[minm]

I am offering an alternative suggestion to a person who is not happy with dropbox's customer service. He/she has the smarts to decide whether a new service is worth a try. My affiliation is irrelevant. Can u guarantee the readers who downvoted me are not affiliated with dropbox or positively biased towards dropbox. You are no different from the dropbox forum moderators.

[mbreese]

Yes, your affiliation is quite relevant. When you are talking about something when you have a clear conflict of interest, you need to disclose it. Then at least the reader has the right context in which to make a decision.

When you post w/o disclosing, you make it seem like someone from this community has found your product interesting and is suggesting others try it. Instead of working for a company and trying to drum up business while disparaging a competitor.

Seriously, things like this reduces the likelihood that I'll ever try Tonido to nil. All you had to do was add "disclosure: I work for Tonido" to your post, if that is the case.

[niggler]

tl;dr: read http://hastebin.com/raw/gefuxumubu

"your affiliation is quite relevant. When you are talking about something when you have a clear conflict of interest, you need to disclose it. Then at least the reader has the right context in which to make a decision."

I used to think the way you do. Then I entered the financial world. At this point, I've seen so many people talk up their positions without disclosing that I automatically assume everyone has a conflict of interest. Then something really strange happened: I stopped caring about the affiliations and really focused on the veracity of their statements.

I recommend you read http://hastebin.com/raw/gefuxumubu, which is a copy of the zerohedge.com conflicts of interest policy. We are all adults here, and a person's persuasion shouldn't somehow affect your ability to make a rational analysis of the arguments that a person lays out.

In this case, if you bothered to look at the offering, you would see that it indeed obviates the problem that dropbox has all of your emails: when you self-host, the accounts are stored on your servers

Note that I haven't actually tried the service, but this is based on my understanding of the offering. There may be vulnerabilities in their implementation. Who knows. But to immediately dismiss a remark because of a conflict of interest doesn't change the fact that the argument may be factually correct and germane.

[mbreese]

I've never seen someone use tldr; to send someone to a different link :)

My response is that it is all about context and community norms. Here, on HN, the norm is that if you're going to bash someone, and you work for a competitor, you disclose that. If you can't pass that small ethical hurdle, there are other companies I can send my money to. (Not to mention, That I consider it uncouth to bash a competitor like that)

In the financial world, things are probably different and you just assume some level of conflict from the beginning. And that's fine, so long as everyone knows the ground rules.

I've actually looked into Tonido a couple of times, so I already knew what the service was. I have a friend who was all ready to buy one of their plugs for their lab when their university got hooked up with Box.net (I think).I probably wouldn't have thought to question them had a) I not already known what Tonido was and b) they had already been downvoted, so I wasn't the only o e to put it together. For some reason, I always had reservations about it, and so this just cemented an already held feeling.

But, you are quite right that different communities have different norms.

[lsaferite]

Just out of curiosity, where was he (minm) bashing his competition?

This is a totally honest question as I looked when you wrote this and found no bashing.

[mbreese]

> You are no different from the dropbox forum moderators

That was the line I was referring to...

[jodrellblank]

Then something really strange happened: I stopped caring about the affiliations and really focused on the veracity of their statements.

But it's not just how truthful the statement is, it also covers "why am I considering this statement at all?".

And the answer "because someone I trust has had the same problem, considered the available options, and recommends X" is very different to "because someone who works for X says use X".

[niggler]

If you spent your entire life only listening to those that you "trust" and if you define trust in terms of those that agree with you, you end up in an intellectual bubble. It is incredibly important that you at least consider what people are saying.

[semanticist]

I downvoted you. I'm not affiliated with dropbox. Your affiliation IS relevant when promoting services, because it means it's not an honest recommendation from a happy user, it's paid shilling.

If you don't understand the difference - or more importantly why one of them bothers people and the other doesn't, you need to stop doing marketing or promotion really quickly. You're going to tarnish the brand of the product you're trying to push.

Do you want people's only lasting impression of Tonido to be 'oh, that's that company that was astroturfing Hacker News'?

[niggler]

NOTE: I have no affiliation with Tonido, but I found your visceral reaction really sad.

"Your affiliation IS relevant when promoting services, because it means it's not an honest recommendation from a happy user, it's paid shilling."

That's not a fair criticism. In this case, there is an issue with dropbox, and he is pointing to a solution which obviates the problem at hand:

'Check out Tonido Cloud (http://www.tonido.com/cloud/) and host your own dropbox.'

I think the wording was poor, but reading into the website offering it is clear that the company doesn't have access to the local credentials. In this case, since the alternative doesn't suffer from the problem at hand, I think it's fair for him to mention the alternative.

[ricardobeat]

I see your intention, but the issue is not this post alone. Take a look at minm's comment history and you'll see 90% of his posts are promoting Tonido: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=minm

I didn't downvote his post at first because it sounded like a genuine suggestion. I consider myself deceived.

[niggler]

I still think you missed my point.

The only way in which you could have been deceived is if you went into the discussion assuming no conflict of interest. Years of dealing with financial media and experts has rendered me incredibly cynical, so I focused on the author's claims (which, in this case, are true -- If the product acts as the website claims, the self-hosted solutions store credentials on your servers and not theirs.)

I recommend you read http://hastebin.com/raw/gefuxumubu, the zerohedge.com conflict of interest policy, for it drives home the key point that if you assume everyone has a conflict of interest you won't be deceived and you can focus on what was actually said

[alistair77]

You've made the mistake of finding a rule that works in a particular environment and trying to apply it in all situations. The HN community is nothing like the financial industry. Applying that level of cynicism to all aspects of life is likely to have a damaging effect to both you and the communities we live in.

[niggler]

"The HN community is nothing like the financial industry."

Oh how I wish that were the case, but there's a really strong mapping from HN and SV to finance (too much to mention in a reply, but I may try to flesh it out in a blog post one day)

[ricardobeat]

I did read that after seeing it in another thread. Thankfully HN is nothing like the financial world. I might enter a marketing forum with that mindset, but knowledge and recognition are the currencies here, not money, so the rules are a bit different.

[minm]

I wish it were the case. But please analyse majority of the top posts in HN with an open mind. One can clearly see the connection SV --> Funding --> YC --> TC. The outsiders are treated or ignored like pariahs. Have you heard a term "Made in SV". It may be subtle. But it is there.

[alistair77]

You just need to add an additional line such as, "I've used product x and it's a brilliant alternative" or "I develop product x and would love your feedback" or "I'm the CTO of..."