It just feels so spammy. I don't want to touch that world intentionally but it works.
It gets worse
I had two similar services, one that used a page's meta information to create URL stubs so that the link would have the semantic meaning in it instead of say "id=27158278". It'd also (this is about 10 years ago) fill in opengraph holes if found and present the social media card generators with more complete information.
It also had a JavaScript plugin that would fill in title tags to your anchor links so that you could hover over a link and get the destination page's title.
I thought it was really useful but I literally got nothing but either silence or criticism. It was really demotivating. I just abandoned it.
It sucks to create something that you believe in, that you like, that you find value in and get nothing but hot bottles of shit from everyone else. Nothing constructive, just demoralizing abuse. I've tried so hard to never be that person. The receiving end of that is awful. It's never ok. (I should make a list of "never events" in open source/programming (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_event) not in engineering negligence but human empathy negligence.)
Anyways, then I had another project (also about 10 years ago) where I registered a bunch of news sounding sites, like say, themercurystar.com and as a url "shortener" it created absurd sensationalist news headlines as the "shortened" URL from a grammar generator. So for instance, you may get a url like themercurystar.com/arts/current/henry-kissinger-sings-dances-on-broadway-in-bye-bye-birdie or /taylor-swift-proves-hodge-conjecture-pnas etc.
It was complete with the opengraph of a stock image and a repurposing of the generative title with more filler to make it like look real, redirecting the crawlers to a fake shell page to satisfy the meta content and redirecting the humans to the actual link to be shortened.
That one was probably too good. I found it hilarious but apparently I was the only one in on the joke.
So failure again. Ah well.
They're still great and I'd gladly launch them again.
It's more like you work on something that flops and you see similar things get traction.
There's bookshelves full of analysis on this problem. I've got a few of those bookshelves in my library, a major preoccupation of mine for maybe 15 years.
But one of the legitimate reasons the big books don't touch upon is the agitation and hustle game. Probably because those authors just do it without thinking about it.
Geoffrey Moore, Steve Blank, Clayton Christensen, there's a certain aggrandizing precocity they all have that they seem to look past. It's somewhere on the road to carnival barking and clickbaiting.
The line on that road that I refuse to cross is likely way too conservative.
In fact I've had things that became popular by other random people playing that game who I've never met, just for the social cache or whatever endorphins that thing does for those people.
That's the core strategy of virality and trying to hook influencers.
It's a trend I've been noticing within the past 6 months or so. When something catches I'll do some research and find an almost irritating number of failed nearly identical attempts.
The "one note band approach" looks like it's a decent strategy, I just have to get over how objectionable it feels to me.
Being a bit more shameless doesn't necessarily always appear to be a bad move
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=19511735 (45 points | March 28, 2019 | 32 comments)
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=24229085 (17 points | 8 months | 7 comments)