Because if you notice a trend in successful companies (Aha! They all have employees!), you need to cross-check and make sure this is something unique to successful companies (or at least over-represented), and not something both successful and unsuccessful companies share in equal parts. (Gee, it seems all the failures had employees too...)
To be fair, Sam Altman has seen the early stages of lot more unsuccessful companies than pretty much anyone has seen companies at all. Plus, he explicitly says that a lot of unsuccessful startups have some of these traits, so it's not like he hasn't considered the idea.
I think it's pretty unlikely that he's not taking unsuccessful startups into account. But it's not a statistical paper, it's an essay. You can't attack the guy for not including likelihood ratios and p-values in his prose.
"Sam Altman has seen the early stages of lot more unsuccessful companies"
Sam Altman has experience with a particular group of companies. A small subset of companies out of a huge set of people who do business. In a wide variety of places.
This writeup certainly makes some good points but it is specific to companies of a certain type and Sam has not qualified that at all in his post.
"than pretty much anyone has seen companies at all."
I've been observing companies (as have many other HN readers) since before Sam was even born. (I started my first company right out of college and that a very long time ago.)
He didn't list things as trivial as having employees. He listed things he has noticed that good founders tend to do better than mediocre founders. He obviously cross-checked and referenced it.
Consider a very likely example: since first to market is very important, one would expect most successful ventures to be quick at decisions.
Yet still one would expect that most quick decisions are bad decisions. I would conjecture there are far more failures that come from quick decision than successes.
But if the market strongly favors speed then it will select those few that just happen through chance to make the right quick decision.
Your outlook on the world makes me sad. There's such a defensive attitude in this community — for some good reasons, I can understand — but it paints the world in black and white.
How do you know that's how it is? For most companies, "work is family" may be hyperbole, but how do you know it's that way at PA? I don't profess to know, but I don't find it unreasonable that there are companies out there that are different than the ones that I'm accustomed to. Just like I accept that there are people out there that have lives very different than how I've lived mine.
You shouldn't sadden yourself with my outlook on the world; I'm doing quite fine, thank you :)
Don't forget that when you sign a work contract in California, it says explicitly that your employer can get rid of you at any time (and they are certainly happy to exercise that right, especially in startups). This is legally true for any company here, no matter how different they are from the ones I've experienced.
Also don't forget that we live in a city where entire teams frequently get cut because they're deemed unnecessary by the new CEO of the day. This is the same city where when people (albeit not in the tech industry) go on strike because they don't get certain benefits promised to them in the past, they become almost universally hated by everyone.
The US is not exactly a reference when it comes to siding with workers in those matters.
I'm not saying that I treat work as a dull, impersonal affair, far from that. As I've said in another comment, I've happily socialized and made life long friends and partaken in office outings and activities in my life as a tech employee.
But I prefer to not cloud my mind with ultimately useless romantic notions such as "your work is your family" (I already have a family, and it's filling its role quite well- don't need another one). When the bad times come, it makes dealing with things much easier. And when employers try to push this angle a bit too much, it's a sign to me that the workplace might not be too desirable to be at.
Totally. I get it. All I'm saying is that it's not out of the question that there are people out there that would be absolutely happy to treat their work just like family.
And that there's an organization/group out there that treats it just like that.
It's sort of like jaded lovers. Certainly there are people that poo-poo the notion of "soul mates" or "love at first sight." Fair enough. But it's always a little bit sad when that dampens the mood for people who are caught up within potential romance, no?
The irony is, this is a community based around the startup lifestyle. Often that means extra hours for a promise of equity (which, in my experience, isn't worth the paper it's printed on) and lower salaries. But for some reason, there's a huge outcry at this posting because it says you have to wear many hats and they don't have a ton of money to spend. Sound familiar? At least they're upfront about it.
Honestly, I'd rather spend time working for someone (or on something) that I believed in and make less money than the usual soul crushing 9 to 5 and make a boatload. I'm in that situation now, actually, and it's not great. I moved the the bay area earlier in the year to chase the almighty dollar, and my overall happiness level has gone down. Who'd have thought?
Sorry about that. We made some mistakes when rolling out from scratch and did some things that I'd be more careful about now. There was no malice intended and hope that you'll take another look in the future.
Thanks for responding, it is good to hear you recognised there were some mistakes and it has changed how you will do things going forward. I appreciate that you needed to explore revenue models and believe you when you say no malice was intended, I always thought of you as a good company. Unfortunately at the time I couldn't give definitive answers to my clients about if such a thing would occur again, so took the decision to just play it safe and remove Disqus. I will certainly reconsider Disqus again in future hearing these words from you however. Cheers.
I didn't have much interaction with Malcolm when he helping us at Disqus, but I just remembered that he was incredibly smart and very kind. I'm very saddened by this news.
Hi Jacques, I’m Daniel from Disqus. Hopefully I can clear some stuff up.
As others in this thread have pointed out, we haven’t really been shy about what we’re doing here. You can see a progress update of how things are going on blog.disqus.com (it’s the second post down as I write this).
We’ve put a lot of effort into being communicative around what we’re doing with discovery and advertising (we call it Promoted Discovery). I don’t think “bait and switch” is accurate in describing how we approached this. It was about a year ago that we started talking publicly about the idea of a revenue-share ad product within Disqus.
As our ideas matured, we started sharing those details with our userbase. This was about 6 months ago. As with many of the things we do, Promoted Discovery was rolled out gradually so that we could learn and get better. Along the way, we blogged, sent out emails, and surveyed users. We’ve done half a year of messaging and we’re still not done with the full roll-out. It sucks that our messaging didn’t reach you, but you should know that you can configure how everything works, or opt out completely, on disqus.com/admin/settings. When new users sign up, they also are introduced to what Promoted Discovery is and have the choice to configure it.
As always, we’re learning through feedback. Especially with the product. Are we finished with the advertising product? Not yet — the product has plenty of room to grow and get a lot better. But it’s performing well for many publishers and they’re happy with the revenue that’s coming in. We care about that because our core discussion product is going to get even better because of it.
As a Disqus user, I did receive notification of this and did disable the new "Promoted Discovery" feature. I don't take issue with anything you have just said, except for the part where you call it "Promoted Discovery" instead of advertising.
Let's be real and call it what it is. I think that in this case, the "Promoted Discovery" term is confusing enough to where some users would think that the "Recommended" content really was selected by the content author. Jacques is irate at this, and rightly so. He did not pick the content, and it would appear to some users that he is endorsing things that he isn't.
That's all fun and games until something offensive or politically incorrect gets "Recommended"...
I think the most concerning part of this is hiding it from site owners when they're logged in. This feels like an admission that what you're doing is wrong, and that it needs to be hidden from the people who can turn it off. How did you come to that particular decision?
OT: I find that interesting. I wonder if that actually leads to fewer converversions to paid blogs? I know of a few (political) blogs that I am surprised use the free tier on such services, because the ads seems so out of place -- but maybe the (non-technical, in this case) bloggers don't reflect much over the ads, because they simply don't see them?
Hi Daniel, why was it not opt-in? You describe it as a "revenue sharing" program, but did not ask your customers if they wanted to be part of it. You assumed their silence meant that they did.
Because that's how most options that are likely to make money are rolled out these days. Disqus are not the only one using these tactics.
I can't find the link the anti-patterns video/site, I'm sure someone will know the one I am talking about. But it's things like pre-selecting paid for delivery options, adding travel insurance to flight cost etc etc to drive up costs but then make it not obvious how to remove those items... kind of reminds me of those tactics.
Most of the things rolled out in Facebook I found out through HN or other friends posting. It's not always obvious (though in this case it looks like everyone else got he email except the OP)
This is a different kind of sleezy. Adding travel insurance to a flight happens before the user has agreed to the deal. In this case Disqus has hundreds of thousands of people signed up for a commenting system and then changed the product fundamentally without asking them if they want this new product. That's exactly why it is (correctly) described as a bait-and-switch.
I am a disqus user and I have no recollection of seeing this email or feature. I am not saying it wasn't sent to me, but if it was, the title surely didn't explain what was really happening because I would be concerned.
I wouldn't be overly surprised if the title was not clear, or the text was not obvious. It like the ToS changes from your credit card company, you need to be a lawyer to decipher it!
I'm only a casual Disqus user, I've maybe commented using it a handful of times, so don't know what the email contained or said. I'm just going by what I've read on here.
Have you seen Twitter's "Sponsored Tweets", Facebook's "Sponsored Stories", Amazon's "Inspired by your browsing history". Ditching the word "advertising" is nothing new and we all use sites like these every day.
"Sponsored" implies an advertising relationship, even if it avoids the dread word - sponsors pay you. "Inspired by your browsing history" is accurate, and is Amazon advertising Amazon - you're on a shopping site, seeing more links to shopping shouldn't surprise you. "Promoted Discovery" is a new and unrecognized flavor of newspeak; it's not just avoiding the word "advertising," it's hard to even recognize as advertising.
I agree that the term "promoted discovery" isn't established and hides the true nature of the feature. I can the logic for choosing it, thought it's not very solid:
- "promotional material" = advertising material (that promotes a product)
- "discovery" = discovery through recommendations from the page owner
- hence, "promot-" + "discovery" communicates "advertising through recommendations"
However, "promoted" isn't quite the same thing as "promotional". What's actually happening is that promotional material is being presented as "recommendations from the page owner". The "discovery" itself isn't "promoted" (what does that even mean?). Most importantly, "promoted" doesn't contain the implication of advertising/sponsoring that "promotional" does.
It would have been more accurate to call this Sponsored Discovery or, to be even more real, Sponsored Recommendations. "Sponsored", however, is a bit of a dirty word too, and they probably made the call to euphemize around it, resulting in the confusing term Promoted Discovery.
It's _Sponsored_ Tweets and _Sponsored_ Stories. It's not the same word, but "sponsored" means that it's advertising. Even "Promoted Stories" would be fine, still means the same thing. "Reommended content" is something totally different.
The Amazon example doesn't apply at all, as its internal linking to products. External advertising is clearly labeled as such on Amazon, too.
Disqus shows their advertising on a site of a different person. This changes a lot and makes this especially nasty.
It's a euphemism, and it feels strange to have euphemisms for your standard business practices.
Note that the screenshot in Jacques' post shows that he's done a search for "advertising" on his page. None of the text matched. Labeling ads as "Recommended Content" seems quite dishonest.
Edit / Aside: I do generally hold Disqus in high esteem, and I sincerely appreciate your willingness to dive into this discussion. I believe Disqus has faltered, but I don't mean to lay that critique at your personal doorstep.
Got it. If the question is about how clear it is to users, then yes that's important and something that we've adjusted along the way. We're going to continue making changes as we learn from feedback.
You've learned a lesson, but what lesson did you learn?
If the question is about how clear it is to users, then yes that's important and something that we've adjusted along the way.
You've indicated that how clear it is to users is important, but you haven't indicated whether your preference is that it be clear or unclear to users.
Your actions right now suggest that you think it is important to not be clear. If you want to be clear, you should start using the widely understood and honest word "advertising" instead of a euphemism of your own making.
We're going to continue making changes as we learn from feedback.
Again you don't suggest directionality to your changes.
Will they be changes that we like? For example will you, as responsible marketers should, make this opt-in instead of opt-out? It is fine to make people choose between opting in or paying a modest fee or losing their comment feature. It is fine to have the "you need to make a decision" show up in bold for the admin (and for admin only) when they are on the page. But opt-out with emails that are likely to go to spam informing people of this in opaque language is not fine.
I believe the issue is you say "Recommended Content" rather than "Ads by Disqus" which, obviously, infers that the site is recommending something they are not.
Saying "Ads by Disqus" will probably annihilate your clickthrough, but you have to make a choice between cashing in, or keeping your partners happy.
All I can say to Disqus is a big "fuck you" and I will never be back. At least try to sell me something. Right now, it's either whore out my blog to your advertisers or pay $999 for VIP service. The first rule of making a product is to actually sell something. I'd pay $10 or $20 a month to keep the whoring off my blog but there's no option for that.
You forget to address (or clear up) the part where you make it seem as if the author of the blog endorses/recommends your advertising links. Because doing that without explicit consent is wrong. Nor does an announcement "unless you stop us, we're going to use your voice to endorse our advertisers' links" make it right.
The latter is almost funny to consider, except for the bit where it actually happened.
(btw I did upvote you because I think it's important to not sink Disqus' reply)
Is it safe to assume that if I'm a paying customer I don't have to worry about ads / promoted discovery showing up on my site, or is it on (opt-out) by default?
"We’ve put a lot of effort into being communicative around what we’re doing with discovery and advertising (we call it Promoted Discovery)."
This sentence is a microcosm of exactly what's going on. This is not a sentence a normal person would write, nor would a normal person read it and understand.
The excerpts from the "notice" sent out, found above, tell the rest of the story.
When people use weaselly phrasing like "being communicative around what we're doing" and emails with innocuous and deadly boring subject lines like "Growing with Disqus" with surprise-now-you're-advertising-for-us bombs inside, what conclusion can we draw?
Looks like deliberate obfuscation to me.
And as Douglas Adams wrote, "If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands."
Overly confident, generalizing headlines are pretty good for capturing attention. But it does poorly at making your point.
Your reader's mindset is contentious from the get-go, and they're going to want to prove you wrong if statement is controversial. It doesn't bode well for your point if you can't convincingly back it up.
The true point in this article is that visual cues within UIs are great and nice. It's a huge victory when you can educate your user naturally (see: the popular Super Mario Bros example), but it just doesn't apply to everything. Not everything is innate; some new things need to be taught. How do we learn most things? We observe someone doing the same thing.
