What's the Deal with Tailscale?

No need for conspiracy. HN has its darling companies that people are really enthusiastic about, more so when they actually work really good. And karma whores know this fact and know any Tailscale article will probably hit the frontpage.

Blame the game, not the player.

I know I will click on a Tailscale post because people have said it's cool, I tried, and it is indeed cool and it feels like I'm only scratching the surface.

There is astroturfing on HN but don't forget we're a bunch of enthusiastic tech nerds. Do you complain because there is a big number of Linux or M1 posts? People really like them.

Disclaimer: not affiliated with Tailscale or any of its employees, haven't interviewed with them, not even giving them any money. I am not from a marketing or ad agency but just a lowly SWEng nerd.

Have you tried Tailscale? I have and our company is going to migrate in the next year or so because it does a LOT of stuff better.

As for your rule limiting submissions to the front page to only one every month. Who’s gonna moderate that? Are blog posts about the product also prohibited? Cause that is how I learned about Tailscale in the first place.

My point being, no I wouldn’t want a rule to moderate something like this. Because I come to hackernews to learn about these types of stuff.

Learn to ignore stuff in live you don’t enjoy.

I wholeheartedly agree. At the same time, there’s a slippery slope that the moderators responsible for the site have to balance.

Banning Rust for example, would be a massive improvement for the overall quality of the site but would deter a lot of conversations and site traffic. HN is an important part of making sure that YC companies have built-in exposure and marketing by using the site to ensure that a lot of people will see certain posts. In this same way, Tailscale is important to saturate the audience with, recently.

I don’t envy the job, however poorly I think it might be being done. It’s like being a world leader or something. It’d be miserably stressful for most people who complain about it, but absolutely catastrophic if they tried themselves. Someone has to do it, at the end of the day.

I’m torn between thinking it’s voting manipulation or the network effect of creating a desirable product so simple nearly anyone can use it. A huge amount of Tailscale comments are from people who find configuring trivial Wireguard tunnels challenging.

Their founder has a pretty famous blog that frontpages all the time (5+ pages of search results with 100+ upvote each): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

So no surprise that the product he made is also interesting to HN

First, can you provide references to your assertion that Tailscale is being mentioned "every 3 days"? Doing a search for "Tailscale" with a "past month" limit is showing 2 front-page hits: "Tailscale SSH" and "Tailscale ate my network". There are two other submissions that didn't make the front page, and one Tailscale alternative that also didn't make the front page.

My personal opinion is that missing either one of those posts through a "once a month" rule would be a negative to me. I personally read both and interacted with both and got value from them.

Deno and fly.io are also things that seem to have been mentioned a lot lately and while I'm not in the "market" for them like I am for Tailscale, I still find it useful to see those mentions.

Much of what I get from HN, like going to Python conferences, is just hearing the "word on the street". Artificially muting that word on the street because something similar has been mentioned within the last month, is a disservice.

Finally, your point about "Say I have a tailscale alternative, how do I overcome the Tailscale inertia?"... You do cool stuff. Tailscale SSH is something they recently built and is very cool. However, the first mention can ride on the coattails, much like one of those tailscale references I mentioned above: "netbird is a tailscale alterantive". But it just didn't generate enough interest.

If you can show legitimate vote fraud or the like that is leading to Tailscale showing up unreasonably frequently (again, it seems your perception is skewed, because TS has only been frontpage twice this month), then that's one thing. But muting what other people seem to be legitimately finding interesting is totally unreasonable.

Incidentally, is Tailscale reliable? I recall VPN services are a bit iffy because they need to store user data so it does not really matter the service they offer - if what you are after is privacy, rather than a way to bypass country-based content filtering systems

I question the premise: I browse HN quite a bit and I don't see Tailscale very often, certainly not every 2-3 days.

Other than that, keep in mind that major updates of software/services often result in a flood of secondary "literature" about the topic.

I think there are a few factors that contribute to its popularity:

• Once you have tried Tailscale - you are hooked;

• The team behind Tailscale is capable of changing the industry;

• Tailscale users become evangelists;

Sincerely yours, Tailscale fan