That amazement is due to one of our largest and least realized critical mistakes as a civilization: no where are people taught how to effectively communicate. We have entire Colleges of Communications at every university, and what do they teach? How to execute mass manipulation, not how to convey understanding, not how to manage disagreements. These are not "mistakes" either, this distinct lack of teaching real communications is how society is maintained manipulative. And the worst part, many of you will read this and not understand, because you've not been taught the communications insights to grasp this message.
I think my college technical writing course covered these things quite well. It's not that they're not taught, it's that communication skills are not rewarded the same way that marketing skills are. Generally speaking there's a lot of blame to be placed on the universities, but in this case it's an HR oversight.
A technical writing class is learning the alphabet, and does not really touch the nuance, the subtleties in certain topics that make them very difficult to communicate.
Any topic with unknown aspects (to the audience) or controversy require special handling because in that uncertainty people's personalities step in, and that is the seed of misunderstandings becoming institutionalized.
When an individual has gained group prestige from their "theory" being accepted, they then guard that prestige with omissions of information that counteract their position, and deferment of blame when proved incorrect. This is the ordinary human response, and will play out unless the participants have formal communications training that break this pedestrian cycle.
Communications is far more than just "communicating with another". Self communications is the gargantuan invisible elephant yet to be realized by larger society, and is the source of gullibility. Group communications has fractal complexities that play out depending on how many participants are trying to collaborate, and their relative hierarchical power verses one another. Entire careers are spent identifying the categories, and this area is largely unexplored, unexamined. It's too interpersonal and laced with extreme levels of power for honest analysis.
And then there is AI: a communications technology that people think is an automation technology, and our colossal communications tragedy is not going to correct this misunderstanding.
It is how I write. This is what happens when one gets 7 college degrees, people accuse you of writing with AI. I've even been accused of rehearsing AI for how I talk; no, that is how I talk.
>I don't understand why HN seems so concerned about nailing down its "value proposition".
You're getting sidetracked because of the particular phrase "value proposition" but a lot of people just use it as a stock meme to simply understand something even without any commercial product perspective.
You can read through this entire thread where people are having a hard time wrapping their head around what _it_ _is_ because the blog article doesn't explain it well.
The following various stock phrases use different words but are basically asking the same thing:
- "This is the solution to what problem?"
- "How's this different from Tailscale/Wireguard/QUIC/etc?"
- "What is the raison d'être ?"
- "ELI5?"
- "What's the value proposition?"
- "Why should I care about this?"
- "What's the use case for this?"
- "What's the motivation / rationale for this?"
- "What does this do?"
And then different commenters try different explanations and hopefully one will finally click for readers.
I mean this kindly, but this is so “engineer brained”
Maybe the game has changed with LLMs, but its been a running joke that engineers will build a startup/product/library/thing only to then realize they can’t get any users and that marketing and sales are hard.
Attention and mind share are more valuable than ever. If you can’t answer “Why should I care about X?” then you are fighting an uphill battle.
> Maybe the game has changed with LLMs, but its been a running joke that engineers will build a startup/product/library/thing only to then realize they can’t get any users and that marketing and sales are hard.
I agree with your premise, but you're still viewing this technology through the lens of "a successful product" versus "a successful piece of technology".
Plenty of open source projects stay open source and are popular without ever making any sales whatsoever. I'm not trying to project my own motivations on the Iroh team; they may want to build a product out of it. For me, though, the project has a lot of appeal already, because it exactly and excellently fulfills a technological need, not because they brought me in with a "it's x but for y" narrative.
It's still about getting users even if you're not charging money for it. If you want to make an open source thing and don't care about getting users then that's great for you I guess? And there's a good chance it'll stay that way unless you put at least some effort into getting them (eg even putting effort into a readme counts).
Even if it isnt a product, it is still a tool/utility. Those srill have value propositions that need to be communicated for the tool to be used by the people who could utlize it
Imagine if had a nail to drive into a peice of wood, but the onky thing youd ever heard about hammers was either how critical they are in building construction, or about their weight balancing and how much grip the handle has. Youd never know that you could swing the hammer to hit the nail and drive it in
On the other hand, parent commenter's comparison is based on another product. How good it is if people don't know what Tailscale is? There was a time I did not understand Tailscale and its value.
Agreed, I went through the blog post and a few other pages trying to figure out what the benefit of Iroh is since I have never heard of it... was struggling lol.
Oh come on. I guess it can be abused that way but its so cynical. First, i heavily doubt thats the intention here, and secondly, mmost ads are blocked at the rendering stage, rather than DNS. Especially since youtube broke DNS adblocking by serving ads and contect from the same domain
No, it didn't. It shifted the burden of learning the value proposition to first knowing what Tailscale is exactly. And a response of "Duh, that's obvious", perhaps indicates being too deep in the guts of tailscale systems.
The target audience of this comment chain is exactly people who are familiar with Tailscale, aren't familiar with Iroh, and read the linked post.
Such a person (like me) reading that post will have an immediate reaction of "this sounds a lot like Tailscale", but the post doesn't provide a clear answer to "what problem does this solve that Tailscale doesn't?"
The people with that reaction are the target audience of this comment chain. The fact it is upvoted to the top of the comment section here is an indication that there are quite a few such people, and if this is your reaction you're presumably not one of them. (and that is perfectly fine!)
Tailscale is a very well established company in the field, and if you didn't hear tailscale before, perhaps this product would not be so interesting for you, so it makes sense here.
Otherwise, everything would end up being a "Thing Explainer"[0].
A big part of communication is knowing your audience. GP could have spent a bunch of time explaining what an "application" is, what a "network" is, etc. but he knew that most HN users are familiar with Tailscale, so leaning on that prior knowledge let him explain the concept in fewer words. That is effective communication.
You explained the value proposition so well. The website just didnt get to the "why?" At all