Secret Shuts Down • Hacker News Board

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#161

Post by adamzerner » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 1:49 AM UTC

quizotic wrote: post #155

adamzerner wrote: post #154

Can someone explain to me why people return money to investors? Legal reasons? Altruistic reasons? Selfish reasons (maybe that keeping it would hurt their reputation and make them feel guilty)?

One reason is when the investors own > 50%, control the board, and decide to recoup 10 cents on their dollar. But I've known entrepreneurs who made the decision independently, feeling it was the right thing to do. And it is the right thing to do if the company has no other prospects or the team is falling apart. But even so, returning the balance just keeps some salt from the wound. It doesn't make anybody happy.

> And it is the right thing to do if the company has no other prospects or the team is falling apart.

Why do you say that? If for moral/altruistic reasons, that doesn't make sense to me - if you have $x million, do you really think the best place to donate it would be to VCs? I don't know anyone who donates to VCs, so I assume the answer is no. (sorry if I come off as harsh, I don't mean to - I just don't know how else to put it)

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#162

Post by ChuckMcM » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 1:51 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #72

This shutdown - and some of the comments here that indicate how nasty Secret had become before it died - is quite interesting in light of the conversation surrounding Google's Real Names Only policy. Secret cofounders David Byttow and Chris Bader-Wechseler were both veterans of Google+. Byttow, in particular, I recall being quite well-respected as someone who got shit done, quietly and efficiently, by the rest of the…

   > My take-away from this is that social software is
   > remarkably hard, ...

Agreed

   > and that whatever you do, people will hate you.

Disagree. I think it is remarkably difficult to create a functional community, and it is impossible to do that if you don't understand how communities work.

In particular, successful communities often have places where similar members can congregate and effectively shun people who don't fit in. Call it a clique, call it a subreddit, but really its about finding a mental space to be.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#163

Post by Yadi » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 1:58 AM UTC

I've a question! Maybe totally unrelated, but isn't it always a bad sign when founders sell their shares before even reaching 1 year?

Doesn't that put a red flag on how the investors should look into it? Or it's just the hype & hockey stick presentations that doesn't matter to some investors?

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#164

Post by timr » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 2:05 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #158

timr wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't ordinarily care what VC's do with their money (i.e. mostly lose it), but it's disingenuous to suggest that there aren't clear trends: it's very difficult to raise a series A, but if you're the hype-driven flavor-of-the-moment, you can close a round with little to no diligence, few metrics and none of the proof traditionally required of a series A investment. We're still seeing money get shoved at companies wh…

Because the best validation is people using your product. Or technically, the best validation is people paying for your product, but if they're doing that in amounts great enough for a VC to notice then you don't need to raise VC. The herd behavior comes from everyone having more-or-less the same metrics for what constitutes success: people using your product. If that metric isn't evident, you fall back on the fundra…

Ehhh. Traction is a necessary, but insufficient condition for getting a series A. There's a "hotness" component here that's contributing to the overreaction.

You can't explain things like (for example) Meerkat raising a big round and cratering the very next week without considering the importance of hype. Meerkat and Color and Secret are walking out the door with big checks while lots of other entrepreneurs with great metrics are waiting for their fifteenth meeting...because they're not in the tech gossip rags.

Say what they will in public, I'll bet you that Meerkat's investors are wishing they'd sat on that term sheet for a couple of days.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#165

Post by diebir » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 2:10 AM UTC

So, what can one develop using this beside "hello, world?"

Can I build a cross platform GUI application? Is there a servlet container? How about an IDE?

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#166

Post by angersock » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 2:17 AM UTC

simias wrote: post #93

maxerickson wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4chan isn't a cesspool though, that's just an image they project to push away people who would respond to such pushing (approximately, the olds). (There are certainly parts of it that are risky clicks though)

I think 4chan survives thanks to its smaller communities. The big boards tend to turn into cesspool once a critical mass is reached (/b/ of course but also /v/ and /pol/, maybe others I'm less familiar with). Even in big boards if you're lucky it's sometimes possible to find an interesting thread if the subject is not too controversial. I'll still take that over reddit though, on 4chan people feel more genuine, for b…

/b/, /pol/, arguably /v/ are all containment boards. They've never been good, they'll never be good, etc.

The reason 4chan has survived has been that it promotes anonymity and hence genuine expression. After dealing with it, for a while, you get to kind of know different types of people. You can go to a containment board and find people that are genuinely, for example, homophobic and antisemetic with complete seriousness. They compete for space with people that are just trolling, and both compete with some genuinely level-headed people. It's fascinating to watch.

Meanwhile, in other boards, you'll find people snarking over guns (/k/), bicycles (/n/), anime (/a/), otaku and general Hikikomori behavior (/jp/), making things (/diy/), and on and on.

Because everything is anonymous and the boards move so fast, there's no advantage to the sorts of politics and forking you see in Reddit or whatever--instead, you just develop a sort of hang-out culture and occasionally interact with invaders. It's fun.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#167

Post by rtpg » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 2:18 AM UTC

zachalexander wrote: post #76

maxerickson wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4chan isn't a cesspool though, that's just an image they project to push away people who would respond to such pushing (approximately, the olds). (There are certainly parts of it that are risky clicks though)

Usually when people say "4chan" I assume they mean /b/.

/v/, /jp/, /pol/, and so many other boards are extremely toxic in behavior as well. There's some interesting stuff, but it's behind layers of "2edgy4u" behavior of people trying to out-insult each other.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#168

Post by elmyraduff » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 2:29 AM UTC

I remember last year Techcrunch was publishing story over story about Secret, mostly as uninteresting as 'Secret app has an update and now it remembers where you left off'. And there was always someone commenting on the article 'Techcrunch stop trying to make Secret happen, it is not gonna happen.'

That artificial media boost brought users and huge expectations, but users did not stick.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#169

Post by NamTaf » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 2:32 AM UTC

simplexion wrote: post #149

droopyEyelids wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Secret didn't have a mechanism to remove offensive posts that was as effective as Yik Yak's is. Yaks can be raunch as all get out, but there has to be something for the average person to relate to. If you follow it closely, you'll see there are many posts made while the author has lost their mind with hormones, but they're voted off in about 120 seconds.

Yik Yak's mechanism for removing "offensive" posts is exactly why I stopped using it. The amount of mundane posts of mine that were deleted was incredible. Too many people take offense to so many things.

If the community as a whole doesn't like the content you post, could the problem perhaps instead be you rather than them?

It sounds like the moderation was working for the good of the community, even if it meant some individuals (such as yourself) suffered for it.

Re: Secret Shuts Down

#170

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 2:40 AM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #66

gsibble wrote: post #63

I've never been more addicted to an app than when Secret first came out. It was all the rage in SF. I had to force myself to delete it after a few weeks in order to get back to productivity. I completely understand the hype. Personally, I feel this is a story about poor execution. They changed the nature of the app so significantly over time that it lost its appeal and never expanded successfully beyond the bay area.…

> never expanded successfully beyond the bay area This seems to be something of a meme. The Bay Area is a truly unique and bizarre place. People are incredibly busy and tech-savvy, and they're willing to spend way more on minor conveniences than people elsewhere. It seems like lots of companies raise on their explosive growth in and around the SV community. It may extend to people with similar demographics in other c…

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