You know, I'm generally a fairly sympathetic guy. I've been screwed over enough times in my life to know how it feels, and to be able to feel for the next poor sod who gets screwed over in his turn. That said, I'm starting to get really tired of people trying to leverage HN into being their grievance du jour fixificator.
Sometimes, it's appropriate, as the people who could do something about the problem are here, or reachable quickly through here. The prospect of being shamed before the HN community is probably a very effective motivator for companies who've been engaged in hinky behavior to clean up their acts, too.
But the simple fact is, HN isn't your mommy, and it isn't the police; we aren't here to hold your hand, and we aren't here to fix your problems for you. People are coming here, crying that "someone on the internet was naughty!" over increasingly trivial bullshit like this, and I, for one, am finding it more and more a waste of time and bandwidth.
An alternative point of view is that people are complaining on HN to warn others about scammers and unsavory companies in their mix.
Without being able to name and shame, how are we supposed to create a social stigma towards the bad players?
I realize that the author spent more effort in drafting the complaint than in entering the contest but isn't that a good thing? Many scams rely on people being unwilling to complain when they are nickle and dimed.
"are complaining on HN to warn others about scammers and unsavory companies "
And in the case of this particular issue we know nothing of the person lodging the complaint other than their karma score.
Why is this even to be taken on face value anyway from someone with no contact info that has provided what amounts to little info other than:
"This is the jpegmini contest that I entered to win a Nikon D5100 Camera. They pulled their pages down after the contest ended so I had
to pull these from google cache. For the record, I blocked out all names and twitter handles aside from my own and jpegmini's. "
Edit: "their karma score" (if you don't want to read their comments and make a judgement on their credibility of course which most won't have the time to do).
And yet posts like these usually get right to the top of the front page. People will continue to treat HN like mommy when HN continues to act like mommy.
Some of the issues that have come to light on HN have been genuine, but in this case I feel like this guy has spent more time complaining than he did participating in the contest... They scammed you out of what? 5, maybe 10, minutes of your time?
Its the "People's Court" :-) But more seriously there is a challenge that in the poorly regulated world of the Internet its often difficult to find justice, either from Joe Jobs or scams. If you have a popular blog you can taunt the scammer with cartoons or dry wit, but if you have no soapbox you're left trying to leverage something else.
Like you I find it annoying that this is something folks use HN for but I understand the motivation. I know there have been times when I've filed a complaint with a regulatory agency, or written a representative, and knew in my heart it would fall on presumably deaf ears, but I count on the law of averages to motivate others to do so as well. Sometimes that works, other times, not so much.
Which is why we have popular segments on the local news called <news-outlet>-on-your-side or ActionLine or any number of things like that. Perhaps there is a startup opportunity here, BobsHitList :-) Some folks who are not particularly moral, like RipoffReport, do quite well at it.
Sometimes, it's appropriate, as the people who could do something about the problem are here, or reachable quickly through here. The prospect of being shamed before the HN community is probably a very effective motivator for companies who've been engaged in hinky behavior to clean up their acts, too.
But the simple fact is, HN isn't your mommy, and it isn't the police; we aren't here to hold your hand, and we aren't here to fix your problems for you. People are coming here, crying that "someone on the internet was naughty!" over increasingly trivial bullshit like this, and I, for one, am finding it more and more a waste of time and bandwidth.