Look, his post may be insightful and interesting, but the point is that if any other startup on here spent post after post publicly criticising their direct competitor, it would hopefully be viewed as a negative thing. Why is App.net any different? There are plenty of ways to promote your scrappy and noble insurgency without sticking it in the eye of your competitor.

Again, I think what app.net is doing is interesting and great, just not these types of blog posts.

But the predations of the Facebook/Twitter business model are both the founding impetus and sustaining animus of App.net. They're always on topic for Caldwell, and especially when new information advancing and refining the critique comes up.

And the analogy of 'spending' posts isn't quite right. There is no budget constraint on internet writing to advance your cause: in many cases more is better as long as you're not repeating the exact same points. (And as I mentioned: I see both new news and analysis in this post, even though it advances a familiar theme/viewpoint.)

Eh, maybe. Twitter got started after Facebook, but I don't remember seeing Twitter talking about Facebook.

Why would Twitter's communications strategy be a normative baseline? (And especially for App.net?)

Lots of successes have been marketed as a contrast to an established competitor: Avis Tries Harder, The Pepsi Challenge, MCI vs. AT&T, Mac vs. PC.

That's because Twitter didn't know what they were or were trying to become. They probably didn't see themselves as a competitor to Facebook, but as a complement.

Facebook didn't try to become Twitter-like until later on, when Twitter was already becoming popular, IIRC. It was more of a "Twitter is social-network-ish, maybe we should incorporate Twitter-like features into our product."

DuckDuckGo publicly blogs about what they feel are the shortcomings of Google. I've seen similar feedback in the comments of the DDG articles.

Yep, that was me http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4744621

I think marketing your product by criticizing your competitor is fine, but constantly blogging about how bad/evil your competitor is can be tiring and people just don't care anymore "oh, it's X criticizing Y again to promote his product, how novel!".

Why should a company criticising competition be viewed as a negative thing? Content quality trumps everything else. When something smart is being said, why does it matter who said it?

Not necessarily negative, but certainly suspect. He has financial a stake in the outcome of his criticism.

Compare this to someone knocking Apple for something about iOS with the explicit hope that they fix it to his liking.

If the problems on iOS being criticized are real, I don't see a problem.

Can't you judge for yourself the content you are reading?

>Look, his post may be insightful and interesting

>I think what app.net is doing is interesting and great, just not these types of blog posts.

Nice contradiction. And perspective from someone who knows what he's talking about as a result of building a competitor is invaluable insight and quite interesting to me.

I don't get why you think Dalton is doing this solely for promotional purposes, but hey, you're entitled to your opinion.

Oh, and in response to your previous post: plenty of people are "carrying the water" and are calling Twitter out on their bullshit.

>And, for an insurgent platform/viewpoint to succeed, it needs tireless promotion.

Then I need to ramp up my userscript for client-side filtering Hacker News.

Much appreciated but the "ramping up" refers to the need to add more content when stuff gets removed per page in this case.

I can not upvote this enough.