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Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

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Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#151

Post by capableweb »

djhn wrote: post #136
Gigachad wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, almost every company has automated alerts for mentions about them on any platform. It can be a great thing and it can be abused. A great way for a company to handle social media is to clarify confusion and to answer questions but not raid every thread with defensive or astro turf content. Often people post online about their complaints about how a product or service doesn't do x when it does but they haven't fou…

How do notifications for services like HN get triggered? Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch? More than half of online communication is video and less than 10% is "public" in the sense of tweets and reddit comments. (napkin math estimate) I don't think anyone in marketing and PR believes social listening companies actually catch even a significant minority of mentions. The things you get an API or a scrapeable feed out of are d…

> How do notifications for services like HN get triggered?

Easy, the API allows you to see all the latest X comments/submissions. Setup something to just text-match your name and hit whatever notification endpoint when matching. I think there are services for this that includes HN already too.

> Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch?

YouTube often offers captions for videos, otherwise it's not too hard to generate yourself. Apply same strategy as for HN but for YouTube/TikTok/Twitch. If it has sound, you can usually automatically transcribe it.

This also goes for TV shows like news and whatever. There are services that are transcribing every single news show and scrapes the transcriptions for mentions of brands/companies and whatever. You can use those services to see when your brand gets mentioned, and some services even send you a five-minute snippet of when you were mentioned. I'm sure the same exists for basically every single multimedia medium out there.

Neither an API nor a scrapeable feed is required for you to get a scrapeable feed from it in the end :)

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#152

Post by nisegami »

djhn wrote: post #136
Gigachad wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, almost every company has automated alerts for mentions about them on any platform. It can be a great thing and it can be abused. A great way for a company to handle social media is to clarify confusion and to answer questions but not raid every thread with defensive or astro turf content. Often people post online about their complaints about how a product or service doesn't do x when it does but they haven't fou…

How do notifications for services like HN get triggered? Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch? More than half of online communication is video and less than 10% is "public" in the sense of tweets and reddit comments. (napkin math estimate) I don't think anyone in marketing and PR believes social listening companies actually catch even a significant minority of mentions. The things you get an API or a scrapeable feed out of are d…

Linked page says they use Zapier to post in slack when GitLab is mentioned on HN.

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#153

Post by radmuzom »

howdydoo wrote: post #3

> We learned that the key to a post reaching the front page was the content itself. Well that's good news, at least

Well their observation is completely wrong. Timing is the most important factor which matters. I have seen thousands of extremely good non-political, neutral, tech related articles not getting a single upvote if it is submitted at times most of US/Western Europe is sleeping.

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#154

Post by Gigachad »

djhn wrote: post #136
Gigachad wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, almost every company has automated alerts for mentions about them on any platform. It can be a great thing and it can be abused. A great way for a company to handle social media is to clarify confusion and to answer questions but not raid every thread with defensive or astro turf content. Often people post online about their complaints about how a product or service doesn't do x when it does but they haven't fou…

How do notifications for services like HN get triggered? Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch? More than half of online communication is video and less than 10% is "public" in the sense of tweets and reddit comments. (napkin math estimate) I don't think anyone in marketing and PR believes social listening companies actually catch even a significant minority of mentions. The things you get an API or a scrapeable feed out of are d…

There are services constantly scraping all public social medias and you pay them some small fee and they let you subscribe to keywords. Of course they might miss some video content but it isn't terribly significant.

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#156

Post by djhn »

capableweb wrote: post #151
djhn wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do notifications for services like HN get triggered? Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch? More than half of online communication is video and less than 10% is "public" in the sense of tweets and reddit comments. (napkin math estimate) I don't think anyone in marketing and PR believes social listening companies actually catch even a significant minority of mentions. The things you get an API or a scrapeable feed out of are d…

> How do notifications for services like HN get triggered? Easy, the API allows you to see all the latest X comments/submissions. Setup something to just text-match your name and hit whatever notification endpoint when matching. I think there are services for this that includes HN already too. > Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch? YouTube often offers captions for videos, otherwise it's not too hard to generate yourself. Apply…

This works great in theory and as one off research projects (source: I've done this). The tricky thing is, can you namedrop any such services that actually work and offer a SaaS model?

I've heard dozens of pitches for such products, but they all end up being either

1) unable to grow due to legal reasons (transcripts are derivative works and thus even creating them, let alone publishing them, is restricted under copyright)

2) pivot to become Yet Another Social Listening Tool with a high-touch sales-heavy SaaS business model. They end up negotiating a deal for direct access to the firehouse feeds with the social media companies themselves, with all the strings attached (completely public content only, sometimes restricted to accounts of certain size, etc).

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#157

Post by djhn »

nisegami wrote: post #152
djhn wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do notifications for services like HN get triggered? Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch? More than half of online communication is video and less than 10% is "public" in the sense of tweets and reddit comments. (napkin math estimate) I don't think anyone in marketing and PR believes social listening companies actually catch even a significant minority of mentions. The things you get an API or a scrapeable feed out of are d…

Linked page says they use Zapier to post in slack when GitLab is mentioned on HN.

You're right, the text does mention Zapier, but what triggers Zapier? Zapier is glue that ties various services together. The web scraper and keyword detection is either a different service or in-house.

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#158

Post by djhn »

Gigachad wrote: post #154
djhn wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do notifications for services like HN get triggered? Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch? More than half of online communication is video and less than 10% is "public" in the sense of tweets and reddit comments. (napkin math estimate) I don't think anyone in marketing and PR believes social listening companies actually catch even a significant minority of mentions. The things you get an API or a scrapeable feed out of are d…

There are services constantly scraping all public social medias and you pay them some small fee and they let you subscribe to keywords. Of course they might miss some video content but it isn't terribly significant.

Any recommendations?

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#159

Post by dnsmichi »

nisegami wrote: post #152
djhn wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do notifications for services like HN get triggered? Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch? More than half of online communication is video and less than 10% is "public" in the sense of tweets and reddit comments. (napkin math estimate) I don't think anyone in marketing and PR believes social listening companies actually catch even a significant minority of mentions. The things you get an API or a scrapeable feed out of are d…

Linked page says they use Zapier to post in slack when GitLab is mentioned on HN.

More on Zapier workflows: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...

I saw your message in Slack, GitLab Developer Evangelist waving from Germany :)

Re: Gitlab Handbook's HN Page

#160

Post by oblio »

simpss wrote: post #137
beachy wrote: post #70

This culture of radical openness must be quite refreshing for people inside the company. A lot of companies would never want this sort of thing to be out in the open. But really, why not? I imagine it helps to keep things sensible if you know that a thousand eyes could be trawling over your employee policies. You're certainly not going to be promoting astroturfing or other undesirable activities. At the same time, yo…

Starting to change though. Personalized analytics and tracking roll-out (including on-prem) was pulled back ~2 years ago[0], they're on another try[1] currently with a heavy-handed hiding approach. Including small additions to release notes[1], short lived and hard to find feedback threads[2] etc... Including deleting/hiding tickets that get posted on HN[3][4] and contain plans/info that users might take negatively/p…

It's going to be a slow process, but they'll become a regular company over time.

There's a reason (many? most?) people are jerks. Being a jerk works.

Companies, being groups of people, are also jerks.

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