I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900 • Hacker News Board

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#71

Post by Ardren » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 12:38 PM UTC

alex_young wrote: post #57

This post talks a lot about the chicken and egg problem, and the inventors of Reddit faced the same problem - no one will come to your homepage for the internet if it doesn't look like the homepage for the internet. Do you know what they did? They didn't focus on one community - they faked it. Thousands of fake posts with fake comments. All scripted. Then one day they started seeing posts they didn't write and it too…

I never heard there was thousands of fake posts, just when they posted articles they used fake accounts. Also there were no fake comments as Reddit launched without the ability to leave comments.

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#72

Post by Keloo » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 12:39 PM UTC

genidoi wrote: post #27

mattigames wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This amuses me to no end, I have never got that question, the closest thing was "you do websites right? do you know how to hack someone's Facebook?"

Or even "can you fix my printer?"

I got this one from one of my mates in school: "Can you please install Gentoo on my toaster?"

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#73

Post by djsumdog » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 12:43 PM UTC

> It is impossible to launch hundreds of communities all at once, that is why I started to choose the idea of the first community

This in itself is a good idea. It worked for Lobsters and HackerNews, and one of the things that went wrong with Voat:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/#too-man...

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#74

Post by adventured » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

agota wrote: post #49

anjc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I spent stupid money throwing shit at a non-stick wall, realized the wall was non-stick, so started spending money throwing shit at a different non-stick wall instead". This is the worst possible interpretation of OP's venture, and must be written by a 12 year old if $1900 is "stupid money" Edit: I'm not saying that $1900 is not a significant amount of money to many people in the world. But it is NOT a lot of mone…

I'd like to point out that OP is from Russia. I wonder if he still lives in Russia? In 2018, the minimum wage in Russia was 11163 rubles per month, which is $174.6 per month. So, it would take a person working for a minimum wage 10.8 months to earn $1900. For comparison, the minimum wage in California is $11/hour, so assuming a 40 hour work week, in 10.8 months a minimum wage worker in California would make $19,008.…

You correctly point out the non-trivial nature of $1,900, including for many millions of Americans, based on duration just to earn the $1,900 in terms of income.

It's even more dramatic than that however. The person earning minimum wage in Russia will never possess $1,900 in loose capital to spend on such a venture, as they don't have enough buffer beyond expenses to accumulate it. At $174 per month, saving 20% of that, it would take five years, and during those five years something would inevitably happen to consume the savings base (stray emergency need or other life event).

It's one aspect of the brutality of being poor, whether in Russia or the US or wherever. You rarely have breathing room above basic life expenses to accumulate anything. Opportunity almost always has a financial cost associated with it, a get-through-the-door dollar cost (whether that's buying equipment, renting commercial space, or just affording the free time to do a thing).

For the majority of the world $1,900 is more savings in terms of liquid cash (eg in a bank account), than they will ever have at a given point during their lifetimes. It's exceptionally hard for the majority of people to put that together.

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#75

Post by unicornfinder » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 1:01 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #4

Honestly, they could have done much worse than waste 10 weeks and $1900, so they may have been one of the lucky ones.

Indeed. I've wasted far, far more time and money on bad ideas than that.

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#76

Post by whack » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 1:05 PM UTC

alex_young wrote: post #57

This post talks a lot about the chicken and egg problem, and the inventors of Reddit faced the same problem - no one will come to your homepage for the internet if it doesn't look like the homepage for the internet. Do you know what they did? They didn't focus on one community - they faked it. Thousands of fake posts with fake comments. All scripted. Then one day they started seeing posts they didn't write and it too…

I remember when I built my own social network as well (www.thecaucus.net). The core feature was fancy algorithms similar to pagerank, that calculated a score for each post. This is in contrast to Reddit where the score is directly proportional to the number of people who liked it. I posted a link to it on HN, and got angrily chewed out by someone for misleading people about the number of people using my site. I wonder what they would make out of Reddit literally flooding their site with fake accounts.

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#77

Post by mocha_nate » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 1:14 PM UTC

tkifnn wrote: post #65

alex_young wrote: post #57

This post talks a lot about the chicken and egg problem, and the inventors of Reddit faced the same problem - no one will come to your homepage for the internet if it doesn't look like the homepage for the internet. Do you know what they did? They didn't focus on one community - they faked it. Thousands of fake posts with fake comments. All scripted. Then one day they started seeing posts they didn't write and it too…

Are there any archives to see what their fake content looked like?

In Alexis ohanian’s book he says you can still find them if you go back far enough on the site.

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#78

Post by ineedasername » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 1:17 PM UTC

Ten weeks to try and build 3 communities... So a little more than 3 weeks each.

3 weeks. And they declared it a failure. Wow. I know "failing fast" can be a virtue in letting you move on to the next thing, but this is too much.

Getting even nominal amounts of free traffic and engagement in that time period is a "win". Give it 6 months of grass roots, a bit of time for network effects to appear at all. Why would they have any sticky users when there is practically no content yet? Let the slow free traffic gradually build some. Then maybe get some paid traffic, who will have a reason to stay around.

Sure, they still might have failed then too, but then at least it would have been a true failure, for the right reasons.

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#79

Post by ineedasername » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

teddyuk wrote: post #60

herewego wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this. The only waste of time here was a result of this individual’s lack of commitment (sorry, but it’s true) and misinformed understanding of the efforts involved in the launch process of any business, let alone his. I hope he sees this and realizes all hope is not lost if he sticks with it, evolves it, and plans for the ramp period accordingly. Success is never guaranteed, but you have to give it a ch…

Just to clarify, are you saying that if you build a copy of reddit I won't become a millionaire overnight? Bloody hell, I wasted 11 weeks and $2600 so far.

I wasted 1 day and $5 and failed to create and alternative to Google. Never again!

Re: I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900

#80

Post by theNJR » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

I built a forum around 2001 for people in the state of Maine who loved cars. I seeded it with friends, I put fliers on interesting cars I found around the state, hosted meet ups, etc. It took a ton of effort to get that fly wheel to spin, but I made a few hundred dollars a month in ads from local business (car dealers, mechanics). Tons of fun, met great people and set me on a course that has served me to this day. I was a bit early for hyper niche communities though :)

Creating a better Reddit has been a brain storm side project I’ve been working on for years. The Internet needs it now more than ever. But after my $100k bet on VR I’m now more deliberate.

Anyway, this kid spending ten weeks on his side project is pulled out of a different era. Such experiments may have yielded fruit a decade or two ago.