You must be blocked… either for a reason, or part of a block list or I blocked you accidentally when blocking ads which has happened a few times. What’s your username?
Not even tall poppy syndrome, because if you dare to talk about how something went horribly wrong (aka you're a short poppy), people react in the way you describe above.
If you succeed, people have to tear you down (to feel better about themselves). If you fail and dare to be honest about it, people have to tear you down (in order to feel superior). People are terrified of failure because if it could happen to e.g. patio11 or you or me, it could definitely happen to them so they must immediately distance themselves by giving themselves the feeling of superiority, and because just telling themselves they're superior in a quiet room alone isn't good enough, they must perform it in public for an audience to get an extra hit. Clack clack clack go the claws.
We used to do $240k a year in technical workshops, sold nearly $300k of ebooks, and have a million-dollar-a-year business… 3/4 of which is SaaS, not 30x500. And no, we don't have "multiple staff members." Freckle is run primarily by 1.5 people and it grows every year automatically, and grows very well every time we actually try to grow it.
And sure, we could make a lot more consulting too, especially since I have proven product chops. But who wants to deal with clients all day? All that negotiating and educating and meeting and trying to persuade them not to screw up their own projects, all their politicking, the invoicing and paperwork and phone calls and email change requests… no thank you.
I spent about 5 hours a month on Freckle, which is why it's not a multi-million-dollar business. But $700k/yr with 1 full-time employee works beautifully for me.
Try to beat that for an hourly rate with your consulting business.
Oh, good question. I can see why you'd think that.
Nope, BB will be more like HN, but specifically for bootstrappers and related topics only. IOW: public-facing, free to use. (Although I think we're going to do a MeFi-style $5 or $10 join fee, to encourage good citizenship.)
It's not going to be a product. I'm not going to run it unilaterally, either. It's for the community.
Self-centered, to me, means not thinking of others, because you're preoccupied with yourself. So, it makes sense to me.
Also, I didn't say "The OP has the social skills of a cockroach." Here I was addressing the audience -- the readers of my comment -- who clearly weren't taking away the same thing from the essay that I was.
For all I know, the OP deliberately avoided the topic, which means his social skills are fine, he's just a bad friend (as he indicates a reader of his blog post will think anyway). Being a bad friend in this way doesn't make you a bad person. You don't HAVE to act like a friend to somebody -- simply don't claim friendship. There, you're absolved.
(If the post was "A guy I was once friends with and then never really cared about after that, died and I didn't know", nobody would have really cared to read it.)
But it does make it seem kinda iffy to write a blog post about it, even include screenshots of the conversation, and not (apparently?) be socially aware enough to realize that the deceased man was nearly begging his friend to express some interest and concern. And so many of the commenters, from my perspective, were not picking up on anything the OP did not explicitly lay out in the essay itself, which is to say: his friend was telegraphing his problems in every possible way, and the OP ignored it. People seem to be reading it and thinking, "Oh, just one of those things." But it's only one of those things if you don't think of, or care for, others.
"assigning blame via the butterfly effect" <-- I didn't understand this. If you mean I'm waving my hands and implying it was the OP's fault the guy was sick and died, no, that's not what I meant. His fault lay in not paying attention to his friend, and then acting surprised.
Yes, lots of us are. The trick is, we've mostly given up on HN. First of all because we got tired of the "lifestyle business" sneer/smear. Second there is almost no content here for us any more.
In May, I organized a 100% bootstrapped product conference: http://baconbiz.com. We had 16 speakers, out of a total of 65 people. (All lightning speakers bought their own tickets.) Many traveled for hours to attend.
Once we get all the conf videos posted, we'll be working on a discussion/community site for product bootstrappers as well, to fill the hole left by the demise of the early HN experience.
In true bootstrap fashion, we ditched the hotel ballroom and held the event in our office. Sponsors just paid for our "after" party (on 1st night, Thursday, instead of Friday, to save costs.) The conf itself was "ramen profitable."
Surely I'm not the only one who read the screenshotted exchanges and thought:
He just told the OP he's waiting for "answers" from the doctor. He can't make travel plans. He says it's long, gruesome, UGH.
Guys. In case you have the social instinct of a cockroach, this is what they call A SIGN. Not a subtle one, either. That is when you LEAP to care for your friend.
Here's what you do. You ask: Wait a minute, forget about whatever it is I wanted to talk about -- what's wrong? Are you okay? Do you want to talk? Why don't I come visit you instead of expecting you to travel?
Alas, the author just glossed forward with "Well if you decide you can make it, let me know!"
The sick (now dead) friend expressed well wishes for health to the OP, only to receive what kind of well wishes in return? None. Not even "good luck with your doctor's visit that I don't want to ask about cuz I'm not comfortable expressing feelings."
How self-centered do you have to be to not even wish a friend with obvious health problems "good luck" or "feel better"?
> "Now you’re probably thinking I’m a real shitty friend."
Yes, but not because you didn't know he died. But because you didn't care enough to notice or ask while he was alive.
I'm sorry you went through that. Of course a memorial page wouldn't help comfort you, when you know your friend was murdered, you know who the killer was, and there would never be justice, just the thought of how you failed, and how the killer was taunting you right to the end.
The notion of a job/employment is a new one for the vast majority of the world's population, Americans included. Most people were peasants/subsistence farmers, or small time commercial farmers, or tradespeople (carpenter, blacksmith, furrier, etc.) who operated more like freelancers today than anything else. More recently, pre-WWI, many people were domestic servants, which is employment of course but not the same as working for a company today. Merchants are relatively new to human history. The legal construct of a company is much much newer than merchants.
The company-employment boom is clearly ending. When you look at human history -- even limited to "civilized" history -- it's pretty clear that mass employment was the exception, not the rule, and now it's going away.
If you read the essay, it's clear he's not anti-startup, much less specifically anti-Y Combinator. He is pro- other things instead, and saying the "traditional" (lol) startup culture is overshadowing all other choices.