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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

In short: spam (AirBnb), cheat (fake Reddit users), and/or gamify your process to addict your users like a casino would (Foursquare). This is usually seen as unethical, but if you make a lot of money then it's all right in the end.

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

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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.

The Airbnb one is definitely on the unethical side of the line. I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't do the same thing to grow my business though. I don't think anyone really got hurt by it.

The others are mostly fine. Especially Quora. I don't know how anyone could have a problem with the founders... using the site properly themselves?

I worry that tech's gamification - gone too far for addiction - will be this generation's big tobacco settlement.

That's quite a hyperbole.

I mean, social media preys on people's insecurities and need for validation and is allowed for anyone over 13.

Pay to win mobile games are designed to be addictive and upsell you to continue playing.

At least in a casino you have a chance of winning money.

The most terrifying thing is that with tech, the data harvesting is immediate and far reaching - people's entire jobs in UX are basically to make games more engaging (aka addictive).

Currently the addictiveness of tech is evolving faster than human wisdom and regulation can keep up so while hyperbolic, there is some sense to the doomsaying.

I don't think he's saying that its as deadly as tobacco. Rather, I think his point is that the magnitude of its nefarious effects will surprise the general populace.

I have a feeling the AirBnB story runs afoul of anti-spam laws. Perhaps even some sort of fraud, as they used an array of fake names with the intent to deceive as to the source of the emails.

It seems incredibly ugly if you haven't seen it before.

A lot of things are like that. The formation of nation states. A lot of relationships. Sausages. That's all I can think of off the top of my head, but you get the picture, but a lot of things seem pretty wrong if you just explain how they actually get made.

Sometimes there's just a certain amount of unavoidable unpleasantness to how some things happen.

Many find "typical web marketing" tactics to be unethical, and express this through adblocker use.

If every entity did those same things would you appreciate that type of experience on the web?

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

LinkedIn: fake that a user that you can connect with is already on the platform.

That's a pattern many dating sites used to do. They crawled competitors' sites and uploaded pics taken from profiles, preferably of good looking women. It's downhill from there.

Very interesting - was unable to find anything on subject. Could you point me to some examples (who stole from whom?)

I can't name names but it used to be a known practice a few years ago (say 5+). It might still be although the dating space has changed dramatically since the prevalence of social media platforms.

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.

> 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.

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.

But apparently you can plant fake seeds and start plowing, and then people will come and plant real seeds there, and then you can harvest that wheat

The purpose of the initial seeding was to create the appearance of users, and also to encourage the type of content the founders wanted to see themselves. I'd be delighted to hear how you would have accomplished this.

...so? You can also create multiple accounts today and post whatever you want. What exactly is wrong with their process when the users themselves decided there was enough value to stay?

I don't think I said whether or not I thought that their process is wrong, I just extended GP's analogy

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.

> 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.

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.

"Hustling" is a dangerous word that people love to bend to justify their potentially slimy actions.

Cold calling potential clients is hustling.

Selling features you don't have is hustling.

Faking activity and demand on your website (e.g. listing properties that don't exist on a real estate site) is hustling.

Undercutting your competitors by flooding their service with fake requests is hustling.

Etc.

Some of those are just work needed to succeed; others are downright unethical.

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.

> 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.

Sock puppetry is disingenuous, whether or not you allow it in your terms of service.

If Reddit used inflated figures anywhere when convincing advertisers to use their platform (especially in growth rates), then they "cheated"--or more precisely, lied.

Isn't the technical definition "fraud"?

Yes.

That's not what's being discussed here.

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

How did Foursquare use gamification to acquire users?

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