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Comment by josefresco | Hacker News Reader

Why this crusade against Mahalo/Calacanis? Why isn't this sort of critique aimed at Google, who is after all indexing and profiting off of sites like (and much worse than) Mahalo.

I find all these posts interesting, but it seems Jason is being portrayed as the most at fault. Isn't he just playing the Google 'game' better than most?

When I see SPAM in Google's index that is ranking high I don't get mad at the spammers but rather at Google for allowing and often times making huge money off of SPAM they index.

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I'd say Google hasn't done it's part either, but people may be taking some schadenfreude at the fact that Calacanis sells himself as a hard-headed, tech-driven entrepreneur, when in fact he is an asshole and a spammer.

This is very much a critique against Google, but more towards the pass that they keep giving Jason. Jason is most definitely not playing the game better than most, and in fact his violations of Google's quality guidelines are in many cases way more blatant than other spam sites, and are definitely more high profile... yet for some odd reason Google refuses to penalize them. Other sites belonging to honest webmasters get penalized on a daily basis, yet Jason appears to be immune.

I think this is an object lesson in the value of social skills and conference going. I doubt that Calacanis would be able to keep this circus going if he hadn't cultivated some excellent relationships inside Google. I can't really blame the Googlers involved; it's hard to knowingly wreck the business of someone who's been a good friend, even if you know they deserve it.

I've never understood this either. Google pretty much funds all the spam, if they had and enforced stronger policies on AdSense it would cripple spammers and made-for-ads crap.

You can report bad sites and people abusing AdSense but nothing ever happens. I wonder if anyone actually gets the reports at all - I reported a site I came across several weeks ago for perfectly aligning every block of ads with sets of images to disguise them as content, obviously nobody from Google's even clicked the link because they're still doing it and it's an immediately obvious violation.

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