In general, I won't downvote a comment that I don't agree with. However, if there is a comment and a reply, and both have lots of votes, I'll vote up the one I agree with, and downvote the one I disagree with.
This comes up all the time here. Most people use downvotes for disagreement. Gotta live with it.
More importantly, TrailBehind looks nice. How's it going?
Edit: Case in point. Someone downvoted this comment to 0. But I think it will come back up. I think with the growing numbers of HN, a lot of rogue voters have come along, who just like to screw around.
We actually haven't touched TrailBehind in well over a year. We switched to developing iOS and Android apps, and we never looked back.
We do still use the TrailBehind data in our apps, and that's one of the main things that differentiates our apps against competitors. But we pivoted because there was no money in TrailBehind.
Nope, we got the site up to 1000 uniques a day. Then we put some ads up. After determining that even if we could 10X our ad returns and 100X our traffic, we'd still be making pretty paltry money, we switched away.
I suppose we could have tried to be more like Trails.com, but the site is pretty much a search engine, so we didn't "own" any data besides the index. We just linked through to the appropriate reports about places.
If I ever get some time, I'd love to revive and finish TrailBehind. It was my first big programming project, and it was growing, but there was just no money.
It still gets tons of visits everyday. Turn off Javascript and you'll see we did some interesting SEO stuff.
If you mean Google ads, then that sounds like a common story. Did you try approaching advertisers directly?
One thing I hardly see anyone do, instead of just running CPC/CPM ads, is actually sell products related to their apps. For example, considering you've already got a site with good traffic, you could create your own niche store of sorts, in which you sell products of interest to your audience. That could include your own mobile apps, other complementary apps, physical goods. You could also sell well-thought out bundles of such products, so that you are not competing with big discount sites which can sell single items for cheap. Offer people good products with convenience and awesome customer service, ride the social network craziness and you could do quite well.
Yeah, we had all of those thoughts. It's just a lot of work, and we also wanted to be writing software, not calling people about ads. We do advertise our mobile apps on the site now. We tried the following kinds of ads:
* AdSense
* a home-brewed system that recommended Amazon maps/books based on the map
* ads for our apps
* ads for custom topo maps of the area in view from MyTopo (These worked the best)
We really haven't been unhappy with our decision. There's a lot of money in the mobile space, and we have even mostly pivoted away from hiking. We have our hiking apps, but we also license our mapping platform to other companies and collect royalties. We power everything from flying and boating, to hiking and wine-country apps now.
My only regret is not pivoting from TrailBehind faster!
Personally I don't think downvoting just because you disagree is good etiquette. Especially if you are upvoting the other. I view a downvote warranted only when a comment is rude, off-topic, or just unhelpful to the conversation (such "i agree" or "i disagree" with no other information provided). Everyone is entitled to have an opinion and just because you, or anyone else, doesn't agree with that opinion does not mean that their comment wasn't well thought and insightful. I have disagreed with people's comments, but their argument and presentation was excellent that I upvoted their comment.
If I could downvote, which I cannot at this point in time, I think I'd only downvote people who state false facts (not opinion) or "flamers" and those that do not contribute to the discussion at hand.
I've no objection to people expressing their opinion in a decent manner, even if I disagree. I upvote those that I agree with and leave those that I don't.
This is something alarming I've seen recently. I cannot quote any specific source, but as long as I've been around, you're only supposed to downvote comments that add nothing to the discussion. Now sometimes this is a gray area, as you are biased. I don't think this is something we can fix, you just kind to have to deal with it. That said, if someone types up a thoughtful comment, and you disagree with it, you should probably actually upvote it rather than downvoting it, since it adds to the discussion. If you haven't figured it out by now, disagreement is good for a community, because it causes people to think about what they believe. In my experience, if you remove disagreement, you can't have intelligent discussions.
But what happens when you have two 50 point comments? I would like to signal which person I think is winning the argument, and enshrine the best comment with the most votes, forever on the internet.
If a comment already has tons of points, it's not going to get buried. But I think it's positive if the crowd judges the merits of the arguments and tries to distinguish the best comment for future readers.
Maybe it's less appropriate here where "right" and "wrong" are often unclear. But in forums like StackOverflow, I would like people to downvote the lesser answers, even if they don't totally suck.
Well, according to my method, both might deserve upvotes, because they both add to the conversation. In my opinion, karma is for people who make thoughtful comments, not ones that the most people agree with.
I tried making that point in a thread earlier (which start-up inspired you most in 2010) - I upvote threads that interest me, and I upvote comments that add value to the thread. If I had downvote access I would use it for flamebait, complete fallacies and and anything really offtopic. IMHO opinions, especially in threads asking for opinions, should never be downvoted, and I would upvote the ones I agree with.
Just because someone disagrees with opinion it doesn't make it a valid opinion. In the thread example I gave, what if I downvoted World Lens or Quora (not that I would - they are awesome) just because I disagreed - I think it would take away from the threads purpose.
Upvote what you want more of. Downvote sparingly. I usually upvote more on comments I agree with and reserve downvoting for rudeness or gross stupidity (regular stupidity is better dealt with with a comment).
More importantly, TrailBehind looks nice. How's it going?
Edit: Case in point. Someone downvoted this comment to 0. But I think it will come back up. I think with the growing numbers of HN, a lot of rogue voters have come along, who just like to screw around.