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"It starts with author calling his users "fools" for not randomizing useragent"

He thought he was getting DDOS'd at first, and his attackers were using one useragent. In which case, they would have been fools.

"Then he realize "This is the biggest opportunity ever!"."

It __is__ a great opportunity! For the HN audience, a large influx of users is considered a great opportunity.

"They are just numbers for him, a viral mob that will do whatever their god tell them to do."

There seems to be a lot of negativity around this. I thought it was hilarious. Would there still be outrage if the users were American instead of Indian?

"His final solution - more lies and unethical behaviors"

I would hardly call it lies or unethical. 1. he isn't obligated to do anything 2. he ultimately delivered a usable product with a paid option to the service. Sounds like any other freemium app or in-app-purchase

> Would there still be outrage if the users were American instead of Indian?

This is exactly the point. There would only be outrage if the users were American. There would not be a positive response here.

Let’s try another more illustrative question - what would the reaction be if he were an Indian in India doing that to Indians or doing it to Americans.

There would definitely be outrage.

As other people have said, he comes across as lacking humanity. Especially as the people using Jio phones would be the kind of people who are not rich or well off.

In fairness to the person, he could just be clueless and doesn’t really think of the people trying to use his service as people.

Hmm. That makes him sound worse.

I know a friend who thinks like that, And Is not a bad person....

I don’t know - this guy comes across as if he doesn’t realize that he is manipulating people less informed and weaker than him like someone orchestrating ants into following sugar.

> As other people have said, he comes across as lacking humanity. Especially as the people using Jio phones would be the kind of people who are not rich or well off.

But that doesn't make his server costs go away. And they must own at least another phone otherwise they wouldn't be able to use WhatsApp Web. So they are probably not as poor as you think.

If they own another phone why do they want to access WhatsApp on their cheapo ones so fervently?

That is what puzzles me most in the article. Unless one phone that can handle Whatsapp is used by several people I do not get what they are trying to achieve here. AFAIK Whatsapp Web needs to have a phone online and is not provided as a standalone web service.

Yeah, that's pretty perplexing to me as well.

They could have used some else's phone to setup the account

>But that doesn't make his server costs go away

If it were just the opening part of the article which gave me pause, I would agree with you.

But the other parts?

Its very hard, even when I am trying to give him the benefit of doubt, to devise a sufficient and forgiving explanation for his behavior. Unless you just ignore entire chunks of what transpired.

He used those people to troll his competitors. It sounds like someone realized that he could flash a laser, and make a group of camps walk over someone else's flower bed.

Its hard to defend that, and the implication that has for his view on the people he aimed like water from a hose.

For the record, I've put some time into knowing what I know about India, the Indian telecom industry, Jio and Jio pricing. I'll say that my educated guess should be pretty close to the mark, but I will change my position if a contradicting piece of information is shown.

edit: Cats, not camps...

Maybe it's a cultural thing. If it was an Indian doing it to Americans, I don't see why there would be outrage. It's just a guy promoting his service, which he did eventually deliver. The Taiwan number 1, competitors number eight bit is hilarious. It's a meme and not intended to be political.

"he comes across as lacking humanity. Especially as the people using Jio phones would be the kind of people who are not rich or well off."

Would you say the same about apps that serve video ads in order to unlock something in app? Or contests that requests tweets for entry? Or bootstrapped companies with "buy now" websites that only lead to an email signup?

"he doesn’t realize that he is manipulating people less informed and weaker than him"

Manipulating seems like a strong word. No one was forced to tweet, this isn't a matter of life or death. (It's for getting on WhatsApp after all). More importantly, I don't think anyone that tweeted really cared about the contents of the tweet.

Manipulation is correct. You could try to see how coerce fits and you will find that harder to pin.

Challenges or re-tweet requests are assumed in good faith or in the context of a (relatively) symmetrical/fair market system.

I’m trying to give him good faith and it’s coming up short.

I don’t think he is malicious, just not used to thinking at the scale of humanity he was dealing with.

By the way - this is also an excellent example of how good net neutrality laws help customers.

I am sure JIO would love to block whatsapp.

Actually - how is Jio blocking Whatsapp?

That’s a more important question.

I don't believe the phones have the ability to download the application. They look like early 2000's phones, like after the bricks of the 90's but before the flip phone craze.

In that case reliance should just buy the guy out.

Jio launches a pretty ambitious phone network and decimated the competition.

Do note thought that they are considered to be really bad competitors to go up against. They almost always have a focus on good ultra competitive pricing and ways to extract extra money from the consumer.

But they are very actively investing in broadband content to drive use of their network.

I think no one would care if Americans were doing this to other Americans... seems like just another day on Social Media Marketing.

>Let’s try another more illustrative question - what would the reaction be if he were an Indian in India doing that to Indians or doing it to Americans.

Probably just a lot of people shrugging and saying "I guess this guy doesn't want us abusing his free service for our own gain" and "it was fun while it lasted".

All indications pointed towards all these people using his service in bad faith. I went to his website and it's obviously meant for cross-browser testing, not spoofing your user agent, circumventing regional restrictions or whatever it was preventing them from accessing Whatsapp directly.

Jio phones appear to run a mobile OS that is not supported by whatsapp. Effectively they are using his server to host the whatsapp instance and then only deal with the very front end of the whatsapp code natively.

I tried bringing up an Android VM and see if I could escape the web browser and get to an app store, but couldn't, at least not by doing anything more than just poking around with the mouse (if the Indians in question had the know-how to do something more intrusive I doubt they would need Browserly to circumvent the restriction in the first place). And it would be strange if Browserly would allow the browser to be escaped and software to be installed, it's practically asking for his service to be abused.

So I'm pretty sure what they want is to access the Whatsapp web interface and use Browserly for user agent spoofing, circumventing geographic blocking or some kind of blocking on their phones like a 0.0.0.0 entry for whatsapp.com in the hosts file. Either way it's a major dick move if you ask me, especially when there is no shortage of services built for this exact purpose.

> I thought it was hilarious. Would there still be outrage if the users were American instead of Indian?

Imagine French facebook users waking up one day to see "If you want to log in, tweet 'I love facebook`". Would there be an outrage? What if tweet would say "Macron is not my president #downwithmacron"?

I Ctrl-F'ed the whole article, the word "fool" only appeared within the sentence: "I throught these attackers were fools".

So I think

> It starts with author calling his users "fools" for not randomizing useragent

Was not very true, given the author previously said:

> I thought it was a DDOS attack. I noticed everyone had this weird user agent that said it was a JIO phone. _I throught these attackers were fools_.

I’ve known this guy for years and he’s far from an asshole.

He’s spent years on this business and finally had a break. Its unfortunate he chose to phrase things the way he did but this is a one man band with a hacker as CEO who does PR about as well as an average PR person does full stack development.

Anyone know what happened to the cofounder's involvement? Last mention I found was from 2014, it seems that substack is in Hawaii now doing his own thing.

Yeah who owns this nowadays? I can’t imagine the author of this was substack. Though I don’t know the guy...

> I’ve known this guy for years and he’s far from an asshole.

Probably not to his friends. But rofling at masses of indians tweeting on command (fooled into thinking tweeting will unlock a service) is a "dick move".

I take your word for that, but it is not an excuse to disconnect users/numbers/visits from real human beings. So you see that people in India are using a 20$ phone to use whatsapp with your app and the only thing that comes to your mind is how can you rip them off with a daily subscription that wasn't there before? And a crooked lottery?!?! You need to have a very small amount of empathy to do that.

A feeble attempt at offsetting the cost of massive server load is not trying to "rip them off."

Those server costs do not pay for themselves. Me personally, I’d likely just block them altogether.

"I'm sorry, I can't support this use case so I'm blocking Jio phones" is fine. "You have to pay for this service" is fine. "Please tweet to use the service" is fine.

Saying "please tweet to use the service" and then blocking people anyway is lying. Making fun of people for doing what you asked so they can fulfill one of their needs is scummy. Telling people to Tweet to increase their chances in a lottery and then not actually doing it is also scummy.

I know this guy. He's not an asshole. But I do think this could of used more research and slightly less trolling. However I think it's pretty funny in a way. Overnight you think your site is being hacked, to be suprised it got popular! So I can see why it would need to be monetized as it was really meant just for web developers. And since web developers are a smaller market than everyone in a entire country trying to use it to use a chat app, it had to scale to cope with the overnight unexpended demand.

In the author's defence, it sounds like these users were creating an existential threat to his service by using it in unintended ways. It's kind of expensive for the author to run virtual machines for all these people. Though the author tries to add a positive spin to this, I'm sure that the story is more complicated.

I completely fail to understand how that's a defense. Whether you're an asshole or not is exactly defined by your reaction to similar situations. The author talked down to people who wanted to use his service and treated them like toys even after he found out they didn't mean him harm.

This post left me with nothing but bad impressions for the author and for Browserling. At some point I wonder whether a middle school bully was writing the post.

I understand that it's corporate etiquette to be a smiling doormat when faced with free riders abusing your services, to politely apologise for not being able to take the pain, but it doesn't mean you're an asshole if you don't act that way.

The vast majority of these users were looking for a shady freebie at his expense, gleefully ripping him off and doing so en masse in a way that would destroy his livelihood. They were being more than cheeky and he has a right to treat them the same way. If it were me I'd have had my fun too.

> but it doesn't mean you're an asshole if you don't act that way.

No, if you lie to people and tell them you'll give them service in exchange for something, they do the something and then you don't give them service, you are definitely an asshole.

I'm not a fan of the false dichotomy of "you're either a doormat or you go full-blast lying and making fun of your users". He could just have said "If you want to use the service, please pay for it per day" and that would have been that.

> The vast majority of these users were looking for a shady freebie at his expense, gleefully ripping him off

Wanting to access WhatsApp is shady? Then I'm shady all the damn day. Also, how were they ripping him off? They were using the service he provided on the terms he provided it, even jumping through pointless hoops of "Tweet/Follow/spam competitors".

We decry all those shitty "tweet to jump the queue" tactics, but this guy doing it and laughing at his users makes it okay?

> And they did! All these users started following Browserling and tweeting about it. But they still couldn't use Browserling or Whatsapp, it was just a new message in place of "fatal error".

If you don't think this is asshole behaviour, we're never going to agree.

Have you told your sales people that they are assholes for telling your future customers about services that do not quite exist or do not quite work?

Have you told that to your CEO?

If our salespeople or CEO say "here, sign up and invite three friends to get our service" and then say "Haha psych! You can't actually get our service, sucker", then yes, I will tell them they're assholes.

Unfortunately I haven't had that chance, as the people I work with already know to not be assholes.

Are you telling me your sales person does not say "XYZ feature works" when it does not quite work as it was spec'ed? Please. Let's live in a real world.

Do you understand the difference between "tweet to access" and then purposely banning access and having a buggy feature? He told them they could use the service when they couldn't. The service wasn't buggy, he actively banned them, told them he would unban them if they did X, and then kept them banned.

If you still think that's okay, there's a fundamental disagreement here we'll never reconcile.

It is exactly the same as selling a product with a known broken or non-existent feature. But hey, it is HN - selective ethics is an art form.

In the end he did provide access. So what matters is what he had really thought of it all when he asked them to tweet.

If that was "okay, there is a demand, I can't monetize it but can still convert it into something useful while I think how this can be a successful business" is one thing. Telling users to fund/tweet/support/whatever while the problem is being tackled feels perfectly fair to me.

If that was "muahaha see my army of puppets tweeting" it's another thing, of course.

It's not really a defense, but maybe an explanation.

When people spend a lot of time looking at stats, sometimes they become disconnected from the reality behind them.

Is it really the interesting thing you see in that article ? The moral aspect of it ? Nobody got hurt, nobody got ripped off, the service was provided for free to people that needed it, until he found a proper price.

And it will probably give ideas to people on HN to build services for this new market, and get Silicon Valley hipsters interested in cheap phone market. I'm not in SV, but at least that's the effect it had on me.

I'm getting more and more allergic to moral hypersensitivity everywhere. The air is becoming unbreathable.

I was thinking exactly the same thing! He is ripping them off and abusing the users.

I think some of the things done here are in poor taste but I think overall he's coming out net positive impact on the world. Providing a good service for poor people in India and the Cameroon to communicate.

I think you misread some of it. The bit about trolling / rolling on the floor was definitely in bad taste and indicates either a lack of empathy, or just poor judgement.

In the end, though, I think he's done something decent-- providing a way for poor people in India to access a service that they are normally unable to afford. That's a good thing.

Honestly, Whatsapp will just find a way to block him. At that point he's got paying customers that won't have service. Let's see how he handles that...

Why would Whatsapp block him. On the contrary, he is providing Whatsapp access to all these Indian users of $20 of Jio phones. I believe it is Jio that is blocking access to Whatsapp (maybe Jio wants their customers to use Jio's own messaging app).

The phone mentioned in the article is a $20 feature phone that runs a fork of FirefoxOS. It's not Jio that's blocking the app, just that it's not available on the platform.

From what I can tell, all that Browserling is doing is allowing you to browse as if you were on another browser, and the Indian users are simply wanting to access the Whatsapp web app (https://web.whatsapp.com/). That must mean that Jio is somehow preventing its users from fully using that webapp. Doesn't matter that there isn't a native Whatsapp app in FirefoxOS.

Perhaps Whatsapp web doesn't support the browser on the phone, rather than some conspiracy to block it?

That's probably it. Still my second point that he is actually helping out Whatsapp stands.

Whatsapp Web on the phone sounds a bit pointless, because it's not really whatsapp web, it's just a frontend for the mobile app (if you lose connection on your phone, you lose connection on Whatsapp Web).

Whatsapp is doing the blocking. See for example the problems that Vivaldi browser has had

https://twitter.com/vivaldibrowser/status/644173304404836352...

WhatsApp should just buy him :-)

I don't know anything about Browserling service, but it seems it renders web page in Chome and somehow streams interactive version of page to any browser? If so, then it's huge breach of privacy for Whatsapp users. The service can read, modify and inject content. Scary.

^ this.

I discovered Browserling just yesterday looking for a replacement for BrowserStack. I planned to hand over my credit card today but saw this blog post on the commute to the office. Thanks, but no. I'll continue looking and make sure to not make business with this guy.

Kindly also read this article before deciding -- [http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-cameroon/]. I know the current article seems a bit tone-deaf but judging him on that alone wouldn't be fair.

Thank you. You're right of course, juding him by one article alone isn't fair.

"unethical and wrong" is subjective. The most successful companies like Facebook and Google have been similarly called "unethical and wrong" for their practices. But alternatively it could be argued that their net utility on humanity is positive. So a lot depends on the definitions of "unethical" and "wrong", and that is a deeper philosophical question.

> it could be argued that their net utility on humanity is positive

It could also be argued that their net utility to humanity is negative: see the issues with social media and echo chambers.

The pro and con sides could both be argued. That just goes to my original point that "ethical" and "wrong" are subjective determinations here.

I've worked together with the author of this post. He's the kindest and most helpful person I know. He's a bit of a prankster but definitely not an asshole. See his next post about Cameroon (http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-cameroon/) or donating portion of his revenue to open-source developers (http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-supports-open-sourc...).

There are hundreds of companies letting you using their services for "free" because they resell your informations.

He did a silly test to have some fun that didn't force the users.

I'm happy for once to read an article that is not heavily edited by marketing to please the sensitive readers but instead gives us the raw reactions of the guy.

I think the word is sociopath. He's not necessarily malicious, he just doesn't seem to empathize with other people, they're just autonomous NPCs to him.

> His final solution

Not sure if intentional, but funny either way :)

Agreed, he is an asshole and this is an unethical way to monetize

What about his monetization is unethical? Where is the moral conflict?

What is he supposed to do?

His initial reaction when he thought he was under attack was fine and the second reaction was immature and lacked empathy but he was likely facing an unexpected problem that he couldn't figure out how to handle but very soon got on the right track.

Those servers and bandwidth aren't free. Bandwidth to tier three countries is actually more expensive.

Advertising revenue is basically non-existent for tier three countries, conversion rates and LTV is super low, ltv for the group of user that are using his service for whatsapp will be in the range of 1-5 Rs, ~(1-8 cents).

He will eventually have to block these countries again if he can't figure out a way to indirectly monetize these users. Or he will run out of money and the servers go down.

The best thing for these users would be if he can figure out a way to make it sustainable, and that means to monetize these users.