How startups such as Dropbox, Airbnb, Groupon acquired their first users

Facebook: force the users onto your platform by subscribing them yourself.

I find none of this unethical and actually pretty typical web marketing stuff - tame even. Not exactly sure who was harmed and in the end the consumer really wanted what was offered.

> cheat (fake Reddit users)

There's nothing about fake users in the Reddit start-up story that equates to cheating (cheating what or whom exactly?).

Cheating requires that there's a framework of defined fairness in place such that you're violating it.

No such framework exists in the context in question (eg: other human users were not promised there were no fake users). Your premise is wrong accordingly.

You might as well claim that when someone at an old-school software conference showed off their product in person, it was cheating (after all, they hadn't even purchased the product and they weren't an organic user). Or that to demonstrate a product on QVC is cheating, because the people doing the demonstrating aren't likely real customers and didn't come to discover the product in a strictly organic manner.

If you have to create fake users to demonstrate how an entire system works to the first real users, the last thing that qualifies as is cheating. As in the QVC example, showing off how a product works through simulation, is among the most important things you can do with a new product or service.

I'm not sure I understand the Foursquare argument. Is gamifying unethical? They aren't really making users "gamble" so the casino analogy doesn't really work for me.

Reddit is at least very transparent about this. You can't plow a field and just expect wheat to grow, you have to plant the seeds.

something else interesting is that these companies all have zero or minimal product costs, so these egregious growth spurts aren't really anything but signups.

No retail company can really utilize the same techniques. Imagine a hardware company or physical product company that got a 75,0000 customers over night. The only thing happening the next day would be customer support emailing order cancellation notices.

I don't know why this strikes me as relevant at the moment but it does.

> I'm going to take these examples whenever someone asks "what's wrong with marketing? "

Doesn't this reflect more on society? I personally don't find the above examples to be evil, but it's interesting that these are the tactics needed to win in this world.

"gamify your process to addict your users like a casino would (Foursquare)"

How did Foursquare use gamification to acquire users?

> what's wrong with marketing?

My summary is usually that it is a zero-sum game, even a negative-sum game but it works for the winner.

It is prisoner's dilemma at its finest: we would be fine if no one did it but if a single players start to use marketing techniques, they get an immense advantage.

We need marketing deescalation policies similar to disarmament commissions. But I am not holding my breath, I doubt I will see that within my lifetime.

None of that is spamming or cheating... and how is gamification a problem at all, especially in user acquisition (vs retention)?

What exactly were these companies supposed to do then? Sit around until people found them on their own? This really just comes off as pretentious complaining rather than any serious criticism.

I think that while these tactics are grey area for sure (specially in the case of Airbnb), I firmly believe that this would fall in the, for lack of a better word, "hustle" category. I would guess that most of the companies listed here tried multiple tactics, and these are the ones that worked. From my own experience as an entrepreneur, you just have to keep experimenting with various channels until one sticks, without getting too bogged down with the wider implications.

The best forums I've been a part of/moderated were forums that originally served for customer support for a product/company, and naturally became a hang out spot for people with interests in common.

I've been part of several dozen such forums over the years, from hundreds to tens of thousands of users. None of them had capital dedicated to community building. I've also seen many people try to follow the model you outlined (faking users) and none of them were successful.

Obviously that approach seems to work in some cases (if you have cash to burn?), but I'm glad that I've seen only more genuine undertakings succeed. Seems more like the kind of internet I want to be a part of.

Square sent out free card-to-headphone adapters, so you could plug it into your phone and start receiving payments through their app.