How Gamers Nearly Killed My Business | Hacker News Reader

How Gamers Nearly Killed My Business

myles.io

9 pointsmkrecny30 comments

Questions:

1. Who are you/What is the business? It's okay to answer this, no one's going to blame you for advertising. People seem to just be curious, it just seems critical to the story.

2. What were these gamers doing to your business? What specific things were they doing to circumvent your revenue model? I notice promotion codes were passed around in that chat you posted a picture of - how did you get that picture? Are they doing anything else to avoid paying for your service?

3. When did this happen/what is the timeframe for this? The tweet happened, and then after what period of time did your user influx happen? How long did it take before they became problematic?

4. Where was your interaction with them taking place? Email? Does your website have a tool for live interaction with your customers? What frequency were you interacting with the gamers vs. your "real" customers?

4. Why do you think they felt the need to treat your business so poorly? Do you think their general entitlement attitude is based on using generally large-scale products, products which don't get impacted quite as negatively by their behavior?

6. How are you dealing with this? You mention straight-up blocking these problem users, and in these comments you talk a bit about how you determine they're gamers, but could you elaborate on this? I think it's pretty clever that you're looking at bio data from Twitter, but are you doing anything else?

Story seems to lack...well a story. What was your business? How did you try to convert the gamer influx as paying customers? Did the gamers in question note they started to get blocked? etc.

Give some substance.

I don't mention what my business as it's not really relevant, and might seem like I'm trying to sell.

You say that it lacks a story ... it's just real life, which doesn't always contain a story.

You submitted it to HN as a story. There needs to be some content there or else you're wasting our time.

All of his comments seem to be very along the line of: "Fuck you, why are you talking to me about this thing I posted online?"

It's enough substance for me, e.g. the quoted stuff makes it pretty clear that conversions were not going to happen. Well, maybe he could try to figure out if any did happen.

It's short, simple, and useful; tells you there are groups from which you aren't going to get any money, warns you to be on the lookout for such crowds paying attention to your site, etc.

Thought I should point something out. Followgen seems to be a favorite-spam service.

Someone posted an article a few days ago about how to do this yourself and was slammed pretty hard for the technique (though I tried to defend it a bit): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6147210

>Basically their attitude towards paying for my software was "fuck that". But obviously gamers are willing to spend on some software (like Steam).

I think you're conflating "gamers" with 13 year old boys who play too much xbox. They probably pirate all their PC software.

This was interesting, but I would have liked a little more detail. I didn't understand how they were abusing the system until the screenshot and then it was over. How much damage did they do initially? How effective was the blocking?

I fail to see how that's relevant.

That article came up recently and someone linked to your service in the comments. I think it's clearly relevant.

Do you need help? I feel that blocking all "gamers" might be a hard decision. Maybe there are better solutions, especially if your service is to advertise to a large audience.

> This was interesting, but I would have liked a little more detail.

While I agree that detail would be nice, but I think what's actually needed is a semblance of some actual analysis. There's nothing about this article that actually helps with, well, anything. There's nothing to learn or have a real discussion about.

It's very telling that most of the comments here are about how devoid of content the article is. Anything for visitors, I guess.

Where is the rest of the story?

That's it.

No wonder they almost killed your business.

What do you mean?

I'm curious: how did you detect who was/wasn't a gamer?

1. The service has a Twitter login. I could parse bios for certain blacklisted terms.

2. The service asks users to list some terms that are important to their audience. Most gamers list game titles, console names etc.

This title should have been, "How I killed an entire gamer customer base"

Pivot opportunity missed! Interesting as a cautionary tale, though.

What pivot opportunity? Why pivot when the pivot opportunity would involve throwing away 90% of my customer base?

followgen.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is not trusted because no issuer chain was provided.

(Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)

Why is the text so unbelievably massive on an iPad?

Seems like this story has been killed by HN mods - not sure why.

What makes you say that? I can still see it - what symptom are you seeing?

It was on the front page, and then magically disappeared. In my submissions page it's greyed out.

It's not greyed out for me, perhaps it's just a visited link. I don't know your setup, so I can't comment on that, but it's clearly visible to me on your submissions page, the new page, and possibly elsewhere (checking ...) yes, currently on page 2.

With regards disappearing from the front page, it's pretty clear that it's been penalised, and I suspect it's tripped the "flame war" detector. It's got lots more comments than it has points, and that's strongly correlated with flame wars. I believe (but cannot independently verify) that PG has implemented a means of detecting this, and applies a scoring penalty to any item tripping that detector.

And I note that you've done this before, claiming that things are getting killed by mods, when in fact the symptoms you observe are adequately explained by other mechanisms. Perhaps you could be more explicit about what you observe so that people can suggest alternate scenarios.

Thanks Colin, really helpful and thoughtful response.

Well, yes and no. It was a little snarky in places, and I apologize for that. But it's given me pause for thought ...

There are lots of things about how HN works that some people just don't know. The flame war penalty is one of them (and comparatively new), and the way flagging by ordinary people is another. There are more, many more. And the regular sort of FAQ just won't help. Even if people do read it the bit they want, and the bit that's relevant, could be buried among huge amounts of information that isn't relevant and they don't need.

How can we surface such information in a useful way?

No problem - I didn't detect any snark, at least nowhere near what I'm used to getting on HN.

"How can we surface such information in a useful way?"

An unofficial HN FAQ or HN Wiki?

There's already an unofficial FAQ:

http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ

Submitted and discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1755533

as well as in other places. Problem is, it's a "FAQ" and so it's a long list of specific questions that may or may not match the one you have in mind.

It would be nice to have some kind of "soup" of information, and let the user home in on the bit required. I have an idea, but have neither the time to create it, nor the time to explain clearly, even assuming it's well-defined, workable, or even possible.

FAQs need to move on. I can't see a wiki doing the trick either, it still has the information buried somewhere, with no obvious way to discover it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com