Hacker News Reader

Comment by LegionMammal978 | Hacker News Reader

Those are some amazingly spammy "Top Posts" at the bottom of the page. From the same blog, I thought at first that the "left-pad as a service" [0] was a parody, but the whole collection of Online Tools websites is so elaborate that it might truly be in earnest.

Also, this should be (2010). The "last updated 3 weeks ago" is likely not real at all, every page on this blog was allegedly updated in a similar timeframe. (Maybe it counts every change to the list of links? Or maybe it's just bogus SEO nonsense.)

[0] https://catonmat.net/1000-paying-left-pad-users

View on HN

Surely its a parody. Like people can put lots of effort into a parody.

Regardless, even if it wasn't, its at worst silly. Its not like he is scamming people out of money.

Edit: after looking at a few more pages, now im not sure what to think. Maybe im wrong. The untracked browser stuff seems like it could be an actual scam on those who dont know what they are doing. Its all so much more extreme than i thought.

Maybe this all is an attempt to link farm in order to get SEO to scam people. In which case it makes me feel complicit.

I thought that the page about a service for padding strings was some kind of satire ("I promise I won't put it on npm, won't unpublish it, and I definitely won't rewrite it in Rust"), but apparently the website tries to sell such services, and overall it's a dumpster full of SEO spam and amateur JS coding exercises. Not a great link to see on HN.

Why be a hater? It doesn’t make you look smart. It just bores the rest of us.

Because they've allegedly gotten hundreds to thousands of people to pay up to $9 per month for basic string utilities as a subscription service, just about all of which are offered for free by a dozen other websites. Either they're padding out their subscriber count by a lot, they have some impressive functionality they aren't advertising, or these subscribers are getting ripped off. Also, comparing to archived versions of the pricing page, they've been ratcheting up the price over time.

Meanwhile, they're making some dubious claims about the security and privacy of their cloud browser service. Sure, your ISP might not see which websites you're visiting on it, but now they can go snoop on your browsing however they'd like, and read off all your passwords and whatnot.

I don't see any hate. I do see useful information. Looking at the linked page for myself, and seeing a list of "Top posts" all of which are obviously ad-infested SEO gunge, I immediately learn that I cannot trust whoever made the page, because getting eyeballs onto their advertisements is more important to them than truth.

This doesn't have any particular implications for this particular page, and the "lucky 10,000" who had never before encountered the idea of converting between miles and kilometres using Fibonacci numbers will have learned something fun, which is great. But seeing the SEO bullshit tells me immediately that I am not going to want to (e.g.) add this blog to my feed aggregator[1].

[1] Does anyone else actually use these any more? I feel a bit of a dinosaur.

The grandparent of this comment was useful to me. Your "why be a hater?" was not.

> Those are some amazingly spammy "Top Posts" at the bottom of the page. From the same blog, I thought at first that the "left-pad as a service" [0] was a parody, but the whole collection of Online Tools websites is so elaborate that it might truly be in earnest.

If you don’t see the hate in statements like that, I question your empathy. What would be wrong with talking about the actual content in the article?

For all you know, the author downloaded a theme and doesn’t care in the slightest. But you don’t have enough empathy to consider that so you’ll close your mind to what could potentially help you think differently.

Hate over stupid things is remarkably boring. Deal with facts - they’re helpful.

I do, in fact, know that the author didn't "download a theme", because all those spammy "Top Posts" link to things advertising the author's products.

I am curious as to whether you truly think that

> Those are some amazingly spammy "Top Posts" at the bottom of the page.

shows more hate and less empathy than

> But you don't have enough empathy to consider that so you'll close your mind to what could potentially help you think differently.

It seems the other way around to me, though of course my opinion will be biased by the fact that one of them is being negative about me and the other about the maker of some random blog on the interwebs. (Though ... I tend to think that any given negative remark shows more hate and less empathy when it's made directly to the person it's about. Compare "X isn't terribly bright" with "You aren't terribly bright".)

> It just bores the rest of us.

Yet you take the time to reply. This always baffles me.

If that truly baffled you, you wouldn’t have replied to me.

The purpose of conversation is to reveal facts previously unknown. If I'm baffled by it, you should absolutely expect me to reply.

If I told you you were being boring, you should wonder why I would bother to reply, or if I'm being dishonest in an effort to be hurtful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com