That is a great way to look at scaling. One of the most frustrating things can be people who can't see their role on the other side of scaling, so they subconsciously (or consciously) work against scaling the company. If you are one of the leaders in such a company you have to spend time helping people see that there is still a place for them in the larger company. That can be hard because as one of the leaders it seems "obvious" to you that they are a valued part of the team, but take a moment and help them see that too.
Agreed. I've been on the side of coming into roles where people were reluctant to let go at first and feeling reluctant to let go of responsibilities. It feels weird. The lego analogy seems to fit really well from my experience.
> If you’ve ever watched an extremely high performer go from killing it one year to struggling the next, you know what I’m talking about
That was me. I was killing it at my company when it was 700 people, but two and a half years later it was over 1600 people and the pace slowed way down. Long story short, yesterday was my last day and I'm moving to a 150-200 person company where I'll have more influence/impact.
> That’s one of the other counterintuitive things: Adding people doesn’t mean there’s less work for the people that are already there. It means that the entire company can do more. If one person was managing all of marketing before and then you hire someone to manage your content channels — the person who was doing marketing before is not going to have less to do. It either means that she'll be able to do the rest of her job better, or that she'll be able to take on new things.
You might say that people are thinking in terms of Amdahl's Law, while what happens in reality is Gustafson's Law. The task increases to fit the available processing power.
Worth noting: Quip's story and practices are definitely a bit different from your typical new startup, given that they are owned by (and provided the resources of) Salesforce. I work at a different company that Salesforce acquired, and internally, it seems like Quip is almost mandated as the standard way of writing/sharing docs.
Can we not reward people who inject shit like "text-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 0px 0px 6px; color: transparent; user-select: none;" into their content?
I think this is a pretty good overview. In my last job I joined a team of 25 that grew to 250. In my current job I started on a team of 8, we just hit 35 and we're in that "30 to 50 employee" awkward zone. I'm much more comfortable with it now, having seen the same kind of chaos very recently, and I'm trying to help the younger employees understand that it's all normal!
I don't care so much about the content here, but it's interesting to note that they've "paywalled" their content by making you submit your email.
It's probably so that they can spam you in the future with their newsletters that feature their portfolio companies and what not.
Not saying this is bad, but it shows how the priority has shifted. For the last couple of years it was trendy for VCs to blog. Basically VCs became marketers. They call it "inbound marketing". Basically they use content to gain mindshare so that founders will think of them when it's time for them to raise money.
But now that this channel has become commoditized--basically every VC firm has a blog and anyone can write analysis content on Medium--and people's average attention per publication has gone way down, they have shifted their focus from "inbound marketing" (basically a brand marketing) to "direct marketing" (A fancy term for spam email marketing).
What's interesting about this is that VCs are now more blatant about the fact that they're using content as marketing.
Oh, I wouldn't label this a paywall as such, since the requested information is not challenged with verification of authenticity.
They aren't making you verify your email, before showing you the rest of the article, and this permits you to use "test@example.com" as the token acknowledgment of their solicitation.
This rates on par with a CAPTCHA to read the full article, since the user merely needs to adhere to the [a-z,A-Z,0-9]@[a-z,A-Z,0-9].[a-z,A-Z,0-9] regex, to dismiss, and providing a real email is an option, indicating that they're willing to accept junk data as part of their collection of subscribers, since mailing list email bounces aren't a disaster.
I don't understand this reasoning which I ultimately write off as entitlement.
They produced the content. They think it's valuable enough to put behind an (annoying) interaction that allows them to grow their newsletter. You don't think it's that valuable and you don't even want to find out if it is or not. That's 100% fine. Just don't read the article. It's not your content, and you're not entitled to an ad-free version of it just because you're on the internet.
It's not your site.
It's not your content.
But then you go and call the site "toxic" and call for a boycott? On what basis? If the content is actually good, then I personally would be inclined to support the site.
I'm not entitled to an ad-free version, but equally they're not entitled to my attention, or my email address. In an ideal world we give each other a bit of value and everyone comes out ahead, but if one side takes the piss it's entirely reasonable for the other side to call them out on it, refuse to participate, and highlight their behaviour for others.
The link did not say "we're going to waste a couple minutes of your time to trick you into becoming invested and not beable to finish the story unless you give us your email."
At least be honest about the situation up front. There was no hint that we would have some portion of the content locked without signing up until i got to the blurred out part. This is somewhat toxic.
No it isn't. Buyer's remorse is where you read the whole article and then conclude that you wasted your time. Oh well, too bad.
It's amazing how much anger/vitriol a small little modal can generate.
No it isn't, because if you spend a lot of time in the web you encounter them tens or potentially hundreds of times a day depending on what you're doing. It's an economic externality, just like the one person saying 'but my little bit of pollution won't impact the environment.'
Yes, I have a back button, but if you've wasted my time then I'm going to remember that fact. Semantic/social web technologies are going to make this sort of marketing obsolete.
It's amazing how much anger/vitriol a small little modal can generate.
It may amaze the designer, but it doesn't amaze me as a user.
The fundamental principle of a "modal" is that it suddenly and unexpectedly robs the user of control over his experience. If that's not a cardinal sin of interface design, I don't know what is.
We're often reminded that good design creates "delight"; that also means bad design can create delight's opposite - pain and frustration.
They invited people to read and then inflicted an annoying and unwelcome interaction on them that interrupted what they were invited to do. It's OK to ask for something at the end of the article but not to engage in that sort of bait and switch. Also, it's pretty damn entitled of the many sites which give you a finger-wagging lecture about your ad blocker the first time you ever visit.
Yes, it's toxic to offer an article and then snatch it away mid-way. Try doing that with a small child or an animal and see what sort of reaction you get.
I think it's fair to prefer that such content not be linked here. I don't come here for this sort of content and being duped into reading half the article only to realize later that it's for pay (in information).
They should be upfront about the cost, and it would be nice if articles like this were marked here somehow so those of us who are uninterested in giving out our email to marketers can avoid clicking on the link.
I think that's fine. If as a content distributor, HN wants to ban all such links then that's completely acceptable. And if as a user, you want to blacklist any site that has that kind of experience, that's acceptable too. I'm not against choice or whatever principles people choose to adopt.
What I don't understand is the sentiment that somehow every site must provide you the perfect user experience, high quality content, high production value and high quality research, all for nothing more than your time. I'm sorry but your measly few minutes isn't ultimately that valuable. Feel free to bounce from the site, you're not the intended customer.
And if a site doesn't provide this magical experience for free then people start calling it "toxic", start calling for the execution of the designers, and a boycott of the product.
I mostly see this sentiment on HN - and I bet it's the same group of people that want a decentralized social network...
Also to your last point, while this particular site prompts you for an email, they let you finish reading without you giving them your email. It's just a prompt and as a site, it's not even one of the worse offenders of this practice. It's quite tame and the rest of the reading experience is super clean.
It’s still obnoxious behavior that IMO should not be rewarded with a share. On my device, the “ad” was offscreen. Highly suboptimal UX. I saw the "Continue without an email address" prompt and thought “fuck them”, crashing my attention sphere like that. And forcing me to scroll-scan to get my place back. The web is full of startup how to stories; I’ll just wait for the next one to pop up on HN.
I mean that's fair enough, but do you have the same complaint about companies like NYTimes or other paywalled content? I only mentioned it because numerous people seemed to be very offended by it which seemed a bit odd to me considering you can just close it, but maybe that's just me.
NYT doesn’t force me to lose my place in the middle of reading. They have the mini bar at the bottom and when you’re out of free reads for the month, they are up front about it and don’t let you read a word. They also don’t offer to spam me in exchange for reading the article.
I agree djinnandtonic (dead comment). The site asked a question in a slightly insulting way, then went blurry for a reason I didn't feel inclined to scroll around to find.
I searched for a while to find what she was talking about with LEGOs and it turned out that it wasn't actual LEGOs she was talking about. I kind of lost interest at that point.
You get upset at the use of metaphors? I thought it was fairly apt:
> That’s why her talk is about Legos. The emotions you feel when new people are coming in and taking over pieces of your job — it’s not that different from how a kid feels when they have to share their Legos. There’s a lot of natural anxiety and insecurity that the new person won’t build your Lego tower in the right way, or that they'll get to take all the fun or important Legos, or that if they take over the part of the Lego tower you were building, then there won’t be any Legos left for you.
That is a great way to look at scaling. One of the most frustrating things can be people who can't see their role on the other side of scaling, so they subconsciously (or consciously) work against scaling the company. If you are one of the leaders in such a company you have to spend time helping people see that there is still a place for them in the larger company. That can be hard because as one of the leaders it seems "obvious" to you that they are a valued part of the team, but take a moment and help them see that too.
Agreed. I've been on the side of coming into roles where people were reluctant to let go at first and feeling reluctant to let go of responsibilities. It feels weird. The lego analogy seems to fit really well from my experience.
> If you’ve ever watched an extremely high performer go from killing it one year to struggling the next, you know what I’m talking about
That was me. I was killing it at my company when it was 700 people, but two and a half years later it was over 1600 people and the pace slowed way down. Long story short, yesterday was my last day and I'm moving to a 150-200 person company where I'll have more influence/impact.
Money shot:
> That’s one of the other counterintuitive things: Adding people doesn’t mean there’s less work for the people that are already there. It means that the entire company can do more. If one person was managing all of marketing before and then you hire someone to manage your content channels — the person who was doing marketing before is not going to have less to do. It either means that she'll be able to do the rest of her job better, or that she'll be able to take on new things.
You might say that people are thinking in terms of Amdahl's Law, while what happens in reality is Gustafson's Law. The task increases to fit the available processing power.
Worth noting: Quip's story and practices are definitely a bit different from your typical new startup, given that they are owned by (and provided the resources of) Salesforce. I work at a different company that Salesforce acquired, and internally, it seems like Quip is almost mandated as the standard way of writing/sharing docs.
LPT: You can still read the content without submitting your email by using your browser's "reader mode".
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10200754
Maybe it should have (2015) added to title.
Can we not reward people who inject shit like "text-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 0px 0px 6px; color: transparent; user-select: none;" into their content?
I think this is a pretty good overview. In my last job I joined a team of 25 that grew to 250. In my current job I started on a team of 8, we just hit 35 and we're in that "30 to 50 employee" awkward zone. I'm much more comfortable with it now, having seen the same kind of chaos very recently, and I'm trying to help the younger employees understand that it's all normal!
I don't care so much about the content here, but it's interesting to note that they've "paywalled" their content by making you submit your email.
It's probably so that they can spam you in the future with their newsletters that feature their portfolio companies and what not.
Not saying this is bad, but it shows how the priority has shifted. For the last couple of years it was trendy for VCs to blog. Basically VCs became marketers. They call it "inbound marketing". Basically they use content to gain mindshare so that founders will think of them when it's time for them to raise money.
But now that this channel has become commoditized--basically every VC firm has a blog and anyone can write analysis content on Medium--and people's average attention per publication has gone way down, they have shifted their focus from "inbound marketing" (basically a brand marketing) to "direct marketing" (A fancy term for spam email marketing).
What's interesting about this is that VCs are now more blatant about the fact that they're using content as marketing.
> I don't care so much about the content here, but it's interesting to note that they've "paywalled" their content by making you submit your email.
The text link at the bottom "Continue without an email address" worked for me, as did Reader mode in Safari.
They aren't making you verify your email, before showing you the rest of the article, and this permits you to use "test@example.com" as the token acknowledgment of their solicitation.
This rates on par with a CAPTCHA to read the full article, since the user merely needs to adhere to the [a-z,A-Z,0-9]@[a-z,A-Z,0-9].[a-z,A-Z,0-9] regex, to dismiss, and providing a real email is an option, indicating that they're willing to accept junk data as part of their collection of subscribers, since mailing list email bounces aren't a disaster.
You only have to submit an email, not your email.
This site first nagged me to join their newsletter and then locked the second half of the article behind an email harvester.
This is toxic behavior from a content provider, please do not drive traffic to this site.
I don't understand this reasoning which I ultimately write off as entitlement.
They produced the content. They think it's valuable enough to put behind an (annoying) interaction that allows them to grow their newsletter. You don't think it's that valuable and you don't even want to find out if it is or not. That's 100% fine. Just don't read the article. It's not your content, and you're not entitled to an ad-free version of it just because you're on the internet.
It's not your site. It's not your content.
But then you go and call the site "toxic" and call for a boycott? On what basis? If the content is actually good, then I personally would be inclined to support the site.
I'm not entitled to an ad-free version, but equally they're not entitled to my attention, or my email address. In an ideal world we give each other a bit of value and everyone comes out ahead, but if one side takes the piss it's entirely reasonable for the other side to call them out on it, refuse to participate, and highlight their behaviour for others.
Um, you give them your attention when you click their link. They aren't entitled, you gave it away.
The link did not say "we're going to waste a couple minutes of your time to trick you into becoming invested and not beable to finish the story unless you give us your email."
At least be honest about the situation up front. There was no hint that we would have some portion of the content locked without signing up until i got to the blurred out part. This is somewhat toxic.
At least it's not ad driven, too.
You don't have to give them your email. You can just click 'no', and read the rest. But I agree with your sentiment of not liking that style.
In exchange for the promise of an interesting article, which they have failed to deliver on.
That's called buyers remorse. When a product or service fails to meet your expectations sometime it's just crap, not toxic.
It's amazing how much anger/vitriol a small little modal can generate.
Don't you have a back button?
Otherwise if you want the thing someone is offering in a simple quid-pro-quo take the deal or don't.
Otherwise all you a really shouting about is that you think the price is too high.
No it isn't. Buyer's remorse is where you read the whole article and then conclude that you wasted your time. Oh well, too bad.
It's amazing how much anger/vitriol a small little modal can generate.
No it isn't, because if you spend a lot of time in the web you encounter them tens or potentially hundreds of times a day depending on what you're doing. It's an economic externality, just like the one person saying 'but my little bit of pollution won't impact the environment.'
Yes, I have a back button, but if you've wasted my time then I'm going to remember that fact. Semantic/social web technologies are going to make this sort of marketing obsolete.
It's amazing how much anger/vitriol a small little modal can generate.
It may amaze the designer, but it doesn't amaze me as a user.
The fundamental principle of a "modal" is that it suddenly and unexpectedly robs the user of control over his experience. If that's not a cardinal sin of interface design, I don't know what is.
We're often reminded that good design creates "delight"; that also means bad design can create delight's opposite - pain and frustration.
They invited people to read and then inflicted an annoying and unwelcome interaction on them that interrupted what they were invited to do. It's OK to ask for something at the end of the article but not to engage in that sort of bait and switch. Also, it's pretty damn entitled of the many sites which give you a finger-wagging lecture about your ad blocker the first time you ever visit.
Yes, it's toxic to offer an article and then snatch it away mid-way. Try doing that with a small child or an animal and see what sort of reaction you get.
I think it's fair to prefer that such content not be linked here. I don't come here for this sort of content and being duped into reading half the article only to realize later that it's for pay (in information).
They should be upfront about the cost, and it would be nice if articles like this were marked here somehow so those of us who are uninterested in giving out our email to marketers can avoid clicking on the link.
I think that's fine. If as a content distributor, HN wants to ban all such links then that's completely acceptable. And if as a user, you want to blacklist any site that has that kind of experience, that's acceptable too. I'm not against choice or whatever principles people choose to adopt.
What I don't understand is the sentiment that somehow every site must provide you the perfect user experience, high quality content, high production value and high quality research, all for nothing more than your time. I'm sorry but your measly few minutes isn't ultimately that valuable. Feel free to bounce from the site, you're not the intended customer.
And if a site doesn't provide this magical experience for free then people start calling it "toxic", start calling for the execution of the designers, and a boycott of the product.
I mostly see this sentiment on HN - and I bet it's the same group of people that want a decentralized social network...
Also to your last point, while this particular site prompts you for an email, they let you finish reading without you giving them your email. It's just a prompt and as a site, it's not even one of the worse offenders of this practice. It's quite tame and the rest of the reading experience is super clean.
There is a link on the email collection ad that says "Continue without an email address".
It’s still obnoxious behavior that IMO should not be rewarded with a share. On my device, the “ad” was offscreen. Highly suboptimal UX. I saw the "Continue without an email address" prompt and thought “fuck them”, crashing my attention sphere like that. And forcing me to scroll-scan to get my place back. The web is full of startup how to stories; I’ll just wait for the next one to pop up on HN.
I mean that's fair enough, but do you have the same complaint about companies like NYTimes or other paywalled content? I only mentioned it because numerous people seemed to be very offended by it which seemed a bit odd to me considering you can just close it, but maybe that's just me.
NYT doesn’t force me to lose my place in the middle of reading. They have the mini bar at the bottom and when you’re out of free reads for the month, they are up front about it and don’t let you read a word. They also don’t offer to spam me in exchange for reading the article.
> do you have the same complaint about companies like NYTimes or other paywalled content?
Not the person you're responding to, but: yes, of course.
I wonder if the nascent web annotations protocol offers a vector for pre-emptively flagging this sort of crap.
I agree djinnandtonic (dead comment). The site asked a question in a slightly insulting way, then went blurry for a reason I didn't feel inclined to scroll around to find.
Same. I find it so irritating to be bugged when halfway through reading an article, so I close the tab and never engage with their site again.
Me too, I close tabs when I get mid-article overlays
Turn on your ad-blocker? I can only reproduce the dumb wall if I have the noxious bounceexchange.com enabled
You can actually just click on "continue without email" and continue reading.
> Jokes about cramming so many engineers in a room they have to shrink desks
> Complains about talent hating the job after a while
Is this a joke?
pay-walled.
I searched for a while to find what she was talking about with LEGOs and it turned out that it wasn't actual LEGOs she was talking about. I kind of lost interest at that point.
You get upset at the use of metaphors? I thought it was fairly apt:
> That’s why her talk is about Legos. The emotions you feel when new people are coming in and taking over pieces of your job — it’s not that different from how a kid feels when they have to share their Legos. There’s a lot of natural anxiety and insecurity that the new person won’t build your Lego tower in the right way, or that they'll get to take all the fun or important Legos, or that if they take over the part of the Lego tower you were building, then there won’t be any Legos left for you.