Comment by CosmicShadow

10 years ago

I'd disagree, he puts on the air that he is, it's his job to and how he gets traffic and reputation, but if you watch how and what he tweets and with who, it doesn't take long to see how brown his nose is. I had to unfollow as it just made me sick to watch.

He'll tell you what you want to hear, but none of it is genuine. He'll act like he's part of big important and/or trendy discussions, but he'll just chime in with the most popular opinion and make sure to include other SV twitter celebs and VCs on twitter to look like more of an authority. I cannot stand those people and they never stop tweeting.

I had a top item of the day early on (or whatever it's called, been so long since I've looked at PH now) and I tried interacting with him on twitter, before posting and after (and I had met him in person a year or two earlier), he said he'd support my project and share it, and he'd definitely back my crowdfunding campaign. He'd tweet me that he'd back it and share it and in DMs again he said he would, but he'd only actually retweet things that pointed to PH or only tweet at me (so not actually help share like he said he would). He said he loved what I had and would help share it, but instead of retweeting or even just composing a tweet, he'd favourite my tweets. Yeah, thanks for the sincere follow up on saying you'd help, a favourite is like a passing smile, not a helpful hand. He never did actually back the thing for even $1, even when prodded and saying that he definitely would, and then after getting practically zero results or traffic from being on top for a day, he sends me an email for testimonials and asks me to write an entire blog post myself about how awesome PH is and how it helped me (with stats)! In addition, I could use the PH Badge on my page to show my pride and drive him more traffic! I said fuck that, it didn't help at all and he lied to me, but I imagine so many others did because they wanted to be touched by this "awesome twitter startup celeb" and to be part of the massive PH circle-jerk that's taking founders by storm. Thus people buy into his brown nosing, and the perceived popularity of PH and make it bigger and bigger, because everyone wants to have an edge up in getting their new thing noticed too!

If you are thinking maybe my crowdfunding campaign sucked and that's why he didn't back or help, well, then don't tell someone directly that you will share or back it if you don't like it. You tell someone you are going to do something, and you announce to others that you did, but in reality you don't, that's not cool man, that's being a lying sack of shit. Especially so if you are using that and me to drive your own site's success. Sure that's what it's for, but still it's low. He'd make a great politician!

What most people don't realize is that behind that shitstained smile we are all just daily throw away products to his ever hungry machine, just like the news, they don't care, they just need content, but if you do just the right amount of spin and brown nosing you can hide that fact and draw people in daily and even promote it for free. It's a self feeding machine.

I'll praise you like the dickens today as it drives me traffic, but 24 hrs and 1sec later you are trash and I need the next hot thing to eat up and spread. It's the news business.

Maybe I might seen cynical, but this is what happened to me and these are my observations from watching the guy online, interacting with him, and thinking about how to make a site like his work long term.

You need to be a mastermind of building a limelight and engineering brand, reputation and hype. You need to jump on every trend, you need to appear like the good-guy darling child of SV, innocent and always supportive of everyone. You need to look like everyone important knows you and supports you. You need to get in everyone's faces all the time.