I don't see this in the guidelines. Was it recently removed?
EDIT: Nevermind, I found it in this paragraph:
Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.
That's exactly what I did, and they changed the link and modified the discussion!
Notice, people below were talking about RapGenius specifically, their VC, and how much a license costs - yet that stopped once the editors modified the URL & headline.
It's not "blogspam" - it gave a nod to the place I saw it originally, while providing a unique perspective on the subject because of my experience.
1 - The Pitchfork article didn't mention any numbers relating to what the license cost.
2 - I gave context into who David Lowery is
3 - The headline included RapGenius, which most people find news on interesting
That information was provided by me, after discussions with song publishers & research. Changing the title & URL is extremely disrespectful.
I was excited to read your article because based on this comment I thought it would have in-depth analysis of the issue, but I found it to be a very shallow in terms of additional content. It has one paragraph with the licensing costs, which is useful information, and then the two sentence blurb on David Lowery, which didn't seem to be meaningfully connected to the issue at all (it actually is somewhat negative in my view, because it seems to imply a slight hint of perhaps ad hominem, but that was just my initial impression, and doesn't seem totally justified upon rereading). If you had multiple discussions with song publishers and research on this topic, it would definitely be valuable to share them.
With respect to disrespect, Hacker News exists for the benefit of its readers, and not necessarily for the benefit of the Internet's citizen-journalist army. Hacker News admins prefer "canonical" sources in most situations. That said, I wouldn't consider your post "blogspam."
RE: "we have enough of these photo sharing gimmicks already"
RE: "I think the author is missing the opportunity cost here"
The fact that there's already entrenched photo sharing kings means that you don't have to be first to market, overspend, or rush. There's no time crunch here, meaning that a great product could have been built well - over time - on budget, and still have had success.
Did you even read the article? The photo storage / sharing / librarian market is HUGE. Definitely large enough to support multiple players, even marginal ones that make $3-400k/yr.
Instead of paying employees half market rates, those employees can go and work on creating a VR app that could be used by millions of people, or some other opportunity. And they could receive full pay.
Why should these employees need to receive half pay when there is opportunity for them to receive full pay working on a different problem? I'm sure they could make great waiters at a local restaurant and receive a livable wage, but is it the best use of the opportunities they have? I'm going to go out on a limb and assume those 6 employees were excellent given how well Everpix was run.
> Instead of paying employees half market rates, those employees can go and work on creating a VR app that could be used by millions of people, or some other opportunity. And they could receive full pay.
Yes, you're right. But does a photo sharing service really need those kind of employees? Is there a need to be located at a technology cluster like the SV where developers are expensive and a scarce resource?
Services like Everpix are - in terms of technology - pretty trivial. They can be built anywhere in the world by average developers. No need to hire expensive Stanford PHDs to do a job a kid from the local community college in Kentucky could do.
I don't know what you do or don't understand, but your post isn't entirely accurate. VCs invest in early-stage companies with strong potential for high growth. That means companies like SnapChat, yes, as well as companies like Amaranth Medical [1].
Your post takes the example of two startups in the consumer photo industry and generalizes it to startups and VCs operating across an entire spectrum of industries. That alone suggests a limited understanding of VC funding.
I won't suggest taking VC funding in all (or even most) cases. But it is the right thing to do when your company's interests are aligned with the VCs.
Snapchat also hasn't proven it can generate a single real-world dollar from end users or advertisers.
They could implement advertising, fuck the entire service up, and all the teens jump ship to the next app that allows you to easily import all your contacts.
There's no "lock in" with social networks like Snapchat. Want proof? Friendster, Myspace, etc.
The main theme I was trying to get across is that it's more realistic to build a profitable business, instead of throwing efforts towards eyeballs, vc-cash, and a lottery ticket chance of cashing out.
Hmm it's actually somewhere in between, it looks like about a quarter is sticker purchases, a quarter sponsored stickers, and a half in-app purchases. The above articles is off, if you read the link in the article it gives the breakdown above.
We didn't see a problem with it (and neither did our lawyers) until that $6.6M judgement played out against another lyric site with similar "user contributed" content.
There are a couple of routes to go legal - one being Musixmatch, which charges at minimum $20k per year for a blanket license.
An email straight from them:
"We offer data licensing packages, through our scalable Lyrics API, that are customized to meet your needs with annual fees ranging from USD $20,000 to higher depending on the audience for the data and which data are being licensed. We are not able to offer any sort of data license for less than USD $20,000."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6723445
Thank you!