Slashdot Killed My Kickstarter Campaign
New submitter agizis writes "Alex from Connectify here. I wanted to say thanks to all of you who commented on the Slashdot story about our Kickstarter campaign It was super-educational discussing Switchboard with all of you: you wanted your own servers, and we weren't doing enough to communicate what was so special about Switchboard. Based in a large part on your feedback, we blew up our Kickstarter campaign, and changed almost everything. Thanks, Slashdot. This isn't reddit, but ask me anything."
I do get how unbelievably negative Slashdot can be. Take the first Slashdot story that ever covered Connectify. ... What did I get 200 comments on Connectify, probably all negative. But I got 20,000 downloads of the software in the 8 hours after the post went up. So it's not obvious from reading the discussion but there actually were 100x as many people who liked the idea, as hated it. (Oh and then we decided that this really could be company).
More and more, I'm coming to think of myself as a guy who takes complex networking technology and tries to make it simple. I'm doing this because I want to give people not only faster internet access, but also free them from the companies that would control what we can do on the Internet connections that we're paying for. Well that's my big vision, mostly I answer emails, and wish I had more time to actually code.
Actually, I find this sort of encouraging.
There's a whole raft of companies out there that simply can't let go of The Vision. And absolutely MUST ram The Vision down everyone's throats.
It's rather refreshing to see a company stop, mid-stride, and re-evaluate a product and actually be willing to make a change like this.
To actually, y'know, LISTEN to feedback. Instead of bulling ahead and damn the torpedoes.
Or worse, making some a pointless token gesture.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!