ShadowTraffic: Rapidly simulate production traffic to your backend
shadowtraffic.ioThis is a weirdly astroturfed post, a full 50% of the top level comments are the author or accounts created moments before this post, specifically to comment here.
I'm still interested in the product, but I've already got a bad taste in my mouth. If it's good, leave it to speak for itself.
Hey, author here. No foul activity was intended.
I've been building in public on Twitter and LinkedIn over the last few months and pre-announced the launch a few weeks in advance. I think a lot of the comments here were just folks flowing through there.
Lol. You’ve been caught red handed and you still double down. Take the L.
Why would the author replying to comments be a bad thing? Shouldn’t be counted in the “50% imo”
As for the potential of fake accounts - doesn’t HN have protection against this?
I'm talking about the top level comments, that is to say, comments posted directly in reply to the post itself. At the time, of the six comments, 1 was the author, and two were his colleagues who created accounts <5 mins before the post was created.
Isn't it strange that 3 accounts were created moments before the post and then all happened to make their first and only comments on this post, each with strongly positive responses and not disclosing any link to the project?
A further account has been created since then:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=chucklarrieu
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=botcanics
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bcalderwood
I do understand that HN has voter ring detection which seeks to cluster groups of users who engage strongly in cooperative voting, but the accounts here are probably too new to establish a pattern strong enough to call a voting ring already.
They are followers, colleagues, supporters as I am.
Is it against the rule to support a friend?
Not at all! It's good to support your colleagues, but it's also considered good etiquette to state your relationship when creating new accounts to give praise like this.
While you're doing do innocently, because of the rewards of doing well on HN, it does happen there people create new accounts to illegitimately try to boost their ranking without saying so.
Being proactive in stating your interests is polite and transparent
It's all good—I understand the need to protect the legitimacy of what's trending here.
I think in this case, a lot of people who've been following me on other channels just wanted to show some support and weren't familiar with the etiquette here. No harm intended.
Hey everyone, founder of ShadowTraffic here. I built this product in 90 days bootstrapped on my own dollar, which was a wild experience all on its own. Happy to answer any questions :)
This looks cool, can't wait to try it!
At first, people might think "$10,000 demo problem? What a high number!" Realistically, in corp environments, that number is an understatement. Plus the long time (and pain) it takes to get every team's buy-in to help with capturing/generating that data.
Thanks! Yeah, I didn't want to seem cheeky throwing out a big round number, but it feels ballpark right based on all the situations I've been in.
I frequently have this problem throughout my product development process: dev, testing especially under load or for edge failure cases, and demo/sales engineering. Great product, solid API and devex, and it’s been fun following Michael’s journey of building a product quickly and in public.
This looks really interesting! Generating large amounts of plausible fake data by modeling the reality is still a big issue both for generating custom demos and for maximum load testing of streaming applications. Will definitely give ShadowTraffic a try.
Thanks! I had initially built ShadowTraffic to help with simple demos, but I'm realizing over time that to run a good load test, you need the same kind of statistically accurate data.
the declarative approach makes for a lean and exacting experience versus other tooling for load testing. Great approach for the cloud native world.
Many thanks! Indeed, I'm looking forward to offering this as a cloud service someday.
Congrats on the launch Michael. I dreamt of this back when I was an SE at RJMetrics :)
Good luck for the launch, Michael!
Congrats on the launch, Michael!
Thanks Chuck! It's been cool getting feedback from you and the team the last few months. Customer-guided feedback FTW
Look forward to trying this!