Do you never tell another human anything unless it results in a direct financial benefit for yourself? You're friends must be fabulously wealthy if they spot you a benjamin for every factoid you throw their way.
OT: Am I the only one who thinks that most meetups are crap? The idea of meeting like-minded people is tempting but the reality is always different: Crowded places, stuffy air, weak talks, lame sponsors, 1-to-n presentations, no real interaction, stale drinks out of thin plastic cups, odd devs
It's been a random mix for me. The non-tech meetups (hiking, board games, etc.) that I've attended were often better experiences on average than tech-related ones, which were often a bit too focused on business interests.
I've only ever been to a few, but I found at lest two really nice: a Perl meetup in SF that wasn't really social at all but had great tech talks; and a Perl dinner (at a conference) in Vienna that had Very Odd Devs who were also super fun to talk to. People working at small regional banks can be way more eccentric than you'd guess!
It seems like all the problems you list are easy to solve, except odd devs, and I'm not sure that's a problem.
Admittedly, I'm too busy/lazy/unmotivated to solve them myself, but I can't believe there aren't some fun ones out there.
I mostly don't go to tech meetups, or any meetups where the only reason it exists is for networking. Those usually aren't that fulfilling. Sometimes if it's an interesting topic it'll get me, but usually not.
I mainly use meetup for board game nights, hikes, hack nights, game jams, movies, dinners, crafting, karaoke, and exploring new hobbies (there's a photography one I just joined recently).
None of those are usually in crowded places, stuffy air, have any sponsors or presentations, and have plenty of interaction.
Only when I am super addicted to HN and only when I am submitting I am going through the New Tab.
Think the current system is broken and have the feeling that in the early votes is too much bias (either through high karma folks, maybe internal hidden push votes etc from HN internal circles eg. admins, alumina).
Btw very good question and I’d love to see someone from HN giving an official statement plus comment how much HN-internal bias might influence the early votes.
Nice content marketing piece and guide for an SEO beginner but I stopped reading here:
> all with a 95% SEO acquisition strategy
That's so wrong. Free organic traffic is great. But if you rely fully on organic traffic, it rather shows that your LTV is not bigger than your CAC and if Google or competition kills your search traffic, your business is done and/or you can't scale when your mighty SEO doesn't work anymore.
I feel like there are a few unstated assumptions in whsheet's post. Even with those, of course, no advice is universal or without exception. They do make a good point, though.
My version of the thought process is that, all else equal, SEO has three key disadvantages:
1. Attribution is often harder than some other channels, and your experimental design has to account for that.
2. There is a less direct, unitary through-line from dollars invested to dollars earned. Say you spend X dollars on various SEO improvements this month, and you get Y units of growth (conversions, revenue, etc.) that you can attribute to that SEO work. It is less reliable to assume (relative to other channels) that spending 10X on SEO improvements next month will reward you with 10Y units of growth.
3. If SEO is your dominant channel at 95%, and you ever hit the maturity in the channel, the effect of the above is can be fatal to a growth-oriented startup. However you measure your SEO-based CAC, it is probably going to be lower than the CAC of whatever your backup/next channel ends up being, and lower by a large amount. If you have to add in a lot of SEM with your SEO, CAC goes way up, and if your LTV was too precariously close to your CAC already, you are very likely to go negative on your unit economics.
#2 and #3 are what I assumed whsheet was intending as I read their post.
Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content.
Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles.
Every Reddit post has more substance and authenticity than the mentioned above.
Edit: To the pro downvoters, instead of downvoting just reply and link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog.
> link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog
I agree with the first part of your comment. Narrowing the focus to a specific demo makes it far easier to provide exactly what your target audience needs, thus a higher quality product/service.
But I have doubts about the second part. You're classifying everything in 2 categories, "tech" and "non-tech" (I assume non-IT here) so this particular thing or absolutely everything else all in one bag. How qualified are you to judge the dozens of non-tech fields out there, say psychology, economics, marine biology, or agriculture? Is this a bit of (reverse?) Gell-Mann amnesia effect where you can accurately judge a tech blog on LinkedIn as being good but when it comes to something outside of your field of expertise you assume low quality?
If we expand "tech" to mean "technical" rather than "technology", those statements become much more likely to be true. People who have skills in some sort of technical background seem much more likely to have interesting insights than people who do not. HN loves to post Slate Star Codex, for example, and I doubt most here have the skills in psych to effectively evaluate his writings as correct.
Maybe but when you go from a very low likelihood to begin with increasing it even 10 fold might not make a practical difference.
The point was any one of us here can accurately judge content on a handful of topics in our areas of expertise and to a lesser extent in connecting fields. But we can say next to nothing outside of that. Let alone generalize to "all" platforms and "99%" of content. It's not "tech"/"non-tech" but "what I know"/"what I don't know".
> interesting insights
How would one even realize this if they're an expert web developer reading a blog on astronomy? Every single article on a platform could be either gold or shiny manure and most of us wouldn't really tell the difference unless they solidly overlap with those topics mentioned above.
You are def right that I should not pack everything in a non-tech cluster and call it crap. However I'd still keep my initial statement, it's a simplicatiom but it's true.
Of course there are and must be great blogs in non-tech areas but they are not that many. Writing high quality blogs for free seems not be common in other fields. Often people rather publish the findings in a protected space, call it academic paper and I can read just a lousy abstract. Actually most academic non-tech fields fall in this category.
Your second statement might more accurately be formulated as "I tend to find the insights of people with a technical background more interesting", or even "I am more capable of understanding what is interesting about the insights of people with some sort of technical background even if it is not my own." Otherwise, you're claiming that there's something objectively "uninteresting" about, like, the majority of human insights that civilizations have ever had and found valuable.
I disagree. Use your time to setup something smarter than a blog. A turn-key ready static site generator still takes 10x the time to set up than just using a random blog site.
Also, you waste time fiddling with CSS adjusting crappy themes. Only upside would be post editing in vim.
But again, do something smarter, too many new shiny toys wait for you: Tensorflow, Haskell, Rust, ESP32... extend the list yourself.
Switching from wordpress to a static site generator has made it much harder to post for me. Sure I can use vim (or my editor of choice) but on wordpress I could post from any browser on any machine, even a phone or tablet, including images with sites that have a front end. I'm not going back but I'd post more if I had a front end like I had on wordpress. Note: IMO as a middle solution just using github is not enough. Yes I can create a new file from the interface but no preview, clunky image uploading, clucky image embedding, and other issues.
Bonus: wordpress.com has some (limited, but nonzero) "discoverability". Blogs can be "followed" so you can have an idea of which are the 15-50 people who look at your stuff week in, week out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dj1048/gitlab_...