Now Earn.com, the concept I was railing against, failed. It failed hard. It was consumed many years ago like many startups,Â
and the company that bought it, Coinbase, does not do anything quite like this. (The guy who created that company, Balaji Srinivasan, is by no means struggling.) But that didn’t stop this three-year-old rant from appearing on Hacker News, out of nowhere, last week.
Out of the context of that period, it reads like an overly hyperbolic, over-the-top rant that doesn’t help anyone. It just feels like I needed to dial it back a whole freaking lot.
Emotions can catch you at the tippy-top of the scale, and while it feels like you’re saying something that matters or speaking up for a group of people, sometimes that ranting can feel completely over the top outside of its original setting. The conflict feels small now, but at the same time, I can understand why it felt big: It seemed like a threat to my business model, and I imagined not one person doing this, but hundreds. And as someone who likes the open nature of email newsletters, that worried me.
Still, I think the tone was unnecessary. I needed to think about the issue at a deeper level without the level of blood-to-the-brain rage that was clearly running out of my fingers at the time I wrote it.
Sometimes, what seems like life and death turns out to be a modest pin prick from a distance. So no, that wasn’t the way I should have responded to that.