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by hoodoof 2945 days ago
Are you me?

Programming feels like productive work, and indeed it is, up until just about the point you are at. Now it is not productive work any more, in fact, once the product is finished, programming is counter productive work. Other things need to be done and you don't know how to do them and if you do, are not in the habit of doing them. IOt is easy to get up in the morning and write code, harder to do unfamiliar things.

--> self sabotage (deeply seated need to actually not succeed)

--> fear of the unknown

--> avoidance of a change in work habit - from programming to...... ? what does one do post launch

--> fear of the likely outcome which is zero feedback, zero users

Curious - how close are you to launch, what remains to be done, and what does the software actually do?

Can I suggest perhaps be really ruthless about the remaining tasks - likely many of those launch tasks just are not important, even though the completionist in you thinks they are. For example - terms and conditions document? Ditch it until users are interested. Privacy document? Same. Purchase? Drop it.

See what I mean? If people like what you have built and use it, then the world will not come to an end because you did not have those things... and user interest will motivate you to implement them.

It's incredibly hard to work on something with no user interest. Just dump what you have built out there and see what happens.

3 comments

Christ this hits hard to home. (Note amateur programmer here), I built my software, openers to beta testers and was active in the community. (It's a good deal control software for a popular game - pretty much a copilot who would do things for you).

So many testers said they would try it out, never did and there was an insane amount of actual testers who wanted something slighty different. (Which i couldn't do, as I had spoken to the company, and doing certain automated style actions would have gotten me banned).

24th of May 2018 might not be the best time to choose to launch anything while intentionally having ditched thinking about your T&Cs and Privacy Policy...
I'd just block Europe instead...
I'm happy to be blocked from products that aren't compliant. There will usually be other alternatives. This is better than unknowingly using something that could cause me problems later.

I don't even take it as an aggressive negative, unless it is explicitly expressed as such. You can just be honest and say "I can't accept your custom at this time because X, and we have other priorities that would make addressing X to everyone's satisfaction a problem for the foreseeable future".

That _helps_, but I'm a British/EU citizen, living in Australia, who regularly VPNs through servers in Singapore, Tokyo, and the US.

I'm still protected by GDPR.

(Personally, I reckon that's quite an overreach by EU lawmakers, but that's what they've chosen to do, in response to equivalent or worse "overreach" by internet companies trading in personal information...)

According to this HN discussion you're probably not covered by GDPR: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16751791
Thanks for that!

That actually makes sense (not something that's expected to be true of laws...)

So by my reading of the advice linked there:

If an individual is in the EU, they're covered by GDPR - whether they're a citizen or not.

If a company is based in or does business in the EU, all it's users are covered by the GDPR - whether they're in the EU or not, and whether they're an EU citizen or not.

That's much less over-reachy than I'd thought. The EU arguably does have the right to make laws about how you treat people within it's borders - whether they're citizens or not. (A death threat against a Chinese person in Paris should be prosecutable under French law by French police/authorities). The EU definitely does have the right to make laws about how businesses in the EU or who have offices/presence in the EU treat people everywhere. (A London company discriminating against a homosexual Saudi citizen should be prosecutable under British law by British authorities, even if it's not illegal to so discriminate in Saudi Arabia).

I think it's even less reachy than that - if a foreign multinational has a subsidiary in the EU, I don't think the parent company is covered by the GDPR unless they directly deal with subjects in the EU. So they can compartmentalize the parts of the company that must deal with the GDPR, by redirecting every EU user to the EU subsidiary.
4% of 0 is 0.
Sure, and I know it's mostly scaremongering, but "4% of zero, or 'up to 20 million euros'" is up to 20 million euros.

A better motivator, in my opinion, is that disclosing up front what data you're going to capture, and what you're going to do with it, and obtaining consent for that from users - is "the right thing to do". Unless your business model is "fucking over the users", those are not scary things to do, and will likely lead you to make better decisions about what you collect and how you store it, and reduce your and your users exposure in the worst case.

Hey "fucking over the users" Strategy has been doing Comcast wonders for decades.
Yep - and I have zero fucks to give about how much grief the GDPR is going to cause Comcast. Or Facebook. Or Google. Or Equifax.
It's whichever is larger.
And it’s the maximum penalty, not the penalty.
Hey wow that's great advice I think I'll learn from what you say here.
Uh? A user replying to himself with congratulations? What's just happened here? :/
I'm just saying heck I wish I could take my own advice.

I am empathizing with the OP about how hard this point of a project is.

Perhaps I'm being too dry.

Maybe a bit meta for HN.
Yep - the more obvious interpretation was "Hey look, hoodoof forgot to switch sock puppet accounts!
This might be the funniest comment/reply I've ever seen on HN.