> I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator.
Sorry for taking that a bit too literally.
The other points still stand.
You have interesting experiences. There's a common theme in my feedback, and in the other comments that provide constructive feedback: you're missing accepted learnings by being a stubborn/arrogant/maybe just inexperienced entrepreneur. e.g.:
> Ultimately, for us, putting too much time into support isn’t a differentiator, and it’s often counter-productive.
Your language here, and in the rest of the conclusion, frames the learning as "the problem was that my idea [that maybe customer support would be good if people just tried] just didn't work for specifically for us because x, y, z is different for us".
It didn't work for you because it's a fundamentally flawed assumption that CS was easy if you just try to be good at it and care about the customer. You wrote that as the idea you had when you bought the company. The idea didn't fail because of your special circumstances, the idea failed because it's a demonstrably bad idea, sorry.
Many other commenters have made the same critical point as me, but your first response to me was essentially: "what critical points? I can take it. And besides, I said 'what I got wrong' so you're wrong to say I got the wrong learnings". Which is - again - you dismissing people's experience (of you).
In the meantime, I noticed your site is down. I'll keep a look out for your writings in future. I mean it genuinely that you have interesting experiences. I think you need humbling a little though. Sorry again for the harsh feedback. I sincerely think your world and everyone else's world would be better and brighter if you really reread and absorb the constructive feedback from me and other HN commenters with an open mind, rather than looking for ways to dismiss it.
I'd like to respectfully disagree with it being clear what the learnings are. Your conclusion says:
> In other words, the best approach for us is what most companies do.
The failure here, based on the article, is you had an idea about customer support, and you bought a company to test it. Personally, before getting that far I would expect someone to do some googling or research or conversations with people in the area and they would have told you what they do and why, and why your idea would not work.
What happened? How did you get this far? Did you ignore people, or not talk to people? What was it you had or thought you knew about your idea that lead you to believe it would result in something different?
Another learning from your conclusion:
> Because building loyalty or rapport at the moment something isn’t working and the user is frustrated hasn’t worked. The real positive experience comes when you actually improve the product, so that’s where we’re spending our time.
Again, this is common sense! I refuse to believe this is new to you or anyone else!
I appreciate the response, sorry for the harsh feedback, and thanks for taking to time to actually try and improve customer support. I think you sincerely have some great learnings and experiences from what you've been through here, I just don't think you've really got to the bottom of them with what you've written here yet.
> I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator. I’ve rarely gotten useful answers from support from services I use. I thought if I used my own product every day, read every email and answered it thoughtfully, people would appreciate this, and it would build some degree of loyalty and appreciation.
This is the opening paragraph. I think a lot of the disagreement or criticism here in HN is from people who recognise the author went into this assuming they know better than basically anyone who's ever done anything in customer service before.
They don't say it, but the author seem to start with the assumption that nobody knows or cares about customer support so they do a rubbish job, and all the author needs to do is go in and try and be a decent human and they'll fix customer support.
And the result was what anyone who's ever done any customer support for even half a day would know: it's not that easy, it's generally infuriatingly hard and demoralising to keep all customers happy, and 10% will take 90% of the time/effort until it drains you. This is customer support 101.
I hope this has waved in the author's face the value of having decent conversations with people they trust in the domain first, as they could have saved themselves a lot of time and effort here. I think the article would benefit and get less flack from acknowledging this is the authors learnings, not some new insight into customers.
I think the comments in this thread are a little unhinged, and it's making me concerned about the sincerity and knowledge of the average commenter here.
The fact is the post shows no evidence of anything malicious being hidden, only that stuff is being hidden.
There are a few obvious explanations in comments for why they would want to hide this particular stuff in this particular way (e.g. if it's to detect abuse and competition).
I don't see how this is different to using e.g. sentry or google analytics, just with an extra bit of trying to hide. I always assume all tech companies do stuff like this, having worked at many tech companies where I've ended up on both sides of stuff like this. I always assumed the average HN reader had a similar background and would be completely used to this sort of stuff.
Like someone else pointed out, the data gathered is likely covered in the TOS too.
In the grand scheme of privacy invasion and modern tech software doing underhanded things to get data, this feels fairly standard?
I'm generally pro-local LLMs and I don't like Anthropic, and from the headline and comments I was ready to get riled up, until I read the article. If this was some small plucky EU privacy startup, then I feel the outrage would be a bit more justified, but this is a frontier AI lab - I can't have been the only one who knew/assumed this happens, and probably happens in some form with all software from any company valued over a certain amount (incl. MS, Google etc.)
I really think this comment section feels completely unhinged. It feels 99% ideology, politics, hysteria and astroturfing, rather than a reaction to the tech and technicality which is what I come to HN for.
I agree! It might even be an issue on my side, where I'm exposed to AI generated stuff that often that everything starts looking like a trope when it's not.
Either way, I've seen more than enough in this comment section to make me want to avoid bunny for now anyway.
The mismatch between how great Bunny is giving away free DNS, and the actual reality that I can't open an account and get free DNS from them is jarring and verging on dishonest.
Saying stuff is free when it's not in the small print feels like a distinctly American Tech thing to do, which is an odd angle for a company trying to be an EU alternative to cloudflare.
> I'm not choosing BunnyNet because it's european, I'm choosing it because it's a good company that is providing a good service.
That sounds like a GPT trope, and seems a slightly weird thing to say: the only reason I thought you might be choosing it because it was European was because your entire comment talked about how you were looking for EU alternatives, and how Bunny is better than other European alternatives.
Come to think about it, this is exactly the sort of output I would expect if a sales person at Bunny had asked GPT to generate a response to sound authentic whilst pointing out out that Bunny is European and better than Hetzner.
To be clear, I'm not saying you're using AI, because I trust you're a legitimate user, and it's also the sort of thing a legitimate user would say, but the style and tone of your comment feels a bit... uncanny. Sorry!
Your first sentence is the proof that CORS is a bad solution.
HN is supposed to be full of people who need to know, use and depend on CORS and CSP. We might all just be idiots, but we're the idiots who are supposed to use this tool, and we can't explain it or agree on it.
If a tool can't be used or understood by the primary users, IMO it's by definition a bad tool/solution. It's easy to see why - it's security that depends on a browser, something we're traditionally told never to depend on for security.
I feel the same. Unfortunately, I've had to deal with CORS in a few situations where the request is "we need to get this thing from this server, but we can't change the servers CORS or CSP", which, in technical security speak is "we have this security system in place, we need to circumvent it".
Ultimately, it almost always depends on the server only being accessed via an untampered browser request.
The Zoom exploit was able to happen because CORS and CSP are so easy to get around on the client side, so Zoom did it. Sure, Zoom were bad/lazy/silly for doing it, but I feel we're bad as a community for still having this model.
It's natural to be a bit racist an xenophobic internally. We're all animals at the end of the day who are motivated to protect our in groups and people like us.
The same way as it's natural to have strong feelings of wanting to inflict pain and suffering on someone who's done wrong to us or people we care about.
Choosing not to do these harmful but natural things is called "being civil". Nobody has to be civil, but a civil society is that way because it makes uncomfortable consequences on people who aren't civil.
It is not sensible to be xenophobic and racist in a civil society unless you consider harming others and inviting uncomfortable consequences on yourself as sensible.
But you don't have to pretend. You can choose to be outwardly racist and xenophobic if you want, it just doesn't seem very sensible.
The difference we're seeing in numbers here is because the centres of cities are historically have a higher number of immigrants.
Fortunately, ONS did a specific report on "Bradford", which is the source for the wikipedia page I cited. The source link was broken on wiki, here it is though:
"In the latest census, around 437,800 Bradford residents said they were born in England. This represented 80.1% of the local population."
I chose Bradford because it's locally referred to (pejoratively, not by me) as "Bradistan". But despite that, according to ONS, 30% cite Muslim as their religion, which is more than "no religion" at 28%, but still lower than Christianity, at 34%
I encourage you to go check the sources for your sources, like I should have done (and you forced me to). If you look at this debate with an open mind, I believe you will find the majority of us rightly don't feel represented by the statement "Brits are legitimately fed up with immigration" any more. My bias' are that I'll almost always be pro immigration, within reason, but I completely recognise there have been times over the past 10 years where I've felt that position has been legitimately hard to defend. Now is not one of those times
The real issue is that every single time someone or something suggests immigration is a problem in the UK, it can trivially be reframed as an inequality issue.
To get back to the original topic, I think beneficiaries of inequality - like certain big tech players - are strongly motivated to keep the general public blaming anyone other than them for the problems caused by inequality.
edit: I just understood the census page a bit more, it's a generic report by area. You can put Birmingham in there too. It says basically the same: the overwhelming majority of residents are UK born and Christian or of no religion. Yes this is changing, slowly, like the world and populations change, slowly - not at a new or concerning rate.
I don't think it's a made up idea that immigration is a problem, some people clearly, definitely consider it a problem, and it can cause problems. But it's a problem that's been heavily worked on recently and has had a lot of success in solving in the UK over the past 2 years.
This is why it's completely barmy to suggest the average brit is fed up of immigration now, and I'm not sure why many people pointing that out are being heavily downvoted.
The most likely candidates are places like Bradford and Birmingham, which are still - according to wikipedia - 60%+ white british, that's without even considering british asian or other people born in and native to the UK.
Again, sorry, I can't find any sources to support your facts here, maybe I looked in a different place to you, so perhaps you could share your sources?
I agree, a comparison and distinction is helpful, maybe even necessary. But I felt the author's bias came across a bit too strong in places and was a little distracting. Still interesting stuff though!
Thanks for the fair response, I agree you're being cheeky. Sorry, I'm being lazy not searching here, but have you written anything on if instances of something is a good measure of decentralisation? (FWIW, I feel independently owned/managed instances in the traditional non-mastodon-definition seems like an okay measure of decentralisation.)
I completely agree with the point in your link that relays are different to instances - I love architectures involving dumb-relay or zero-trust type nodes. But I think Relays should still be mentioned in your post, since they're probably the main architectural element which protect PDS instances from the scale issues heavily federated AP instances might face, right? (I only have a high level understanding of ATProto and very little experience with AP, happy to be told I just need to learn more for this to make sense.)
Fair comment, it wasn't my intent to insult - I can completely see how it could come across as a lot more personally and insulting than I intended - sorry Tezza. I hope it's understood my frustration is not at the person or content itself (which I'm sure are both genuinely interesting and decent in the right places!) just the voluminous, qualitative and domain specific nature of the it in response to a request for quantitative stuff.
I hope you were both able to have great days since!
> Every single time a post about atproto hits Hacker News, somebody asks in the comments: “But where are all the Bluesky instances?”. The problem is, there are no instances in atproto! The question is a category error. Instances are a Mastodon-brained concept, and I wanted something I can link to that explains this clearly.
I feel like you've (perhaps purposefully?) misinterpreted "instances" just to plug ATProto specifically at the expense of ActivityPub (and RSS, a bit). I think you lower yourself by doing this:
1. it forces you to omit and contort the interesting technical truths about ATProto and Activitypub, like Relays and their pros/cons for ATProto and account migrations and pros/cons for ActivityPub
2. it creates unnecessary conflict and criticism and seems unnecessarily divisive for 2 platforms solving problems in such a similar space
It's also just seems a bit silly: why would you assume that when someone asks "where are the instances?" they're not using the common mainstream use of the word "instances", like, servers, or running software, or VMs, or containers?
Sorry if this is overly harsh or I've misunderstood, but it gives me a strong vibe that it was motivated by disdain and frustration towards ActivityPub and ActivityPub users rather than wanting to legitimately inform the world about ActivityPub.
I did enjoy the diagrams and the explainers though! I just felt like the subtle digs and pops at activitypub were an unnecessary distraction.
> I had an idea when I bought Castro that human support based around actual user experience was an easy differentiator.
Sorry for taking that a bit too literally.
The other points still stand.
You have interesting experiences. There's a common theme in my feedback, and in the other comments that provide constructive feedback: you're missing accepted learnings by being a stubborn/arrogant/maybe just inexperienced entrepreneur. e.g.:
> Ultimately, for us, putting too much time into support isn’t a differentiator, and it’s often counter-productive.
Your language here, and in the rest of the conclusion, frames the learning as "the problem was that my idea [that maybe customer support would be good if people just tried] just didn't work for specifically for us because x, y, z is different for us".
It didn't work for you because it's a fundamentally flawed assumption that CS was easy if you just try to be good at it and care about the customer. You wrote that as the idea you had when you bought the company. The idea didn't fail because of your special circumstances, the idea failed because it's a demonstrably bad idea, sorry.
Many other commenters have made the same critical point as me, but your first response to me was essentially: "what critical points? I can take it. And besides, I said 'what I got wrong' so you're wrong to say I got the wrong learnings". Which is - again - you dismissing people's experience (of you).
In the meantime, I noticed your site is down. I'll keep a look out for your writings in future. I mean it genuinely that you have interesting experiences. I think you need humbling a little though. Sorry again for the harsh feedback. I sincerely think your world and everyone else's world would be better and brighter if you really reread and absorb the constructive feedback from me and other HN commenters with an open mind, rather than looking for ways to dismiss it.