I bet they run a useful service. But their post doesn’t really speak well to people who don’t already use the service, because it doesn’t define the used names (e.g. it’s only implied that the service is a VPN, why not just say it up front). That’s why I think it’s not a great press release.
Their homepage literally says it is a “Zero-config Business VPN”. Not “implied” — directly stated.
> That’s why I think it’s not a great press release.
Press release? This a blog. It should be self evident that this is for customers and other already interested parties.
When you visit friends and family, do you regularly reintroduce yourself? I’m going to guess you probably don’t. If someone did that, it would both be weird and wasteful of everyone’s time.
Blogs work similarly. The majority of traffic is expected to be people already following you, in which case reiterating who you are, what you do, etc, would all be a waste of everyone’s time — with the minor exception of the occasional person that stumbles upon your blog for the first time. Even then, such individuals usually end up on an unfamiliar blog because they are explicitly searching for something topically relevant, and thus are already familiar with what is being described.
It’s kind of bizarre, IMO, to arbitrarily follow links from a link aggregator (Hacker News, in this case), with no prior knowledge of the related topic, skim through a blog on said unfamiliar topic, and then complain that the author didn’t spell out what 99% of their readership already knows. Like… why? If you like exploring things you don’t know, why not check out their homepage? You already clicked one link without knowing what you were getting into, what’s one more click to go to the very page that describes what they do? Or if you don’t like discovering new things, what compelled you to click a link, when the link text was completely foreign to you?
Car maintenance books don’t describe the usefulness of cars.
Calculus books don’t assume you have zero familiarity with numbers and counting.
Recipe books don’t remind you that, as a human being, you need food to survive.
The Netflix tech blog doesn’t tell you what Netflix is, describe “streaming” in the abstract, nor explain what movies are and why people watch them.
How little familiarity would you recommend that Tailscale expect from the reader of their blogs? Should plumbers be able to understand what’s being talked about? If they should tell you that they are a VPN service, should they also describe what a computer network is, what you can do with a network, and why they’re useful? Do they need to describe what a computer is?
