1. Someone thinks of the clever idea of overwriting non-affiliate urls with an affiliate url of their account. 2. In realizing that no one would ever install this, they think "how can I convince people to add this to their browser and take a cut of the profit?" 3. Charity!
I hope I am way wrong.
And man, the news in here is really becoming a TechCrunch aggregator.
And that's particularly easy to do with a newly launched startup, since the right way to launch most things is to launch very early-- way before what you've built is formidable enough to stand up to determined criticism.
Why don't you try giving the founders the benefit of the doubt instead? I can assure you they'd give a project of yours the same.
I've said this before (You told me off for moaning about twitvid.io), but I doubt people want to hear the feedback "Yes that's nice dear, lovely" from HN. They want the real opinions of people.
We don't know the founders, so we can't asses them, we can only assess the idea. And this idea is a fundamentally bad one. Hopefully they change it soon enough.
A lost of these critical comments could be phrased more politely (like "how do you plan to get away with this"), but they're all fundamentally reflective of what a middling idea this is in general, and what a terrible idea this is for anything couched as a 'startup'.
for the following reasons:
some of us run companies and see how this pushes the boundaries of abusing the affiliate system by taking a profit margin
were cynical enough to not take the donating to charity bit as salve for the first gripe
I'm not sure it's a lack of givng the benefit of the doubt as disquiet at the ethics of the idea.