable clarification?"
No, to "provoke questioning" is to induce someone to re-examine something they thought they knew; it's not the same as "provoking a person", which means to intentionally offend them, which I wasn't doing. In fact, as you can see, I was very careful to phrase my questioning in as deferential and inoffensive a way as possible. And the particular way I was trying to provoke questioning was specifically by asking for reasonable clarification—clarification which apparently led somewhere she didn't want to go. It's good to see that she's now explicitly rejecting racism against Chinese people, which is something she wasn't willing to do eight years ago.
So you think you were trying to teach me with socratic dialogue by calling me racist? rather than asking, oh I don’t know, “what kind of goods”?
You made your decision — you called me racist then and now — and now you’re dishonestly trying to pretend it was more complicated and actually for my own good, really, when you think about it.
It’s super transparent tho so I appreciate all your replies that show just how twisted you’ve got it
I can’t reply to your nth nested comment so I’ll do it here.
You did call me racist, just like you did today. That’s how I knew EXACTLY which tweet it was 8 years later. Tweets can be deleted. I certainly don’t remember YOU as a person, you’re nobody to me.
You are being dishonest. You consistently saying things about me that are untrue. There was no racist tweet, I didn’t block Star — just you — and I didn’t flag your posts, among other lies.
You are using loaded questions and statements to try to assassinate my character.
You’re claiming I abuse people by blocking them.
You think you’re entitled to my tweets and attention. You fantasize we have some sort of relationships where I owe you conversation.
You’re obsessed with something that happened nearly a decade ago.
Bottom line: You need to stop talking about me and to me. I told you stop already and I’m telling you again: Stop.
I didn't actually call you racist then, as anyone who reads the Twitter thread can see; it's easy to see that the things that I'm saying are true, and the things that you're saying are not true. Even Star didn't call you racist. But (if I recall correctly) I knew that the line of questioning would quickly lead to you either having to take an explicitly racist position (which you'd probably be uncomfortable with) or strategizing on how to reduce the impact of racism (which you'd be even more uncomfortable with, if you were racist).
It's true that instead of asking, "What kind of goods?" I asked you whether you thought Etsy was a reasonable venue for Chinese artisans to sell their wares, which seems to me like a question you could have easily answered by explaining what kind of goods, saying something like "Of course, but people in North Carolina are reselling injection-molded Chinese toys like https://t.co/something." Instead, you blocked us both for eight years and counting, so I concluded that the discussion was leading someplace you didn't want to go, so you actually were just racist.
And now you're responding to me telling the story of how you treat people by smearing me as "dishonest" and "weird", which seems entirely in keeping with the kind of aggressive behavior that the whole discussion thread is about.
I really don't think that kind of behavior is the kind of behavior we strive for here, although I guess probably whoever is flagging all of my comments disagrees with that.
I see Star misinterpreting/extrapolating from the original tweet but (sort of) backpedaling or backing off relatively quickly, and you escalating and derailing the already tense situation with "interesting topics" Amy clearly doesn't want to discuss, then being whiny about this block 8 years later. Check yourself my dude. Amy does sound pretty annoyed in that thread from the start, but you were just pushing it further.
Just caught up on this thread, but just to reiterate what Amy said elsewhere and to refute your response that I can't reply to because it's flagged like basically everything else: She did not block Star.
Dude are you mad I deprived you of my tweets for 8 years, or are you mad I’m supposedly a racist? You can’t have it both ways. This is weird. You should stop.
I don’t think it’s in good faith to accuse someone of using multiple accounts to flag your comments without any basis and I believe this type of behavior is directly in violation of the guidelines of HN.
Claiming I refused to “explicitly reject racism” “eight years ago” is a loaded statement. You might as well accuse me of having refused to deny I was beating me wife. That would also be true. And it would also be dishonest and manipulative.
Over a decade, I went from doing grunt work freelancing — data entry, HTML conversion, etc — to charging about $500 an hour as a true consultant.
Freelancers do what they're told. Consultants advise the client on what they should do.
When you start out, it's natural to think you're Doing A Thing (whatever skill you have & want to charge for) rather than Running A Business. I started out thinking "I'm here to make web pages and get paid for it!" and that made it very easy for people to take advantage of me. I would do exactly what the client asked for and then they would complain about it.
By the end of my consulting career, VPs would come to me with their ideas and I'd feel free to say "I'd love to work with you, but that idea won't fly. Here's what you SHOULD do." And they would go with it!
I realized that I could have positioned myself as the expert much earlier on in my career, and saved myself a lot of stress of trying to do every little thing the client asked, no matter how foolish.
The business mindset also means service agreements with initial deposits, work schedule with intermediate payments, kill fees and more.
I now run a product biz — the star being a time tracking SaaS for freelancers http://nokotime.com
Turning my catch-as-catch-can freelance business into a real consultancy is what made me able to charge more, work fewer hours, and have less stressful projects (bc I was the actual boss rather than a tool to be used by the client) and build the SaaS on the side.
Someone else mentioned Freelancember. Guess who made it? Me! Based on all my mistakes and years coaching others to level up like I did. http://freelancember.com
I highly recommend the book The Secrets of Consulting, which is like "the inner game" rather than explicit stuff like contracts, taxes, etc which are covered elsewhere.
seminar -> mailing list (aka newsletter, aka free)
SEO bait -> a thing I wrote on my blog with the words "Apple Watch" in it like a million other pieces, there is literally zero chance of SEO doing a damn thing which, if you work in SEO, you know
the barest whiff of commercial activity sending a person "bitching" to a comment box -> 6 years in business, I still don't understand this
1. I linked to hundreds of people saying exactly that thing, plus it's all over Twitter, the op-ed-osphere, in-person conversations, etc.
2. I argued very clearly: Apple Watch is not a watch. It occupies a similar spot on the wrist and it has a time keeping app. That's where the similarities actually end, digital crown or no.
3. My point was never that "People buy Ferraris because they've been in business forever." That's irrelevant. My point is: There are plenty of very wealthy people who don't fret about $10k, or that it might be a "waste," because they're wealthy enough it doesn't matter. F Scott Fitzgerald and all that.
4. I think it's funny that you don't believe in the idea of "track records." Which invalidates skill, experience, customer loyalty, brand recognition, platform lock-in… all the things that drive sales. Apple products are not randomly generated in a vacuum.
5. Nope, it's not about conspicuous consumption. Never claimed it was. It only came up in my quoting that article about the "basic bitch" Birkin. Very wealthy people who are inclined to drop $10k on a whim could buy something much rarer and more impressive than a mass-produced electronic device. Which isn't to say there aren't stratified status layers inside the Watch editions/brands.
6. I never claimed "People will buy Apple Watch as a causal outcome of plane tickets." You missed the entire point of the article.
7. You probably should brush up on the definition of "straw man argument," since you made several. I didn't make any; straw man requires you to set up a false premise in order to knock it down. I made an argument by analogy.
8. You didn't cite any sources for your claims, or even quote the parts of my essay you were refuting, but you used a lot of Classic Style so it sounds impressive.
Neither of your things in "quotes" are things that I said. The "shitty friend" was alexcap's own words. The phrase "think of, or care for, others" didn't show up in my comment at all.
I didn't call him a shitty friend. He wrote, "Now you’re probably thinking I’m a real shitty friend" after his explanation of the events — which I quoted, in quotes, very clearly a direct quote from his own words — and I wrote "Yes" to answer the question. 95% of my comment was advice for people on what to do in the situation that the friend is reaching out to them as that friend did, who got ignored and later died and that person didn't know for years.
If you write an essay about something you did that you think was bad, and post it to Medium, and post it to HN, and then say "You probably think I did something bad," is it reaaaally so controversial to comment with "Yes, I agree, I think you did something bad"?
Also, if you thought that was my last comment, maybe you don't see my actual last exchange? It was about my bootstrapping conference and upcoming web site. Perhaps it's truly hell banned as in not visible? It was this:
> "The phrase "think of, or care for, others" didn't show up in my comment"
It's a direct quote of a dead comment you wrote in a reply. Turn on "showdead" to see it [0].
The dead "think of" comment in the "shitty friend" thread appeared 405 days ago. Your comment about the bootstrapping conference was 406 days ago. (There's also a dead reply in the bootstrapping thread dated 405 days ago, which fits the timing of being hellbanned for the "think of" post.)
You call it the "shitty friend" thread is pretty inflammatory considering, again, that was the OP's own words (not mine). I turned on showdead and my dead comment that you're referring to sure looks reasoned and measured to me:
I never said anyone specific is self-centered. I said:
>How self-centered do you have to be to not even wish a friend with obvious health problems "good luck" or "feel better"?
That's a rhetorical question.
Then, in the dead comment, I wrote:
> Being a bad friend in this way doesn't make you a bad person…
> But it does make it seem kinda iffy to write a blog post about it, even include screenshots of the conversation, and not (apparently?) be socially aware enough to realize that the deceased man was nearly begging his friend to express some interest and concern. And so many of the commenters, from my perspective, were not picking up on anything the OP did not explicitly lay out in the essay itself, which is to say: his friend was telegraphing his problems in every possible way, and the OP ignored it. People seem to be reading it and thinking, "Oh, just one of those things." But it's only one of those things if you don't think of, or care for, others.
Again, I didn't personally attack alexcap. You are quoting it out of context.
Real inflammatory stuff. If this is what I got hellbanned for, it really makes me wonder about the actual, deliberate, specific, personal cruelty that goes by on a regular basis without banning.
Meanwhile the other dead comment… the one that's actually newest, not the one you claimed above was the newest… is about my bootstrapping conference and upcoming site:
> Oh, good question. I can see why you'd think that.
> Nope, BB will be more like HN, but specifically for bootstrappers and related topics only. IOW: public-facing, free to use. (Although I think we're going to do a MeFi-style $5 or $10 join fee, to encourage good citizenship.)
> It's not going to be a product. I'm not going to run it unilaterally, either. It's for the community.
That is the last thing I posted before being hellbanned.
I'm using "shitty friend" as a disambiguator -- whether they're your words or his, they act as a unique identifier. And I think your comments in that thread are the likely culprit. You seem to think what you wrote was reasoned and measured, but I can see why a moderator might read them and think "whoa, this is way too personal" and ban you. EDIT: remember, you know what you were thinking when you wrote it, but others might read the same words and take a different meaning. The words you used could have been interpreted as pretty inflammatory. (Again, I'm not defending the hellban as the right decision, just explaining that I see an obvious reason it may have happened. And yeah, I've seen people say worse who didn't happen to get hellbanned for it.)
Your other dead comment was probably posted after you were hellbanned (the point of a hellban is that you wouldn't have known it happened right away). That's why both comments are dead. If you'd been hellbanned for the last comment, only it would be dead.
No, being saucy is fine, and people much more disagreeable than you (cough) seem to thrive here. I can't see why you were banned, but I asked, because that's weird.
I think it's pretty complicated, actually. I've lurked here for years but only made an account within the last year. In that short time, I've said arguably worse things than you have (though not with ill intent; I can just be abrasive and opinionated) and as far as I can tell I've not been hellbanned yet.
It probably helps that I'm a "nobody"; I'm not a member of the startup culture, just an outside observer and occasional commentator. If it's true that politics are a factor in bans and heavy-handed moderation, then I can understand (though not agree with) you being hellbanned for what are fairly mild comments as judged by an outsider like me, as you are a member of the startup club.
And I hate to say it, but misogyny might even have played a role in it. I have zero evidence of that and it's not meant as an accusation, just that it's a remote possibility. It's a real problem in just about any internet based community, and I really doubt this one is immune to it.
He's not belittling it, he's (politely and patio11-ly) saying: "Stop putting this huge space between me and you because it isn't there, and you're short-selling yourself by pretending it is."
If we were to look at the most quantitative, objective thing, consulting rates, there very certainly is a difference between patio11 and the average HN user (and most of us are better off than the population at large, I'm willing to bet).
I've met him, and you're right that he's very polite, generally humble and a good guy, and I can appreciate he's seen plenty of people making orders of magnitude more money than him. Still though, he's pretty successful.
It's a bit irrelevant to go down this road since patio11 has quit direct consulting, but from what I've read, patio11's path to (consulting) success goes like this: patio11 likes teachers, makes bingo card app, charges for it like a reasonable person; patio11 notices all these mistakes he's making while selling to teachers, blogs about it, blog gains popularity among like-minded individuals; patio11 falls into consulting, delivers a good service, and finds out how much he can charge for it.
There's nothing in this story that's dependent on being very lucky or being exceptionally smart; the only outstanding traits here are overcoming the fear of the unknown that plagues everyone and being a good teacher, but both of these can be learned. It mostly just comes down to spending your time doing the right things.
And now with AR, just by focusing on the major mistake from BCC (selling to teachers), patio11 has sort of proven my point for me: it doesn't take that long to bootstrap a successful business with all the resources available to you now. There are more than enough blog posts telling you what to do, what not to do, and there are more than enough open niches that are perfect for microbusinesses to supplant the dayjobs of everyone on HN who has the same restless ambition that makes staying in those dayjobs an impossibly depressing prospect. And from there, consulting for larger businesses with what you learn in your micro is just icing on the cake.
1. The CEO randomly picks on women on twitter he thinks subtweeted him and writes their bosses
2. The same lock-out mechanism — plus the queue for deletion — happens if eg your credit card expires or has an issue or sometimes randomly