61–70 of 290 posts
The Twitter 'thick skin' part made me laugh. A past startup had the same experience with Reddit ads. The initial replies were so negative ("I could do this 3x cheaper myself" etc), and often negative for the sake of negativity. It took a little time, but we replied to most of them with gentle words along the lines of "thank you for your thoughts and comments; we're a small business trying to do things ethically; gett…
> This is why we ask all users where they heard about PostHog whenever they sign up or book a demo – it's a simple (optional) free text field. Enough of our users say 'ad on Google' or similar that we know paid ads do actually reach a large chunk of them. You have to be careful with how you word questions. If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then yes, an ad may well be it because ads are so in your…
Could you list down some non popular digital service you pay for(i.e. not google workspace, AWS etc.) and how you heard about it?
High Fidelity, sort of. Failed commercial project to develop a sort of VR world from the same guy that made Second Life. Their advertising honestly cheesed me off and seemed to reek of desperation. Their adoption of cryptocurrency didn't help either. What did was that despite that they had promising technology people I knew talked about, so I did check it out despite all my initial misgivings, and it was good enough for me to stick around there for a good while. When they gave up, I was part of the group of people that tried to keep things going, which eventually became a non-profit I'm now a member of, https://overte.org/
Resonite. The new version of NeosVR, still in development. Happened after an ideological split. I heard of NeosVR mostly from Reddit discussion and friends who love the system.
Linux Weekly News. Only news site I pay for, they post interesting highly technical information. Pretty sure I heard them mentioned in Linux discussion spaces.
Linode -- Same deal, Linux users that use their services. Now it's much bigger, I signed up back in the early days, back when they used User-mode Linux, and had no SSDs.
> Quora > > Dark horse – good for conversion and awareness. > Quite cheap, good targeting. > Seriously, I don't know why more people don't use Quora. Amazed to hear that. All my homies hate Quora, I would assume its the same amongst other developer groups.
These are the ads of "they can't come up with enough ads to show me because not enough people are advertising on this platform".
> This is why we ask all users where they heard about PostHog whenever they sign up or book a demo – it's a simple (optional) free text field. Enough of our users say 'ad on Google' or similar that we know paid ads do actually reach a large chunk of them. You have to be careful with how you word questions. If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then yes, an ad may well be it because ads are so in your…
I believe ads work by making a brand name familiar, which helps you recognize it in the sea of information. And that makes it automatically somewhat more attractive and reputably. You can be entirely unaware of this and it still works. Maybe the ad is not what convinced you, not at all, but it did prompt you to wonder if this LaunchDarkly thing is any good. Youtube kept spamming it in your face and you kept ignoring…
Eg, all the Youtube ads of NordVPN only did was to convince me that if I'm ever in the market, I'll use someone else. Part because all that advertising has to cost a lot of money, which of course the subscription has to pay for. Part because some of their advertising is less than completely honest about what they provide.
I’ve had my own startups and worked with tens of others. I don’t know anybody who has had good experience or ROI with paid ads. There is something “emperors new clothes” about the whole industry where we all play the game but nobody admits they just aren’t very good. Yet we all keep paying the Google bills thinking it’s something you have to do.
While I try reading this, the site loads something and scrolls to the top of the page, even on 2. try. Who designed this? This page sucks.
Yikes, I'm the founder of this company (one of my colleagues wrote this piece) - just saw it appear here. We shipped a rather huge change to the website recently (we're trying to let other people post stuff too), think we accidentally made it janky and missed this. Will fix when the right person wakes up - he's west coast US! Sorry for QA via HN :)
The Twitter 'thick skin' part made me laugh. A past startup had the same experience with Reddit ads. The initial replies were so negative ("I could do this 3x cheaper myself" etc), and often negative for the sake of negativity. It took a little time, but we replied to most of them with gentle words along the lines of "thank you for your thoughts and comments; we're a small business trying to do things ethically; gett…
I’m fairly sure the Twitter portion is because they named their product synonymous to a common social media expression for “share a picture of your (male) genitalia”. It’s an unfortunate scenario for anyone who had to look at those tweets, I’m sure.
Then again, I've seen memes about it several times from completely outside of the dev/tech sphere because of this, so maybe in a way it works since it made me look up the company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SponsorBlock ( https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock ) to the rescue!
I feel more bad about using this than a regular ad blocker. With a regular ad blocker it's blocking ads for which the lion's share is probably going to $facelessabusivecorporation, whereas sponsorships go 100% into the pockets of content creators who typically aren't exactly rich. It feels less like downloading pirated music and more like sneaking into an indie concert without paying.
I had enough of Raycon, Raid Legend and other bullcrap VPNs. Especially when those sponsors got greedy by asking a 2 minute and on a 8 minutes video. That's a quarter of it.
So I don't feel bad anymore for sponsorblock.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Developers avoid ads like the plague." If they can. They can't avoid them on Instagram or Tiktok.
No, I guess that's where my age or echo chamber shines through; I don't know any developers using those platforms. My colleagues don't; most are > 40, but the 20somethings we work with also don't. That's just my experience, so it says very little. Like I say somewhere else, I'm curious what the conversion for tech products on those forced ad platforms is. Actual numbers.
But I was surprised when I syndicated my content there, that so many devs where engaging there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SponsorBlock ( https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock ) to the rescue!
I feel more bad about using this than a regular ad blocker. With a regular ad blocker it's blocking ads for which the lion's share is probably going to $facelessabusivecorporation, whereas sponsorships go 100% into the pockets of content creators who typically aren't exactly rich. It feels less like downloading pirated music and more like sneaking into an indie concert without paying.
They get paid ad revenue based on ads served, they already got paid for the sponsorship.
Personally I feel that this is the wrong way round (however I'm totally morally ok with blocking ads of all kinds, I'd be a hypocrite otherwise, ads suck)