Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

>But the larger company has done some really sketchy things where they mislead users in the name of growth. They also have policies that help entrench it beyond what is fair.

This could be the story of literally any large tech company today. Airbnb got its start by spamming people offering vacation homes for rent on Craigslist [1]. According to The Facebook Effect [2], Facebook was almost entirely dependent on its contact importer/spammer for its growth in its early days. On days when Hotmail blocked them for spamming, new user sign ups dropped by 80%; it was only after they cut a deal with Microsoft that included an agreement to not spam-box their emails that they continued to grow.

When you look behind the curtain of successful modern startups, virtually all of them were built on mountains of spam and bad/unethical/illegal behavior, which they then publicly decry and block on their own platforms after they become influential enough to do so. If you have issues with this, Silicon Valley probably isn't the place for you. There are plenty of tech jobs in other areas - but look away from startups, because most are employing/willing to employ extremely aggressive techniques to win.

[1] http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Facebook_Effect

> virtually all of them were built on mountains of spam and bad/unethical/illegal behavior,

This simply isn't true. There are a few who did that, but they're the exception, not the rule.

Shady unicorns: Uber (too many to count), AirBNB (spam), DropBox (lied about encryption/security), The Honest Co (lied about product quality)

Not Shady unicorns: Xiaomi, Palantir, Snapchat, SpaceX, Pinterest, Spotify, DJI, Intarcia, Stripe, Vice, CreditKarma, CloudFlare, BloomEnergy, Fanatics, Slack, Blue Apron, GitHub, Domo, SurveyMonkey, BlaBlaCar, Lyft, MongoDB, Buzzfeed, Cloudera, Automatic, EventBrite, Evernote, Warby Parker, Docker...

The narrative that "everybody cheats" is just something that cheaters tell themselves, so they can pretend that their behavior was warranted.

That said, it's worth discussing these things before applying to a company, because dishonesty creates massive risk in the company, so if you hear and answer that sounds like 'downandout's, you need to devalue that company, because their lack of ethics creates risk for that particular company, and it creates reputational risk for you.

First, I don't think anyone that read my comment would objectively say that I was endorsing such behavior, as you seem to imply in your comment (for the record, I wasn't). Second...you're honestly saying that CreditKarma, Buzzfeed, and Vice didn't grow through spamming? CreditKarma (and everyone else in the free credit space) contracts with affiliate networks to drive new customers, whose affiliates do every shady thing imaginable (and then some) to get commissions. "Free credit" offers thrive in these networks - they occupy the top spots in the best performing offers lists because they pay $20+ to affiliates for each "free" signup - and they are primarily promoted through fake job offers on Craigslist and other job boards. Affiliates tell people they're hired for XYZ job - they just need to complete a credit check by going to <insert affiliate link here>. CreditKarma probably isn't directly doing this, but they know full well that their affiliates are.

Buzzfeed spams the crap out of Facebook. Eventbrite & Vice had some spamming issues in the beginning as well. I'm not sure about Snapchat's growth story - they may have been a rare example of natural growth, along with Google. Most of the rest of those you're talking about aren't really the kinds of pure internet plays that are relevant to this discussion. No amount of spamming would have made Xiaomi, Palantir, SpaceX, DJI, etc any more successful, so they didn't employ these techniques.

You made an "edgy" but incorrect generalization based on sparse anecdata. It was good for your comment karma, but it's silly to stand by it.

AirBNB's CAN-SPAM violating email was clearly unethical. A media company showing up on Facebook more than you would prefer is, at worst, mildly annoying. There's an important difference.

Ethical people do not need to leave Silicon Valley. Dishonesty is not prerequisite to success. Your claims are wrong.

>Ethical people do not need to leave Silicon Valley. Dishonesty is not prerequisite to success. Your claims are wrong.

Again, you're implying things that I simply didn't say.

>A media company showing up on Facebook more than you would prefer is, at worst, mildly annoying

You're right, that's not spam, but that's not what I was referring to either. I'm not going to write a massive explanation here of the specific Facebook spamming techniques employed by Buzzfeed et al, but suffice it to say that they are actively and aggressively spamming to "prime the viral pump" with certain stories.

It was clear to me that you weren't making an endorsement.

Not Shady unicorns:...Palantir...

This is a stretch.

In the same sense that a C-section is a "stretch".

I paused at that one because I don't like the state's intelligence arm, or it's sub-contractors.

However, I decided it was ethical for the context of this conversation, because to my knowledge they don't lie to grow revenue. They claim they'll charge a huge pile of money to analyze data, and that's precisely what they do.

Until the past couple of years they were almost entirely dependent on government contracts from shady three-letter agencies, and most of the work required a security clearance (now it's a little closer to 50/50 government contracts and Fortune 100-type companies). Not to mention they were literally funded with millions of dollars from the CIA's venture capital arm. Suppose they had been shady - I'm not sure we'd know about it. You probably should have had an 'inconclusive' group somewhere in the middle and they would have at least fit there.

Sorry, but, many of these companies are not as ethical as you claim.

Xiaomi sent user data to China without consent. [1]

Palantir proposed an illegal campaign agaisnt Wikileaks [2] and its very industry is by its nature fairly dubious and shady, though that doesn't mean it's doing things that are strictly illegal aside from what is known.

Snapchat ignored and didn't fix various privacy and security issues. [3]

Pintrest operates in a dubious copyright gray area. [4]

Spotify pays artists very little and most money gets sent to record labels. Even labels see almost nothing. [5]

Like Uber, Lyft engages in unethical treatment of its workers. [6]

I can go on. The badness of these things varies significantly. Not all of them indicate a company is totally unethical. But I think the assertion "most Silicon Valley companies are doing at least some illegal, scammy, or otherwise unethical things in order to get ahead" is completely true.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/xiaomi-under-investigation-for-...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palanti...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/style/uber-facebook-and-ot...

[4] http://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-illegal-faq-2012-2?...

[5] http://www.hearya.com/2012/11/28/david-macias-enlightening-l...

[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/Lyft/comments/2y16r3/lyfts_highly_u... (aggregates news articles)

> Spotify pays artists very little and most money gets sent to record labels. Even labels see almost nothing. [5]

How is that shady? They have deals with the appropriate companies.

Exactly. That's not shady, that's just how their business works and labels are not blind from that fact.

It's unethical to exploit artists for the profit of streaming companies and record labels while simultaneously hailing yourself as a godsend for said artists.

> Not Shady unicorns: [...] Palantir

Good God!!!

Vice is incredibly shady and unethical in my opinion. They champion local DIY scenes and lament the loss of music venues yet their new offices are directly responsible for the closure of 3 venues in NYC (they were all part of the industrial zone in Williamsburg where Vice chose as HQ). They don't publish stories that conflict with their branding partners corporate narrative. I know people who have been fired because they wrote poorly of their brand partners.

Almost every company is mendacious and shady.

Your list of "not shady unicorns" betrays a certain naiveté on this topic...

As a user I found Facebook's contact importer to be useful, and LinkedIn's to be deceptive. Zynga was a terrible spammer /on/ Facebook, but Facebook eventually cleaned that up (too slowly, but they did).

Google's growth was organic and based on a very high quality search product. The spammier search engines all basically died off.

So I disagree with your premise that Silicon Valley success is generally based on spammy or unethical behaviors. Yes there is way too much of it, but no, it's not a necessary part of success.

Google is an extremely rare example of natural growth. Many found Facebook's contact importer in its early days to be deceptive (and many more still do). Their growth to more than a billion users was almost inevitable - as long as they could spam dozens or hundreds of people for each new user. LinkedIn is yet another example of success-by-spamming, and Facebook's "cleaning up" of Zynga and thousands of other smaller, similar businesses built on Facebook is an example of what I was referring to when I said that companies block the very kind of behavior that got them to where they are once they are big enough to do so. They do whatever they have to do to get through the door, then they shut it behind them.

Is spamming/other bad behavior "necessary" for Internet success? That's an interesting question. I can only think of a small handful of successful Internet companies that magically went viral without such aggressive "growth hacking". The overwhelming evidence is that "necessary" may be a strong word, but "highly unlikely without it" is probably an accurate description.

Define "early days". The early days I remember everyone was waiting in anticipation for the moment their university (and later on, "Network"/company) would be on Facebook. There definitely wasn't a contact importer in those days, because the entire platform was exclusive.

I'm talking about after they went to open registration.

Google took the opposite approach, which was to play the iconoclast that was not evil and once they won the market, to start being shady and use dark patterns everywhere.

I love the sense of ethics here. "it's OK, everybody is doing it".

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