Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Don't be a free user?

<< < (5/5)

wraith808:
There's nothing "real" about it though. I apologize if I come off sounding antagonistic. I'm no more doing what IainB was doing in the CNET Downloader topic which is just to show and warn of obvious marketing schemes that I know of. Pinboard is not any way wrong for doing this, it's just that it shouldn't be used as a metric for "being real".
-Paul Keith (December 16, 2011, 12:13 AM)
--- End quote ---

If the statistics are truthful, then how is it not being real?  Just because others use it for marketing purposes, does that predicate that he is doing the same, rather than showing transparency?

Paul Keith:
Well that's the thing that makes it efficient. You never know whether the statistic is true or not.

The best marketing tricks don't involve creating lies. They involve tweaking truths.

Unless you're a major entity like a government, transparency comes when a crowd of doubters asks for the information and you give it to them.

...or reverse: Let's say a flaw was found in your service that could provide a vulnerability and instead of just disclosing it later and then letting your fanbase say transparency, you go beyond what you should reveal to instigate that trust across a board of skeptics or even zero skeptics. (Basically do the opposite of marketing, risk ridicule when things go bad)

Everything else could be there for a reason. But again, I emphasize that my post shouldn't be perceived as anything but a general warning. Pinboard is a well reputed social bookmarking service if not the only well reputed social bookmarking service that is completely reputable when it comes to longevity. I have never heard/read anything bad about the service. Not even sudden feature changes or service ownership rumor like with services such as delicious or Diigo. You could even see it in the main webpage design. Nothing flashy. Just a straight direct invitation to sign up. I could be misinformed of course but as far as I know, there is no other social bookmarking service that has the same rep as pinboard when it comes to signing up with cash.

mahesh2k:
If the statistics are truthful, then how is it not being real?  Just because others use it for marketing purposes, does that predicate that he is doing the same, rather than showing transparency?
--- End quote ---
Exactly. You can verify his prices by checking leasewebs price plan and some other prices which he added into the table. This type of approach from startups/small business is verifiable because most of the DC'ers can scrutinize every small bit of it. In case of IM blogs and services, that niche entirely is based on scam and delusion of information sales, so there is no point of transparency there. It's gray collar business.

Paul Keith:
The problem with verification is kind of like open source. How often do people really check the source?

Only here it's not just checking up on the sources, you have to check up on the person's total living expenses to be really sure they are not in debt. It's not like that's enough. You still have to be sure about their motivation to continue the service.

Pinboard has earned it's userbase' trust because of it's longevity that this is link is an added bonus but applied to all of startups/small business, you're still not immune to any startup suddenly selling out or hiding something in the closet. Basically, it's a trees for the forest thing. Just because the IM niche is most well known for doing this doesn't mean someone can't do this for startups. It's not like the service is aiming specifically at DC'ers either. It's a general service that happens to have a blog post linked to DC. I'm not really contending about your admiration for the action. I'm simply giving a warning that this isn't any indication of transparency or "being real" and it shouldn't be. There are more notable examples of showing startup transparency and this isn't it.

mahesh2k:
That is true, some of the startups are in the process of abusing the free software. I have seen some shopping carts offering open source software only to premium subscribers. I do understand that open source can be paid, but using copywriting gimmicks with word free doesn't make it free. At least no like GNU's "free" but more of buy one get one free.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page