Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Svbtle Funding

blog.svbtle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 173 posts

Re: Svbtle Funding

#91

Post by Avshalom »

nchlswu wrote: post #77
glomph wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when many of them are making quite long and thought out points. Haters seems appropriate to me only when applied to the most vacuous of comments. Real points deserve real responses or at least the respect of being called comments or criticisms not hate.

That's fair, but I feel like the majority of comments I've read through appear that the poster cannot separate the prospects of Svbtle with their perception of Dustin and his brand. Those aren't critics. They're haters.

The prospects of Svbtle are directly related to the brand of the people involved though.

Re: Svbtle Funding

#92

Post by oh_sigh »

pg wrote: post #75
oinksoft wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we all agree to stop calling critics "haters"?

I think not. Haters are distinctive enough that it would make the language less expressive to discard the word and merge it into "critic." I'm slow to adopt new words, but I think "hater" is a useful addition to the language, and not simply a pejorative version of "critic." The difference is that a critic is what you're called as a byproduct of being critical in a particular instance, whereas being a hater is an ongo…

You are correct with your definition of hater. The problem is that your original post doesn't leave any room for critics who comprehend the svbtles game plan, but still find it unappealing. The implication from your post is that 1) a community misunderstanding exists, and 2) that misunderstanding is caused by either people not being intelligent enough to see what svbtle is doing, or people having a personal vendetta against Dustin.

Re: Svbtle Funding

#93

Post by loceng »

mladenkovacevic wrote: post #74

I don't know much about Svbtle but there's something so un-exciting and unapproachable about the way they describe their objectives: >Svbtle is a curated, invite-only collection of great people who have things to say. ... >Our goal is to make it easier and more natural for interesting people to write down their thoughts. ... >Think you should be a part of the network? Apply for membership below. The most exciting thi…

It seems to reflect Dustin's attitude overall, though. In reality they have traction because it's an invite-only club they're doing.

Re: Svbtle Funding

#94

Post by jspthrowaway2 »

batgaijin wrote: post #88
jspthrowaway2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like Dustin Curtis as a person, based on prior history (i.e., American Airlines, presumption in his articles bordering on know-it-all after accomplishing little, and so on). You might find that the majority of the haters you're talking about feel the same; there's been discussion about this recently linked elsewhere in the thread that I won't rehash here. If he's genuinely confused by the hate, that'd be surp…

I think he's a bit of a d too, but I never heard about the AA story and just looked it up[1]. I assumed someone got fired because he was whining, but it seems AA fired someone for breaking their NDA to talk about why the website was so crappy. So, to me the story is more AA being the asshole in that story. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/6531610/America...

When classifying assholes, there's no rule that states only one party can come out the asshole. Nobody won in that situation.

Re: Svbtle Funding

#95

Post by loceng »

ryguytilidie wrote: post #25
RyanZAG wrote: post #9

I don't understand - what possible business model could you have with such niche blogging? Can anybody explain how this is expected to work? Some kind of sponsored advertising on what the blog topic is about?

The problem is that companies like this are as not-scalable as possible. It is a bunch of individual contributors. The only way you add value is to hire someone great, who will presumably be quite expensive. Once they start trying to figure out how to hire more cost effective bloggers, quality will suffer and people will stop reading.

Or hope you can keep convincing quality people to join a boy's club, with some editorial power, and perhaps a marketing channel that it could be promoted on/with. Most of the character that I enjoy in personally written blogs feels like it gets lost in whatever process they follow for editing. Just MHO.

Re: Svbtle Funding

#96

Post by beefman »

pg wrote: post #53

Svbtle is probably one of the most misunderstood companies we've funded. Partly because what they're doing is hard to understand, and partly because Dustin has alienated a few people along the way, who now in the usual way with haters want to misunderstand what Svbtle is. One of the reasons Svbtle is hard to understand is that it's a work in progress. At its current fairly fuzzy resolution, it's what I'd guess a trad…

I haven't followed the Dustin-drama. In fact I don't know anything about it, but that something happened one day and he changed his tag line from "hero" to "villain".

But I've followed more than a few links from Hacker News to articles on Svbtle over the past months and came away with the strong sense that they're of unusually low quality. Maybe I'm just not the target audience, but the articles I've seen have been vacuous without exception. I went to the home page just now and scrolled down and found more of the same. Having been the editor of a print magazine in a past life, I'm a fan of the curated approach, and I like much of the front-page content on Hacker News, so this surprised me.

It looks like saved stories aren't public here, so I can't use them as a constructive example of content I think is good. But I use reddit for similar purposes

http://www.reddit.com/user/clumma/liked/

and here are my Google +1s (from Reader)

https://plus.google.com/115045287509032322837/plusones

If I had to describe the Svbtle content direction, I'd say it's like somebody is randomly scraping longer comments off of TechCrunch articles and putting them into a blogging system.

Re: Svbtle Funding

#97

Post by nchlswu »

Avshalom wrote: post #91
nchlswu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair, but I feel like the majority of comments I've read through appear that the poster cannot separate the prospects of Svbtle with their perception of Dustin and his brand. Those aren't critics. They're haters.

The prospects of Svbtle are directly related to the brand of the people involved though.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying Dustin's reputation can negatively affect the prospects of Svbtle.

While Dustin's brand own brand spills over into Svbtle's, I think the network's prospects can be sufficiently differentiated from Dustin's brand.

Seems to me that the network is becoming large enough where the "tech blog" echo chamber opinion (about one individual) is inconsequential to Svbtle's fate

Re: Svbtle Funding

#98

Post by pclark »

xt wrote: post #13

I liked the minimlistic approach of Svbtle, so I created a super simple Git+Markdown-based blog that draws inspiration from Svbtle. Check it out: http://hveem.no/simple-blogging-with-lua-and-git

Silicon Valley appears to think there is a fine line between "drawing inspiration" and "copying." There isn't and to be honest, your output is a good example of the latter, not the former.

Re: Svbtle Funding

#99

Post by joeblau »

I didn't realize there was so much contention over the Svbtle theme. I was using a Tumblr version, but I just changed to something standard as I spend time to work on my own custom theme. As far as the funding, I think it's great that the blog platform will continue. As a relative new comer to the valley, I have gained some pretty insightful information from some of the Svbtle authors.

Re: Svbtle Funding

#100

Post by ry0ohki »

jspthrowaway2 wrote: post #83
dcurtis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I now find those posts somewhat embarrassing. The vitriol was unnecessary and diluted my arguments. In fact, I no longer even link to those articles from my website. Still, I don't think something I wrote several years ago in a completely different context should impact your opinion of Svbtle as a network.

As I told pg, my opinion of you impacts Svbtle so minutely that it might as well not even exist. But , it is still my opinion of you . Let's be honest, Dustin, that article was from 2009. It wasn't exactly written in the '80s when you were on a coke binge. I think your attitude in a lot of blog posts reflects quite negatively on who you are as a person, and that's where a lot of the hate for you comes from. You're pr…

"Often I've asked, who is Dustin Curtis? Why is he telling me the important things about building a startup?"

As someone who is neither in the hater not fan category, this is what I've been trying to figure out. I have no clue who he is and it's very difficult to find out much besides he's an opinionated person with a taste for design.

Post reply on HN