[angersock]

So, just a gripe about your startup plug at the end of the article.

Look, I don't care whether your product cures cancer, dispenses oral sexual favors, and mints pure gold dubloons-- I will not give you my email address without a damned good reason.

Every single goddamn link on your page brings me to a "Enter your email here" prompt, except for the company tab, which brings me instead to a pile of vapid marketing bullshit.

Flotype Inc. is a venture-backed company building a suite of enterprise technology for real-time messaging. Flotype takes a unique approach by building developer-friendly technologies focused on ease-of-use and simplicity, while still exceeding enterprise-grade performance expectations.

Flotype licenses enterprise-grade middleware, Bridge, to customers ranging from social web and software enterprises to financial and fleet management groups.

What does that even mean? You using carrier pidgins? Dwarves? Cyborgs? UDP? ZeroMQ? Smoke signals?

You don't even tell me how my email is going to be used.

Fix your shit.

[ramanujan]

^ This kind of post just drags HN down, and is the kind of thing that jacquesm was talking about. Seeing something this rude at the top of HN for a post this guy worked hard on is probably not what he expected, and made his lunch taste a little worse today.

There's a time and place for profanity/verbal hostility. Feedback to a stranger on website UX isn't it, the perceived intensity level and level of anger is just dialed wrong. I wish pg would implement a filter for this kind of comment.

[radicalbyte]

TL;DR: angersock seems jaded, he expected a blog post and got an MVP plug / blatant marketing post.

Honestly, I think it's a reaction to "Minimum Viable Product" overkill on HN.

The first 10 times it's OK. The next 50 times it gets less interesting. Once you're into three figures it really starts to grate. So you start to the MVP style posts. Which means those making MVP posts have to turn to a different strategy: the "interesting headline" blog post, to drive traffic to their site.

Oh, and I think that the older people here (and at 31 I'm probably one of them) are turned off by really blatant marketing..

[smackfu]

Yeah, the filter is voting up or down.

[bobds]

I don't see any hostility. The comment was certainly not polite, but I wouldn't say it was unfriendly.

[Smudge]

To be fair, his name is "angersock." (I jest, I jest - thanks for calling him out).

[angersock]

^This kind of post clutters up discussions with metabullshit already accounted for by the karma system.

More seriously,this is not a mere UX problem. This isn't a problem with colors not matching, with poor navigation, or with anything else.

Absent any other information, this site appears to be a way of fishing for email addresses. That's the long and the short of it.

I am not just a string to send messages to. I am not just a networking opportunity. I am not just an entry in your preferred database.

I am a developer, and I don't like it when sites treat me otherwise.

I thanked the author for his (very fast) response.

I'm sorry about the tone of the post, but frankly we can't let this dehumanization and arrogance towards users (and worse in this case, fellow developers) slide.

EDIT: Note also that, had he simply posted a good article (which it was!) without the shameless plug, I would've said nothing. If the plug had linked to a page that had anything other than email scraping, I wouldn't have complained. But the linked page was so offensive that it deserved calling out. Let this be a lesson for you startupy folks: don't cheapen a good thing with a bad plug.

[nostrademons]

Then don't give him your e-mail address.

[temphn]

Which is an example of a "dehumanizing and arrogant behavior towards a fellow developer": cursing them out personally in a comments thread or collecting an email address like every other site in the world?

[billpatrianakos]

Hey man, at this point whether you're right or wrong doesn't matter. You may very well be the rightest man on earth about his site but this is neither the time or place for that kind of talk. You're so off topic you might as well be on another planet right now, for starters. Then not only do post something totally unrelated to the topic of the post or the discussion at hand but you proceed not only to insult the author but your language was out of line and your tone was as if the guy had just broke into your home and strangled your dog.

Everyone here has something we could all criticize really harshly. I've got crappy UX design in some of my sites, I have personality flaws, you probably have some site with something very annoying to a user, etc., etc. but if I noticed it while reading something of yours posted here I wouldn't barge into the comments and call you out on it when it has nothing to do with the content of the article just like I wouldn't want you to do that either. If you absolutely must say something then let the author know privately and nicely. Good manners go a long way.

My intention isn't to sit here and say "hey look at this asshole, let's all pile on!". Not at all. There was just a discussion about this sort of thing last night (see the comments on the 16yo Indian girl who passed away for the reason that discussion was necessary) so it's up to everyone to try to stop it. Anyway, I'm sure you're a nice guy. I'm a nice guy. We're all nice guys so lets all chill and be friends okay? And I know I probably said some asinine and or dickish things in the past so I hope someone tell me when I've gone too far too.

Okay. Good. We're all friends again. Let's move on.

[enki]

sorry, we didn't get to making a better site yet, but we'll definitely address your concerns when we get to it!

[angersock]

Thank you.

:)

If possible, at least have a dev writeup some use case or sample code or something we can see to get an idea of what Bridge does.

Thanks!

(My team's website is rather bad right now, but at least it has direct download links without asking for emails. I feel your pain on the web stuff, though, when you've got code to hack.)

[wisty]

I'm guessing it means the site isn't done, but they'll contact you when it is.

[conbtl]

Thank you for articulating what was exactly on my mind.