| HN Mirror

Not a scam. It just feels the same as a scam feels.

One time I had a couch delivered. Two guys show up to set it up. One guy says he needs a tool from the truck and walks off, and the other guy starts talking to our dog, and tells us how he used to train pit bulls, and starts doing some weird hand motions and yelling commands to our dog like he’s casting a spell or something.

I think the guy was probably just not all there mentally, like too much former drug use or something. But it was one of those surreal moments where red flags were going off in my head. I went to find the other guy just to make sure he wasn’t robbing us out the back. Because that’s what it felt like: misdirection, social engineering, a performance.

In hindsight, I don’t think there was anything suspicious going on. But the alarm bells in my head were still completely real.

When we see this “everything is an plugin” but “plugin details are internal-only” and “plugin detail is coming” and “1.0 is released” and “but we will have 40 more release candidates before 1.0 final” and “you could support us with pro” and “you dont need pro” and “we don’t recommend pro” and “you can build anything in pro yourself anyway” and “you shouldn’t use this pro feature anyway and should use CSS instead”, and then when people ask a question about any of this inconsistency, we get juvenile responses like “don’t use it then”, “don’t buy it then”, “fork it then”, “my time isn’t free”, and so on. Even though there is no scam, it’s surreal. Like, “is this really happening?” It sets off the same red flags in people’s minds, even when there is no scam.

Datastar seems very cool as a tool, and the developers seem very technically competent. The problems they face don’t seem to be technical problems.