travelhead

Viib is a static ad generation platform that turns a single website URL into production ready ad creatives.

The core idea came from a simple frustration. Generating ads is repetitive, but the input data is usually already structured on the site itself. Brand colors, value props, product hierarchy, reviews, pricing language, hero images. Most ad tools ignore that structure and start from a blank prompt.

The focus is static ads because they are still the workhorse of performance marketing. Faster to test, cheaper to iterate, easier to scale.

Right now the system generates three ads on signup so people can see output quality immediately. No long onboarding.

Happy to answer technical or product questions.

After 5 years building BeltBro with 5 patents and 3 million customers, I watched my Amazon sales collapse overnight.

The reason? 250+ duplicate listings from Chinese sellers flooding my category—all selling the identical product under fake brand names with manipulated (fake) reviews.

I investigated and found that 42 of the top 100 "New Releases" in Men's Belts are duplicate listings by the same seller network. Same 5.9" x 1.5" dimensions. Copy-paste descriptions. Identical videos. Coordinated launches.

They aren't just dominating organic searches on Amazon, but they also use Amazon ads to drive tens of thousands of sales per month to their infringing products.

When I tried to report patent infringement through Amazon's APEX program, they limit me to 10 reports per month. Meanwhile, 100+ new infringing listings appear in the same timeframe.

Amazon's response when I asked for more reporting capacity? "We are unable to discuss this criteria."

This isn't just my problem. Chinese networks control 63% of Amazon's third-party marketplace—$35 billion annually—using shell brands to dominate search results and destroy American small businesses that actually innovate and hold patents.

I've documented the full investigation with evidence in the HN link above.

If you work at Amazon, represent government, work in media, or have connections that can help—please share this. Small businesses deserve a marketplace that rewards innovation instead of manipulation.

The “invisible hand” of HN

No options. It’s secondary equity from EquityZen.

EquityZen

I invested $25,000 into buying secondary equity shares of Evernote about 1.5 years ago. In January, I got an exit check back for $120 bucks after the sale to Bending Spoon :/

I definitely think you’re on to something.

Chess rating, with sufficient number of games, over a long duration, is an excellent measure of progress or lack thereof.

It could also serve as an early warning indicator for Alzheimer’s or neurodegenerative diseases, especially bullet (1 minute) chess which relies both on motor coordination and rapid thinking ability.

Amazon cut inventory sending limits for merchants which means many skus are out of stock. Why did they do this? A combination of fewer employees, fewer warehouses and less space, etc.

Overall trend is going in the wrong direction. They should be helping merchants and providing more space and opening more warehouses.

I have EXTENSIVE experience with this, as I’ve dealt with it many times as a brand owner.

The strategy is to attack them from all sides.

1) Shopify DMCA 2) Cloudflare DMCA 3) Web host DMCA 4) Look at any widgets or services they use on the page - DMCA 5) Get a lawyer to email them notice of violation and lawsuit 6) Google DMCA 7) Registrar DMCA

I’ve had most luck with 1 and 2 (most responsive). Others can work but take more time 2-3 months.

8) Order from their store (If they are selling) and write your company name as customer (so they can see you are buying to pursue legal action).

9) Start adding any relevant keywords they might be using on their domain to your website to catch any traffic (like variations of your trademark).

With all of these listed, the best method is to cite your Trademark # in each email. There’s a specific template for each service provider which needs to follow guidelines for takedown requests (such as your signature, mailing address etc), make sure you include all those relevant points or they may ignore your request.

It wouldn’t be that hard to hack and packet sniff the hotel wifi where all the players are staying and analyzing lines the night before the game.

Our favorite test is A, A, B, B

It’s surprising how often a test could be set up incorrectly or have other technical issues which this test can catch.

We try to ensure a statistically significant result on both A’s or both B’s before determining a winner.

It does take longer to run this test, but should give a much higher degree of accuracy.

I’m curious how difficult it would be to iterate this model into a VR Holodeck with spoken scenes, realistic movements, personality and behavior? Obviously this would be a huge AI undertaking but my prediction is 5 years.

Not using multiple accounts, please do not make unfounded accusations or I will report your account as harassing.

Why are you flagging relevant discussion threads on moderation and undisclosed shadow banning policies that are relevant to the HN community?

Shadow banning is a particularly severe form of moderation as it intentionally silences a critical voice without any notification that his/her voice is being censored, and without any ability to appeal to the larger HN community in case of an error.

FYI Dang, the moderator of HN, reversed your decision on flagging aka “killing” my previous thread, please see his comment to you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252141

Example 1:

Dang you admitted yourself to shadow banning me for this post:

https://travelhead.medium.com/amazon-delists-us-again-3c8874...

You claimed this was self-promotional. The article had nothing to do with self promotion and was written as a critique of big tech, which ironically as an SF “big tech” website you appear to be defending by censoring my submission from HN readers.

All I requested was a “fair chance” to submit my content and get upvoted or downvoted by my peers, which you explicitly forbid by killing the post within 2 minutes and shadow banning me.

In fact, my previous submission on a related topic received 511 upvotes and 267 comments, which was fairly promoted to the first page of HN:

https://travelhead.medium.com/competitor-reported-our-no-buc...

You claimed my new submission was too similar to my previous submission even though it was on a completely different topic.

At what point does Dang (ONE GUY) have too much power and control over what gets seen and distributed to potentially millions of people?

I’ve read over the HN terms, guidelines, rules, and your moderation techniques seem to be completely unjustified. I neither spammed HN, submitted promotional material, used bots, or submitted irrelevant content. Yet my account is treated just as a spammer even though my previous submission had 267 comments and I was interviewed by national media on TV, etc about this exact topic.

Example 2:

Within 5 minutes of submitting this post it gets “FLAGGED” status. Granted, this was probably from the community and not Dang (although I’m not certain). As a community, why is this topic so heavily downvoted and flagged? Why is it controversial to discuss in the open HN’s policies towards content moderation and specifically shadow banning when it’s not clearly disclosed in any terms of service or website policies that are available for the community to read?

Example 3:

After submitting this thread and noticing it was flagged, I attempted to ironically post another submission pointing out this post about moderation was flagged and censored, but my submission was immediately shadow banned:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30240159

Essentially what is happening is there is no discussion on the topic of HN censorship and shadow banning policies, any attempt to discuss it results in immediate downvoting and shadow banning, and this all happens under one guys watch, Dang, who everyone trusts to moderate content without any bias across a wide variety of topics that he may or may not agree or disagree with.

However, Dang, I do appreciate you responding to this thread and “unkilling” this thread. This shows me you are attempting to act fairly, although I disagree with your moderation policies and ability to kill topics so quickly which you solely deem irrelevant (To YOU).

Yes! White moves first, then black makes two moves in a row, followed by regular back and forth moves after.

This would theoretically allow black to start on equal terms.

I don’t like being logged into Twitter on my Desktop, but I often need to search Twitter. Now it appears I need an account to search?

Elizabeth could have saved herself many of these charges by telling investors she was pivoting to using 3rd party testing devices, reducing the number of tests, and transitioning to a business model involving venous blood drawing as a service with lower costs and better branding. Instead, she decided to continue to lie to investors even though she knew her tech didn’t work as she represented.

Your priorities and goals have likely changed from earning a living to finding meaningful and fulfilling work and leisure.

When was the last time you traveled overseas? Had a girlfriend? Developed a product or service that had an impact on society? Took up a new hobby that you enjoy?

Once you refocus on creating a new life, you’ll likely find your drive and ambitions returning.

I limited my article to only opponents that chess.com analyzed and banned after my report. There’s dozen more I reported that they failed to ban, and my guess is it has to do with a financial incentive to show more ads.

There’s definitely a large swath of cheaters in the 1900-2200 range on chess.com.

I’ve written extensively on the rampant cheating happening on chess.com:

https://travelhead.medium.com/rampant-cheating-on-chess-com-...

LiChess on the other hand has incredible cheat detection algorithms, and I’ve only reported one cheater in the dozens of games I’ve played since quitting Chess.com and moving to Lichess.

(I’m approximately 2350 on LiChess).

Totally agree! Here’s why: https://travelhead.medium.com/rampant-cheating-on-chess-com-...

Unfortunately, HN is a highly censored and moderated platform that uses tools such as shadow banning posts, banning users, power downvoting posts, etc to control what content is displayed. Moderators then apply their arbitrary and subjective rules to defend their actions with no community transparency.

For example, I posted a highly relevant article and was shadow banned because a moderator felt it was “too similar” to a previous post. This means it did not appear in the new section and was hidden from the HN community, even though my previous post received thousands of upvotes.

When I emailed the moderator and tried to appeal his decision, he provided more subjective rules to defend his position, claiming the content was self promotional because it was related to my own company’s struggle against Amazon.

People should realize HN supports only the moderators views with zero tolerance for all other content.

The post was shadow banned.

As far as similarities between posts, yes they are both about my experience with Amazon.

I agree HN moderators should flag spam accounts, remove automated bots, and focus on improving overall quality of HN.

What I fail to see is why the “new submissions” page is so heavily moderated that the HN moderators feel like my post was worthy of a shadow ban, when my previous post made national news attention and the front page of HN with 511 upvotes and 267 comments.

If a post is not spam, then let the users decide to upvote or downvote it.

HN proclaims itself to be a social news site, but this is clearly false. The content MUST align with the views of HN moderators or you won’t stand a chance at even a few people seeing your post. This was made evident by my post getting shadow banned by Dang within a few minutes of submission.

Also remember, shadow banning is the most severe form of censorship. By not alerting the user that his post is not visible to other users, they give the user no chance to appeal or even know that his post has zero distribution on the platform, in order to not draw attention to the censorship.

HN moderators clearly did not want me to know that my post was removed, in order to prevent threads like this appearing on HN. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this entire thread was removed because we are discussing HN / HN moderators in a negative light. That is the exact definition of censorship. The powers that be don’t want their content moderation policies exposed, in order to maintain the illusion of HN as a site that aggregates and votes on content by your peers.

>Have you asked by mail about that case?

Yes, I have a very lengthy email correspondence with the HN moderator who shadow banned the submission. He said it was similar to my prior post (it's absolutely not, it's a totally different topic) and that it was self-promotion (it's not, the reason why my prior post went to the front page of HN with 511 upvotes and 267 comments was because of my experience as a small business selling on Amazon.

Instead of a vague comment, why not read the article or respond to the specific accusations outlined on the thread?

Here’s a concrete example from two of my posts. My first submission received 511 points with 267 comments and was on the front page of HN and received national news attention. This clearly shows interest from HN about Amazon’s power against small Amazon sellers.

My next post was shadow banned by Dang and was wiped off the submission page within a few minutes, without even a chance to be downvoted or upvoted by my peers.

The HN moderators have too much power and control, especially in regardless to lack of transparency and arbitrary opinions on who to shadow ban.

1. Delisted on Amazon – “Defective Product” with 6 complaints of 5164 sold in 2021 (travelhead.medium.com) 1 point by travelhead 3 months ago | past

2. Amazon competitor got our belt listing taken down by saying it contains drugs (travelhead.medium.com) 511 points by travelhead 4 months ago | past |

This is an important topic since HN appears to be a news site that uses social up/down voting, but really is a highly moderated platform, where moderators have full power to censor and shadow ban for any reason without any transparency.

I was shadow banned for my submission about Amazon’s power over my small Amazon business, an important topic in which I received national media attention from NBC, former editors of Vice News, etc.

However, an HN moderator did not like the article, so he shadow banned me.

I understand there are cases for shadow banning, such as trolls, spam accounts etc, but my submission was a highly significant news worthy article that received national media attention, that did not deserve this treatment due to one HN moderators opinion.

HN lacks moderator transparency. Readers believe they are being shown a curated list of relevant news from their peers, but really are just seeing the topics and views that closely align with HN moderators opinions.

As an experienced media buyer, I would highly suggest avoid direct site buys like this. Most are total scams that may even resort to sending fake or bot traffic to inflate their clicks. Usually prices are 2-10x higher than just using site targeting on Adsense if available.

The way the scam works is churn and burn. Advertiser 1 is sold package for $5k-$25k on popular site X, advertiser realizes it’s total trash and loses all his money with 3 sales. They convince the next advertiser and the process repeats.

As a long time chess player and moderately rated (2100) player, this is a fascinating development! I played the 1900 and beat it in a pretty interesting game! Can you increase the strength to 2100+?

Hey HN,

Thanks to everyone’s feedback and help we were able to get them take down!

It’s counterfeit because they are using my logo and images on their product with the intent of deceiving my customers into purchasing their product.

It's relevant to the discussion considering I have no legal rights in China to protect my copyright and brand. Amazon is a USA based company that is ignoring my IP rights so they can profit by increased competition which reduces consumer prices.