Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why was the Posterous Thread Killed?

news.ycombinator.com

31–32 of 32 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why was the Posterous Thread Killed?

#31
post #21
post #11

I, for one, flagged the article because I felt: - the author was trolling - the post was misleading

Did you honestly feel that it was any more so than the Posterous "Tumblr is dying — come over here" post that inspired it? I felt the article in question was significantly less trollish or misleading.

Can you link to the post where they claimed that? In the one I read, they said that Tumblr was a pretty cool site. Not a single word about the size of the user bases.

So which post did you read?

Re: Ask HN: Why was the Posterous Thread Killed?

#32
post #11

I, for one, flagged the article because I felt: - the author was trolling - the post was misleading

Flagging is a pretty drastic response to a post you disagree with. Andrew's article was certainly pretty blistering, but he had an argument backed up with evidence. Saying a post is misleading but offering nothing to back that up is unhelpful to say the least. There was an active and civil comments thread that seems like the perfect venue to have a more enlightening discussion.

From Andrew's post:

  But I have some beef here Preposterous staff, you call 
  all your competitors, who are all building products to 
  serve similar communities, dying?
Incorrect. This is a deliberate misreading of the original post ( http://blog.posterous.com/make-the-switch-to-posterous ) which states:

  You grouched about dying platforms that haven't added 
  new features in ages, sites that have made it too 
  complex to perform the most basic tasks and places 
  that smother your content in ads.
Again from Andrew's post:

  Threats of lawsuits are reported, and to me this isn’t 
  about the tools or privacy, it is about a company being 
  a dick and the legal response to just that. 
There are many possible interpretations of the situation, but companies generally don't bring out the lawyers because another company is "being a dick".

Again from Andrew's post:

  Saying switching to your service is fine, but by 
  discrediting them, both the community behind them 
  and the staff, you are also attacking the full 
  history of the site, which, a lot of people care 
  about.
I don't see him backing this up anywhere in the post. He makes a big leap from Posterous lacking "community" features and saying some of the platforms they're writing exporters for are dying, to "discrediting" the communities behind sites and "attacking" the full history of those sites.

Then, there's the repeated use of the derogatory "Preposterous", which is roughly equivalent to the old "Windoze" or "Crapintosh".

So, again, in my opinion:

- the post was trolling

- the post is misleading

The trolling alone was enough for me to flag the post.

Post reply on HN