New ask Hacker News story: Our Show HN post was strongly criticized, here are our lessons learned

Our Show HN post was strongly criticized, here are our lessons learned
3 by hubraumhugo | 2 comments on Hacker News.
Our Show HN post (https://ift.tt/3nK8k9g) about a VPN review aggregator got so many negative comments that the HN pushed it down from the front page at some point. Although we should take comments on HN with a grain of salt, we learned a lot from this failed launch post: # Astroturfed reviews The VPN industry is full of false promises and shady businesses. It's a highly commercialized market, and companies are bought up by less reputable and bigger ones, making it hard to know who to trust. People had no reason not to believe that our review site was a shill for another company. Kape Technologies, a former malware distributor and owner of PrivateInternetAccess and ExpressVPN, is doing this (https://ift.tt/3exbBDm). VPN review sites Kape Technologies own include vpnMentor.com, Wizecase.com, and SafetyDetectives.com. It's no surprise that these sites all rank VPNs owned by Kape as the best choices. Learning: The first step was to be fully transparent about our intentions and ownership. We did this by adding an about section (https://ift.tt/3Js1y0z) and a writing a blog post about how our aggregation and ranking works (https://ift.tt/33TitJ8). The second step was to remove all untrusted review sources, which left us with Reddit and HN. Please note that these sources are not fool-proof, and we always recommend doing your due diligence before making a necessary purchase. These sources are also subject to change as trust issues emerge. # NordVPN security breach NordVPN was ranked #1 based on our initial analysis. What we didn't know: Some of their servers recently got hacked to root, and they then attempted to cover up the huge security breach rather than disclose it. In addition, they have a relationship with a shadowy data mining company called Tesonet. Learning: We changed our ranking algorithm: Once we determined the most trusted sources, we worked on a ranking algorithm that we thought was as fair as possible. We ranked each VPN with their overall score on the r/VPN comparison table, which scores VPNs based on their specs. We then adjusted those scores based on sentiment and volume of discussion on Reddit and Hacker News. # Annoying popup To spread the word, we added a popup to collect email addresses. The idea was to keep people updated about what we're working on. As it turned out, this was a bad idea. A popup doesn't inspire great confidence in being a neutral, non-biased, not marketing-oriented informative site. Instead, it gives the feel like it's just another place to siphon data to monetize. Doubly so when the field of VPN reviews is rife with scams and paid fake reviews. Learning: We disabled the popup for now and will instead add a dedicated signup button. Don't scare people away in the first 20 seconds. What are your learnings from posting your project on HN?