Hacker News.love – 22 projects Hacker News didn't love

> Every great project was once called a bad idea

What a concise explanation of 'survivor bias'. Well done!

The problem is that every bad idea had someone behind it saying it was a great project, and the number of such bad ideas vastly outnumbers the actual success stories. To be fair, if the point is to say "Don't listen to the haters", that remains a good point.

Love the mobile UX. You nailed the scrolling experience

The issue here is that the people commenting on whether something is a good or bad idea usually don't have the necessary insight to give useful comments either way. But with certain trendy topics, many people still feel the need to express their shallow opinions. That is especially true on HN, because many like-minded people will chime in, upvote and increase visibility as long as they themselves feel validated, irrespective of whether what was said is true or not.

In fact I'd love to see an inverse to this list. I.e. shit people celebrated here that failed miserably. Although failure as a business can have many reasons and must not necessarily be due to the core business idea. It's probably much harder to get this data than searching early HN threads for high value IPOs. You'd have to search for popular threads and then track down the companies and find out what happened eventually.

Some of those comments are completely fair:

> Dropbox: I think competitors can duplicate Dropbox’s nice front end

That’s exactly what happened.

> Bitcoin: “Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency.”

This is still true even now

> DDG: “I can’t ever see anyone saying ‘just duckduckgo it.’ The name just sounds silly. It makes me think it’s a search engine for toddlers.”

And I still think the name holds them back. I say to my friends “I googled…” or “I searched…” because DDG sounds ridiculous.

> DDG: “How many people would go to Google and search for ‘new search engine’? DuckDuckGo is not even in the top 10 pages.”

This is completely legitimate feedback. Not a criticism.

> Uber: Two months after this thread, Uber received an actual cease-and-desist from San Francisco — seemingly validating every skeptic. Travis Kalanick’s response was to ignore it and expand to five more cities.

So they’ve literally said that the comments were correct here and still published it anyway.

> AirBnB: “All my experiences with it as a user have been too unreliable to expect that it can scale to truly massive usability. I just don’t see it swallowing up the whole hotel industry.”

Which is completely correct.

> Stripe: “I really don’t get or see how Stripe is different? Why would I use it instead of PayPal, 2CheckOut, e-junkie, etc?”

That’s a question, and a valid one at that.

I gave up reading after that because of the obnoxious hijacking’s of the scrolling on mobile.