Some honest feedback from a long time hacker news participant and innocent bystander...

It looks like pclark is providing feedback of some kind to a product represented by rantfoil, who is responding.

I have no opinion about the issues being discussed in this thread, in fact I'm not sure I even understand many of them. But this much I do understand...

rantfoil, you appear to be arguing in a public forum. Don't. By definition, you can't win.

You responses may be perfectly valid (who knows), but language like

I have a major bone to pick with your characterization of Posterous themes.

I hardly think the theme community is unhappy about...

Attacking...is absurd...

make you and all that you represent appear confrontational.

It doesn't matter who wins this battle, rantfoil will lose the war if this is the public perception of the corporate face. Find a way to address this feedback that will attract innocent bystanders, not scare them away.

Agreed, I've gone from being curious and neutral/positive about posterous and how they were thinking about making money (ie: solving the "how do you get users to pay for their own content" problem), but now I'm completely turned off to the company because of the way I've seen them respond to criticism over the last week or two. Not that I'm looking for a blogging service, but I'd rather be on one that was run by adults if I was.

Eh, its cool to be passionate about your own startup - I didn't realize rantfoil was the founder. :) As I said, I think Posterous is a cool company and they're better than this. I didn't want to ruffle anyones feathers, just state my opinion on these kinds of messages to users. He was probably right about my comments on their theme policy, he certainly knows better than I do, I tried to clarify my post a bit. We should be glad we're having a discussion about this - maybe we all learn something :)

I'm a hacker, just like all of you. It's hard for me to avoid having an emotional response over something I've poured my soul into.

Mea culpa. Edw, you're right. Pclark, thanks for the feedback.

I didn't attack the feature, I said they bootstrapped their theme launch with the tumblr themes. That isn't attacking.

I simply meant they lent on the pre existing tumblr community to boost their own offerings - which was genius.

I do think to do that, and for Tumblr to nod or whatever, and then to do this, seems, IMHO a mis-step.

Actually on day one every single theme that we launched, I designed.

We gradually added the best themes that we liked the most, some of them were Tumblr themes, and others were created by Posterous users, e.g. http://corywatilo.com

I wouldn't even call them "Tumblr themes." These were just blog themes, owned by a third party, who licensed them to us for use on Posterous. They just happened to be on Tumblr first, but don't have any other affiliation to that service.