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by noduerme 5286 days ago
Hah. I just reloaded HN and clicked the comments here -- I've had a few drinks -- I thought this was the same article along the lines of "Go Daddy Supports SOPA", until I read through the responses.

This just shows what a couple thousand mobilized, highly motivated geeks can do in six hours. HN is solely responsible for this. Imagine if the top-ten stories for the day on this board were about the conditions at Apple's factories in China. Or the massacres going on in Syria, for that matter. Something more important than whether that elephant-murdering bastard is a 99%, or a 100% asshole.

But, credit where it's due, this isn't the first time I've noticed a shift in public perception within 24-48 hours of a major HN freakout. I won't say how much money I've made buying or selling based on watching this phenomenon -- not a ton -- but it's recently been more than I make at my day job. It's a shame Godaddy's not publicly traded, or we could've all had some fun with it.

This is the place where the people who man the engines spend their time. And when the engineers are pissed, shit breaks. Never mind that engineers are just as often wrong as everybody else, just think of HN articles as events that bubble, and figure out if they're going to be ignored or not by the larger program.

7 comments

HN is solely responsible for this

I love HN. But that statement is myopic and over the top. I believe that Reddit started the discussion on a boycott. At the very least, much discussion took place there.

That is correct. I'd say Reddit is the one solely responsible for this.
You meant jointly.
Nono.. It means many different people are solely responsible. ;)
A lot was spread on Twitter too... There I saw that a number of registrars were offering discount codes.
> Imagine if the top-ten stories for the day on this board were about the conditions at Apple's factories in China.

I don't think it would have the same effect. Go Daddy is immensely reliant on the decisions of a handful of tech-savvy people. It's easy to move a domain, which hurts their bottom line. (for example, there was an effort made by some redditors to try to convince Wikipedia to move away from Go Daddy)

If everyone who visited HN stopped buying Apple products, it would be a blip (if that) on their revenue. While I wish it were that easy, I think Go Daddy is a special case.

even than it would not matter. Apple could move every manufacturing operation to another bad but better than china condition countries overnight. And we would pay half more for the same equipment..
"Imagine if the top-ten stories for the day on this board were about the conditions at Apple's factories in China" Or imagine if the top ten stories pointed out that they aren't Apple's factories, but Foxconn's, and that Foxconn also makes the Playstation 3, the Wii, the Xbox, and the Amazon Kindle, as well as stuff for Acer, ASUS, Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung... Yet somehow Apple always takes the blame. I've even seen this used as a justification for buying an Android device over an iPhone. Does anyone seriously think that conditions in the HTC or Huawei factories are different from Foxconn's to any significant degree?

I don't like the factory conditions in China, either, but neither do I like seeing Apple getting the brunt of the criticism.

Fair enough. My point wasn't to single out Apple.
HN is nowhere solely responsible for this. If at all, the credit for pioneering this should go solely to Reddit.
> HN is solely responsible for this

Several communities worked together, such as the tech blogosphere, Reddit, and other social media. Although HN may be the birthplace of the idea to boycott Godaddy, its hardly just HN being responsible.

> Although HN may be the birthplace of the idea to boycott Godaddy

I'm relatively sure the idea started on reddit too.[1][2]

---

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3381822

[2]: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/nmnie/godaddy_supp...

OK -- I didn't mean to leave Reddit out of this. I'm not a regular there and didn't read the initiating post, so it's fair I'm over-estimating the solo value of HN in this. Either way, it's impressive when you look at the small numbers of HN users and regular Redditors who took a stand on this and got results so fast. This is dirty democracy in action.
This just shows what a couple thousand mobilized, highly motivated geeks can do in six hours. HN is solely responsible for this. Imagine if the top-ten stories for the day on this board were about the conditions at Apple's factories in China. Or the massacres going on in Syria, for that matter. Something more important than whether that elephant-murdering bastard is a 99%, or a 100% asshole.

this.

Was "this" an ironic single syllable, or something more profound? Where are we going with "this"?
Unsurprisingly, I have failed at googling up some other examples, but in recent years it has become common (at least in my circles) to use the word "this" as short hand for, roughly, "this thing here is something which is important/i agree with."

I wrote my comment, rather than simply upvoting yours (the parent), because the parent contained several other points which I either don't agree with, or which I thought clouded the message of the part I quoted. In short, I wished to emphasize that one part of your comment.