> I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me.
From the article:
> They were so excited about the project and got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they’d spent redesigning the blog.
The management directed the designers to do that work, to see if they could get away with charging for it. There is no doubt, that you were deceived to squeeze money out of you.
> I genuinely believe that WebAgency tried their best on this project. I don’t feel like they meant to deceive me or squeeze money out of me. We just didn’t match.
Sounds exactly like how people rationalize abusive behavior from their partner. "It was my fault he hit me" etc.
That's because they did abuse you and ripped you off.
I disagree. (1) There is evidence that his company may profit from the redesign, and (2) he risks being sued for even the slightest mischaracterization in his blog, which requires tens of thousands to defend (at least). I don't see the point in risking the family business over this. Both parties learned a lesson. Perhaps the WebAgency will decide never to have hourly clients again.
>These are people -- tricking them into helping to increase your websites monetization is just unethical and wrong.
This only persuades me that they're doing it. I don't believe backlashes are effective in this kind of scenario, as there's no power on the backlash side.
>Maybe you're right that it's a bit naive to throw money at internet eccentrics who don't have a plan and trust that they will manage things well.
I don't expect him to manage it well. I'd have been happy if half of the promised work got delivered and the money was spend on hookers and blow. I know most of the fees for my portfolio are funding that type of thing already.
> you quite firmly believe the project itself has a future, just that nobody else is able to do so.
Looks like some unwarranted feeling of self-importance combined with the sunk cost fallacy.
You still have options: make it paid only, stop taking contributions at all, hire someone to sort it out or find a volunteer to do so. Or walk away and see how quickly Amazon will copycat you.
Or accept that that’s the cost of having your pride.
Otherwise it’s almost a textbook example of emotional blackmailing some parents are known for.
> I feel the original intent, to be able to contribute directly back to page authors, was a noble one. It may not have played out as intended, but it wasn't a scam.
The original intent was absolutely a scam. They wanted to hide the ads that were already on websites, replace them with their own, then give a fraction of the revenue they just effectively stole from those websites back to them (but only if they knew to ask for it).
Also they were going to take over all the third-party tracking data for their own, while branding it as “privacy” — so much hand waving about "we don't run a MiTM proxy" (while hoping we didn’t notice it’s because they don’t need to be in the middle when they control the browser itself).
Absolutely brazen, and they kept changing their story in real time whenever people started to notice hey wtf is this. Happened to be able to find this in my posting history for example; in hindsight I wish I hadn't been so cowed by the fact that I was arguing with Brendan Eich Himself, because man what a load of horsepuckey he and his guy were delivering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14464518#14465271
> realize you on the path to make $100K on an app that, rightly or wrongly, could impact other people's livelihoods
Because someone giving me 100k for an app which wrote, to use it for the exact purpose I made it for is certainly /the/ reason I would change my mind about making it...
> and subject me to a torrent of unpleasantness. But that’ll end soon enough, and that’s better than how I’d feel if I kept going.
What he doesn't say is that he is obviously already getting what amounts to a "torrent of unpleasantness", from people which are more like colleagues than customers. Of course, no one wants to admit to kowtowing, so there is no mention of it, but as we can see, he cares about this sort of thing, so it was obviously a significant factor.
> Meta is paying, one way or another, for this project.
Did I deny this?
To put it in extreme clear example, just said time for someone to punch you != time for someone to work for you, while money is same all across. I hope you don't disagree with it.
> Also i feel little bad you didn't get any money out of I
Most likely it got them a much higher paying job than they would have otherwise gotten. Walking in and saying you single handedly run a site with billions of requests per day and petabytes of traffic will get you noticed.
> I have nothing to sell (other than the French course). I’m just sharing my experience.
I like your project, but this ^ is blatantly disingenuous.
Disclosing your revenue is a very effective marketing move that gives you a lot of traffic and drives sales up. You cannot not know that and it's extremely unlikely if it weren't one of the reasons for the linked post, if not the primary one.
If you were up to "just sharing", you would've done it anonymously with the name redacted and no links to your website.
> Easy thing to say. But imagine Zuckerberg had hired you to code the first version of his site, paid you a few thousand bucks, and then he went on to be one of the richest men in America?
The GP still has it right. Paid for a task. Done. It would be different if he toiled away for 100 hours/week for no pay, with the hope of having a hit. As originally described, he has no more of a claim than the guy that made Zuck a sandwich at the food truck.
> I went ahead and sent the demo URL to my friend who is opening a restaurant. We’re having lunch on Thursday, when he’ll sign up for his account. It’s exactly the kind of thing he was hoping for, so he can get back to working on his restaurant and not worry about his website.
This reads more as a paid promotional piece than an objective opinion.
From the article: > They were so excited about the project and got carried away, but he was going to remove the hours they’d spent redesigning the blog.
The management directed the designers to do that work, to see if they could get away with charging for it. There is no doubt, that you were deceived to squeeze money out of you.
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