I’ve never heard of Plausible either but the instant I browsed to the article I suspected they were a competitor. I skimmed the table of contents and saw the last item was recommending a product with the same name as the website, and my suspicion was confirmed. They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything.
>They’re perfectly up front and obvious about it, not hiding anything.
Wtf, this is the opposite of "up front." You had to poke around and figure it out yourself based on a suspicion. Up front means that they just tell you, no figuring out required.
I didn't poke around. I knew by the time I finished reading the Table of Contents, before I even got to the content.
Even if they had said in their very first sentence of the content "Disclaimer: We are a competitor to Google Analytics", I would have already known before that.
It's blatantly obvious, they didn't need to spoon feed me. This isn't some submarine article.
All the examples given in that article are people belittling complex programming tasks. But this was just a simple a reading comprehension and logical deduction task, not even remotely in the same league.
But maybe to you this was a similarly difficult task, so I apologize if I was being insulting by belittling it. Sorry!
You don't know what it is from just reading the link. And even that itself is not upfront -- browsers have been trying to hide the URL for a while now. What if you read it on Google AMP? I agree with the other commenter that this is misleading.
No, just read the TOC. The last two items, especially the one that says “Give Plausible a Try”, make it clear when combined with the big “Plausible” logo in the top left of the website (or the “plausible.io” domain you can see in the HN submission title) that this is a blog post by the company Plausible listing reasons why their major competitor is flawed and advocating their own product as an alternative.
You don’t have to read to the end of the article to know this, it’s communicated in the TOC at the very start. They could hardly be more transparent if they tried. This is not a submarine article, people are knee-jerk making this into something it isn’t.
