Business Insider and pissing off your web visitors

you might be running a free website but if you dont think your customers are adding value with their mindshare then dont bother asking them for comment (or reading any further).


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This morning i was reading an article about startup visas on Business Insider
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-startup-visa-is-actually-a-really-bad-idea-2010-3?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=SAI_Select_032310



I posted the following comment
“Wait until these visa recipients find out about the “Heart Taxation Act”, they might change their mind. I’m leaving the USA before 2014 unless it’s repealed before then because of it”

- expat

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Unfortunately the Business Insider spam filter felt something i said was spam?? They have this complicated process where you need to send an email with your username, the article url and your comments then they manually approve it. PITA

I wrote a little snipe basically saying - what could possibly be wrong with my statement above for it to be considered spam.
To which i got the following email from Dan Frommer the editor of Business Insider;

Hi Dean,

Your comment has been approved. Obviously, the inconvenience sucks, but since your comment was left, we've successfully blocked more than 800 spam comments. I'm very happy with a <1% false positive rate. FYI, we use the same Akismet antispam filter everyone else does. But we'll try to keep improving it.

Thanks for reading!

df
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To which i replied

Dan,

This is the fourth comment I’ve had blocked personally.

I wonder how many of those 800 you blocked were people who just gave up…… and never bothered to send the follow up email?

Think your making up stories here (running my own websites I know you cant confirm one way or the other – don’t brag if you cant prove it and if you are reading the spasm then why not have someone post the false positives automatically instead of asking us to send an email) either way heads up this is the last email I’m sending – get a false value next time I’ll keep my thoughts to myself – if you don’t feel I’m adding value to your website I’ll keep my thoughts to myself.
Cheers,
Dean


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I guess the reason i'm writing all this is when someone writes a complaint to me about one of my websites i see it as a mjor gift to me personally.

They could have kept it to themselves and not taken the time to complain.

Instead they chose to gift you with some feedback to help you be successful 100 times over. Love and cherish the feedback, and never ever try to justify that you are right and they are wrong.

Otherwise next time they'll probably just choose to take their readign eyeballs elsewhere and your advertisers will surely follow sooner rather than later. No one is too big to say no to even a single customer.


Cheers,
Dean