alohahacker
Joined 15 years ago
Joined 15 years ago
I can't for the life of me figure out why HN keeps hating on bitcoin for the past 10 years since ive been following this site has but has been pretty much spot on about every other tech related subject. It initially discouraged me back in the early days but once you GET it, you realize its one of the biggest technological breakthroughs in the history of mankind.
I think with bitcoin you simply can't read about it but actually get your hands dirty and fully use it to really understand the potential it is going to have.
This makes total sense.
It seems unfair especially in my case when they give you the go ahead and you end up investing alot of time and effort only to have one person not like your site and completely disregard all the work you have put in. When the reason for disabling your account is exactly the same reason they encouraged you to create your site in the first place it makes it all that much more frustrating.
My sites were not small either, they had heavy daily usage and brought over 800k in overall advertising revenue in the last 2 and a half years.
As a user, I wasn't getting paid either just wanted to help out since the coupon I found was superior than anything they posted for that store at the time.
Is their mission to help users find deals or pad their affiliate revenue? If it was the latter, their reason they gave me would make sense.
I'm fine with respectful open discussion but the entire situation left me with an uneasy taste in my mouth. If another CEO supported gay marriage and it created a stir like Eich's case did, I would feel the same way. Imagine if Sergey Brin donated to a gay marriage group 5 years ago and it caused such a stir that sites like fox or disney asked you to switch from chrome. Imagine the thousands of tweets criticizing him and the right media making a spectacle out of it calling out his character. That would be ridiculous.
It's about mutual respect and discussing ones differences in a cordial human way. In this case, it was anything but that and the double standard was obviously apparent.
I remember posting coupon codes to their site and having them being taken down constantly because they weren't getting commission on them. They were original company specials so no affiliate was getting paid (including me) but I posted them merely for the people who were searching could save money. They gave users 50% off hosting and the links on the retailmenot page were simply regular links to the products page disguised as specials.
When I emailed them asking why they keep deleting my posted coupon they said that any specials need to be run through them and they need a way to track aka put their affiliate id on them.
Left a bad taste in my mouth.
The guys that make millions in large part use their own software.
I used a simple piece of hardware last year for college football season that was suprisingly accurate. I weighted my own opinion most heavily but would use the software to confirm my picks. If both ways checked out, I would place a bet.
Never had a losing week last year and would usually pocket a couple thousand in profit a week. Of course there was alot of lucky but a large part of my success was due to the statistical software I was using.
I remember Josh the founder of Omniture said how they first got hired by ebay back in the day. Changing the color of the ebay homepage and button to yellow helped ebay increase sales by 15%. That slight increase on a heavily trafficked website resulted in millions of dollars in increased sales.
wannabe hacker and surfer.