alt Hacker NewsI know this is a very minor point in the article, but reading the message next to the Doublespeed phone farm:
> out of 130 dms sent, 15 pointed to a conversion.
> From a former ecom guy's lens this is insane
Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions? It seems pretty obvious to me on the surface that this "works" because it's new. As soon as it becomes common place people will see that channel of communication as a source of coercion/marketing and start to ignore it. Aside from the fact that he seems to be drawing massive conclusions about the viability of a business based on extremely little data here, it seems really naive to not consider in his calculations the long term effects of essentially ruining the value of the channel that you are exploiting to get those numbers in the first place.
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>Why do these otherwise very smart people always seem to draw these kind of shortsighted conclusions?
The obvious conclusion is they aren't very smart. Consider that Cluely guy: the best returns on lying are to be the only one lying while everyone else tells the truth, so why does he want to promote lying? Partly dumb ragebait marketing (this isn't going to attract talent... and while it has given them millions in startup funding, how long are the sharks giving him the money going to do that?) and partly he just isn't very smart.
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Tragedy of the commons. The person that ruins a commons first takes all the supply.
This is why regulation before, not after, the commons are plundered, is important.