Comment by kentonv
12 hours ago
We really struggled with how to present this to multiple audiences at once.
My tweet thread, and the GitHub readme, is really the presentation intended for the HN crowd. The blog post is for a different audience.
12 hours ago
We really struggled with how to present this to multiple audiences at once.
My tweet thread, and the GitHub readme, is really the presentation intended for the HN crowd. The blog post is for a different audience.
Why not a talk/demo video? Like Google Wave. Yeah I know that's probably not the best ~~success~~ example but it was a hell of a demo.
> The blog post is for a different audience.
No one? Like literally, I don't understand a thing of what the blog post is saying. It's vague to the point of meaning nothing. Every piece of text I've seen that explains CloudflareOS is clear except the blog post.
I sent the blog post to someone right now because it had exactly the kinds of details they care about, with the appropriate level of technical details.
I used to read their blog regularly because it had lots of interesting technical details. Lately, though, there’s less of that, and I can’t quite put my finger on what changed. My guess is that they realized how popular the blog had become and started using that attention more for advertising. There’s nothing wrong with that, but earlier the “advertisements” actually made me want to try things out and bring them back to my team. I even considered applying to work there. Not so much anymore. I’ve even removed it from my RSS feed.
I don’t like offering criticism without a solution, but I’m not really motivated to come up with one here. It looks like employees may read this, so maybe someone will see the feedback.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/three-chapters-at-cloudflare-pro...
TL;DR; jgc stopped editing the blog, and AI slop took over:
> Today, after more than 13 years at the company, I am joining Cloudflare’s board of directors and retiring from my full-time position as CTO.
> ...
> I wrote for, and edited, the Cloudflare Blog for many, many years
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This matches my perception of a ton of recent Cloudflare blog posts. I literally have no idea who they are targeting. It almost feels like they're targeting themselves.
Launching just recently and having to think about how i'm marketing things more and more, the hardest parts to really market are the AI related features. Most of the real value AI provides isn't flashy its just eliminating the tedious work that sits between the interesting parts of a job: structuring messy data, extracting information from documents, validating it against references, filling out forms, routing it for approval, and preparing it for distribution. The exciting work was already exciting. AI just removes the friction between point A and point D. That's alot harder to demonstrate than generating an image or writing a paragraph. "Look, here's all the data you no longer have to enter manually" isn't exactly a compelling marketing headline, even if it's where users save the most time.
I sometimes wonder who AI marketing is really for. The people who would benefit from eliminating repetitive work, or other technical people who want to see interesting AI demos.. A lot of product launches end up looking like "Here's a prompt that bootstraps X," when the bigger story is that the prompt replaces an hour of repetitive work that nobody wanted to do in the first place.
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