

How Gamers Nearly Killed My Business - mkrecny
http://myles.io/thoughts/how-gamers-nearly-killed-my-business

======
diminoten
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?

------
thoughtpalette
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.

~~~
mkrecny
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.

~~~
mentat
You submitted it to HN as _a story_. There needs to be some content there or
else you're wasting our time.

~~~
xauronx
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?"

------
jere
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](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?

~~~
mkrecny
I fail to see how that's relevant.

~~~
jere
That article came up recently and someone linked to _your service_ in the
comments. I think it's clearly relevant.

------
jdalgetty
Where is the rest of the story?

~~~
mkrecny
That's it.

~~~
icedog
No wonder they almost killed your business.

~~~
mkrecny
What do you mean?

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

~~~
mkrecny
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.

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

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

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

------
radicalbyte
followgen.com uses an invalid security certificate.

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

(Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)

------
thedrbrian
Why is the text so unbelievably massive on an iPad?

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

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

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

~~~
ColinWright
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.

~~~
mkrecny
Thanks Colin, really helpful and thoughtful response.

~~~
ColinWright
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?

~~~
mkrecny
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?

~~~
ColinWright
There's already an unofficial FAQ:

[http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ](http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ)

Submitted and discussed here:

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

