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Ask HN : What's the meanest thing that has been said about your startup?

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Re: Ask HN : What's the meanest thing that has been said about your startup?

#83

Post by pg »

bprater wrote: post #56
pg wrote: post #27

If you want to see mean, try writing essays.

It brings up a good question -- is an essayist obligated to read people's responses? Or do you hire someone to filter out negative responses? (Not necessarily opposing viewpoints, just reddit level commentary.) I can understand how demoralizing it can be -- short of re-evolving the human race, what is a good way to deal with this so you can stay positive and energized?

As a first approximation, you can discriminate by site. I never read comments on Reddit and always read them on News.YC.

Re: Ask HN : What's the meanest thing that has been said about your startup?

#84

Post by ConradHex »

mattmaroon wrote: post #55
ConradHex wrote: post #22

Several years ago I co-founded a small game company. We busted our butt working 80 hours a week for months on end to get stuff done. We had one game that we shipped and were proud of; it was a budget game, but it was superior to many other games at that price point ($20). Anyway, one reviewer wrote: "I would prefer the soothing comfort of a spork being gouged in my eye rather than playing a few more minutes of this g…

How did the game end up doing?

Badly. :|

It's hard to say if it was marketing or what, though. Plenty of budget games did well (not sure any more), but people don't usually buy budget games based on reviews. They buy it because they see it at Wal-mart for $20 and it looks fun based on the box.

Someone ported it to an arcade platform, though, and I still see it at most Chuck-e-cheese's, which is the coolest thing in the world. Way cooler than seeing it on the shelf at the store.

Re: Ask HN : What's the meanest thing that has been said about your startup?

#85

Post by racy_rick »

okeumeni wrote: post #20

I don’t think that mean criticism is all bad; I’m one of those people who think you should not be creating companies if you don’t have a thick skin. I found out some mean criticism actually push you back against the wall and give you a different prospective on the whole thing. Human ambition feed on challenges; some on the things I did in my life I did them because someone told me I could not do. A personal story: In…

That is actually pretty mean. You finally took your life in your own hands and you blame your laziness, your sloth, your lack of motivation on someone that wanted to help you (albeit while being very uncouth).

That is incredibly mean. You may not be fat anymore, but you are still an asshole.

Re: Ask HN : What's the meanest thing that has been said about your startup?

#86

Post by webwright »

shiranaihito wrote: post #42
webwright wrote: post #25

Heh-- people have called RescueTime evil, especially in a work setting. Never hurt our feelings much-- we try to not go tooo far down the evil path, but we've always felt like a manager/biz owner has the right to say, "How are you spending your time?" and get an honest (and CORRECT) answer. A lot of people say, "Well, if I get my work done in 2 hours every day, I have a RIGHT to screw off for the other 6"... While we…

> we try to not go tooo far down the evil path So what have you done on the evil path so far?

Well, we've created a tool that a manager could put on an employees machine to see how they spend their time at work. We strongly market/urge managers to expose this data to their employees and allow them to see how they compare to the average on their team, but they don't HAVE to do that.

The "spectrums" of evil that we deal with are:

Open vs. stealth: Right now RescueTime can't be stealthy, but there are certainly settings (academic labs trying to understand utilization) where stealth might be appropriate.

and

Exposure of worker data to managers (customers): How much detail do we expose to the manager beyond the team averages/totals? Due to customer demand, we've exposed some high level individual data to managers.

and

How much data we collect in a workplace. We're not budging here and are sticking with time/attention data. There are services out there that literally log keystrokes, take screenshots, and blindly cc managers on all emails sent (including personal webmail). Yuck.

Re: Ask HN : What's the meanest thing that has been said about your startup?

#87

Post by DTrejo »

racy_rick wrote: post #85
okeumeni wrote: post #20

I don’t think that mean criticism is all bad; I’m one of those people who think you should not be creating companies if you don’t have a thick skin. I found out some mean criticism actually push you back against the wall and give you a different prospective on the whole thing. Human ambition feed on challenges; some on the things I did in my life I did them because someone told me I could not do. A personal story: In…

That is actually pretty mean. You finally took your life in your own hands and you blame your laziness, your sloth, your lack of motivation on someone that wanted to help you (albeit while being very uncouth). That is incredibly mean. You may not be fat anymore, but you are still an asshole.

So mean.
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