This is a weirdly astroturfed post, a full 50% of the top level comments are the author or accounts created moments before this post, specifically to comment here.
I'm still interested in the product, but I've already got a bad taste in my mouth. If it's good, leave it to speak for itself.
I've been building in public on Twitter and LinkedIn over the last few months and pre-announced the launch a few weeks in advance. I think a lot of the comments here were just folks flowing through there.
I'm talking about the top level comments, that is to say, comments posted directly in reply to the post itself. At the time, of the six comments, 1 was the author, and two were his colleagues who created accounts <5 mins before the post was created.
Isn't it strange that 3 accounts were created moments before the post and then all happened to make their first and only comments on this post, each with strongly positive responses and not disclosing any link to the project?
I do understand that HN has voter ring detection which seeks to cluster groups of users who engage strongly in cooperative voting, but the accounts here are probably too new to establish a pattern strong enough to call a voting ring already.
Not at all! It's good to support your colleagues, but it's also considered good etiquette to state your relationship when creating new accounts to give praise like this.
While you're doing do innocently, because of the rewards of doing well on HN, it does happen there people create new accounts to illegitimately try to boost their ranking without saying so.
Being proactive in stating your interests is polite and transparent
It's all good—I understand the need to protect the legitimacy of what's trending here.
I think in this case, a lot of people who've been following me on other channels just wanted to show some support and weren't familiar with the etiquette here. No harm intended.
Hey everyone, founder of ShadowTraffic here. I built this product in 90 days bootstrapped on my own dollar, which was a wild experience all on its own. Happy to answer any questions :)
At first, people might think "$10,000 demo problem? What a high number!" Realistically, in corp environments, that number is an understatement. Plus the long time (and pain) it takes to get every team's buy-in to help with capturing/generating that data.
I frequently have this problem throughout my product development process: dev, testing especially under load or for edge failure cases, and demo/sales engineering. Great product, solid API and devex, and it’s been fun following Michael’s journey of building a product quickly and in public.
This looks really interesting! Generating large amounts of plausible fake data by modeling the reality is still a big issue both for generating custom demos and for maximum load testing of streaming applications. Will definitely give ShadowTraffic a try.
Thanks! I had initially built ShadowTraffic to help with simple demos, but I'm realizing over time that to run a good load test, you need the same kind of statistically accurate data.
I'm still interested in the product, but I've already got a bad taste in my mouth. If it's good, leave it to speak for itself.