The appropriate escalation step here is probably paying a lawyer to send a properly-worded letter on legal letterhead.
As far as dates go, did they use Certified Mail or a similar service? Does the postmark agree with their date or yours? Writing a date on the letter doesn't prove anything about when they sent it.
If it's a scam an not incompetence, a letter from a lawyer will probably shut them up quickly. Litigation usually isn't acquired, you're switching their opponent from a consumer they think they can scam to a professional they know they can't.
"A workaround exists, it's the user's fault for not knowing it" is terrible interaction design.
Having links on the site fail arbitrarily devalues the entire page. Users aren't stopping and thinking "hey, is clicking this link going to waste my time?" - which results in the entire system being perceived as less reliable and trustworthy.
I agree that such discussions are off-topic, but is there a better way to handle these articles than "RTFM, noob"?
You're quoting things I didn't say. The snark-amplification mechanism of putting the most uncharitable spin you can possibly think of on someone's remarks is one of the worsts you can do in comments here. I spend a lot of time asking users not to do it to other users.
Of course the paywalls suck. Is there any user who has to deal with more of these annoyances than we ourselves do? There can't be many.
The question is the lesser of two evils. Anyone who doesn't get what a disaster it would be for HN to lose the NYT, WSJ, Economist, and New Yorker doesn't get HN in the first place.
I think you're over inflating the value of articles that a bunch of people can't read. If this policy is even half consistent, nobody will be able to complain when there are things posted that there is absolutely no workaround for other than paying (or having someone copy and repost). Postings like that absolutely deserve complaint IMO because it punishes those without privilege.
> the value of articles that a bunch of people can't read
"Paywalls with workarounds" means people can read them. Obviously we care about that—we've explicitly let everyone know that users are welcome to help each other do so.
Re value, people disagree about value judgments but someone has to make the call, and it's the same now as it has always been.
I can at least tell you what it's based on: HN wants to maximize the quality of the articles on the front page and the quality of the comments in the threads. Sites like the NYT and the New Yorker increase the former. Repetitive complaining about paywalls reduces the latter. Hence the above.
With articles like NYT taking the place of an article without a paywall (the front page has limited real estate), all you know is that NYT articles result in crappy discussions because users have difficulty reading the article and rightly complain.
Rather than banning the crappy discussion, why not ban the articles that result in it?
Because many of them are high-quality articles, and intellectual curiosity is what HN tries to optimize for.
Obviously the discussions on such articles aren't all crappy. Often they're good. That doesn't mean that off-topic generic tangents about paywalls aren't a problem. All generic tangents are a problem, and this was an increasingly common one.
It astonishes me how the people making objections in this discussion ignore that we're talking about articles that are possible for nearly everyone to read. That's what paywalls with workarounds means. It means readable with a bit of a nuisance.
There have been a few legitimate counterpoints—for example, if it's true that in some countries you can't google WSJ articles to read them, that's a problem. But mostly this argument has charged ahead as if we were talking about unreadable content, with lots of indignant points being made on that basis and little stopping to notice that it's false.
Banning people from talking about it seems rather childish though. If people are talking about something off topic it's usually because it was something jarring enough to distract from the point. "the beatings will continue until morale improves"
It astonishes me how this policy is so favorable to a money sucking strategy yet it ignores the myriad of other usability complaints that frequently pop up (e.g. Why is/isn't this on medium, wtf is this scroll jacking, why is the js so big, why is the font so small/big).
None of the workarounds cost anything—that's what "workaround" means. Your comment is a good example of what I was talking about: indignation blithely proceeding on a false premise without stopping to consider it. The fact is that these articles are freely accessible with a bit of work. Had you said "time-sucking", you'd have had a point.
> ignores the myriad of other usability complaints that frequently pop up
You're right that those are also off-topic and mostly of little value. But we can't come up with a complete set of rules to cover everything under all cases. Even if we could, the community would reject it, and even if they didn't, what a miserable way to live.
Given that you did put in quotes things that dang didn't say, it sure seemed like dang was describing your actual actions, not saying anything about you or your intentions. (Well, maybe 'snark amplification'.)
The ad hominem was "doesn't get HN in the first place". It's very dismissive of people who disagree with you. And it's not the first time you've responded like this.
Oh, I see now. Sorry about that. Normally I'd delete it, but in this case I suppose I'd better leave it in.
I still don't see any ad hominem, and as a statement of HN's very specific values it seems obvious to me, but you're right that I shouldn't have said it in a dismissive way.
Freemium is the wrong route far more often than not, and I'm only going to cheer you on for making the decision which lets you continue to develop a stable business around your services.
It sucks to have to change your stance after the fact. There will probably be vocal opposition to doing so. But your odds of still being in business three years from now just shot up.
If it turns out to be at all useful with regard to maintaining revenue-generating code in production, $25 per year is a laughably low ask, even if it's only useful some of the time for some of the people.
Figuring out which people and when is, generically, a matter of doing your homework with customer development and targeted marketing, and then further improving your marketing surface as you learn more about who is a customer and how to find them.
Going from "this might be useful" to a working business model is, of course, a deeply nontrivial problem...but it's one that many people have solved before, and it's a heck of a lot easier if you don't start with "maybe $25 per year."
For reference, I'd kick myself for undercharging if I billed that much for a week, and correspondingly consider it "annoying but not business-critical" if I had trouble collecting it. Charge more.
Your rates should not be pinned to a lowball bid for an annual salary for a newly minted CS student. You're assuming far more risk, and hang around just long enough to deliver major value and get out, rather than being just productive enough that it's not worthwhile to hire someone to replace you.
You need to operate like a business that is delivering a high-value service in exchange for a reasonable fee. And you should probably narrow down your offering & marketing to the point that you have very few direct competitors, and practically none once you account for location and availability.
If you can constructively and reliably ship code to prod, you almost certainly have better immediate options than Elance.
Worst case, calling ten different web agencies in your area will probably get you enough work to pay the bills, likely at rates which are not unreasonable, and with far less pathological clients than you'd find on Elance. You might have to call another ten after that, if your luck is bad or if your sales skills are poor.
After that, what? Full-time job? Freelancing? Another startup? Get out of software and into the exciting world of fruit vending?
It's a wide world and you have skills that are in high demand. What do you want the next chapter in your life to be about?
The best solution depends entirely on your optimization conditions.
If transaction time is important, hard drives are high bandwidth. Ten 1TB hard drives are $500. Two 6TB hard drives are also $500, but you have fewer drives to worry about shipping. Five 2TB hard drives are about $370, if drive price is more important. Using ten 1TB drives is only best if we're optimizing for load / unload time and have that degree of parallelism in the pipeline. Otherwise, one of the other two will be better, depending on price sensitivity vs. other factors.
If it's not as time-sensitive, something like BitTorrent Sync will get the job done. This doesn't require shipments, additional hardware, or mucking about with hardware at either end, so it's very nice if "get it there ASAP" isn't a constraint.
In general, I would avoid selling software without a service agreement.
Bugs are a thing that happens. You will endeavor to make them happen less, because you're a competent professional. But because you're a competent professional, you know that some will happen anyway. So structure your business deals such that both you and your customer have a good answer to the problem. You shouldn't take a wash for being available, and they shouldn't be left hanging with nobody to get help from.
This gives you a tidy source of recurring revenue and an easy way to nudge up your average deal value. It gives your customers a reliable source for fixes and changes. It's good business all around.
As far as dates go, did they use Certified Mail or a similar service? Does the postmark agree with their date or yours? Writing a date on the letter doesn't prove anything about when they sent it.
If it's a scam an not incompetence, a letter from a lawyer will probably shut them up quickly. Litigation usually isn't acquired, you're switching their opponent from a consumer they think they can scam to a professional they know they can't.