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Comment by santialbo | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed hn users are bashing Peter for wanting to monetize the trafic. This is not a cheap service to run. He has to raise entire virtual machines and he's getting ddosed by thousands if not millions of people.

The fact they are indian is totally irelevant here.

Maybe making them tweet stupid stuff was a mistake but hey, we all do mistakes, that doesn't make us assholes. You don't know the relationship he has with his competitors, maybe they are in good terms. Why are people judging him this easily?

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We're not (I'm not) bashing him for wanting to monetize. We're bashing him for lying to his users and laughing about it. "Haha, I made those stupid idiots tweet about Browserling and then blocked them anyway! Isn't that funny! Interesting that they'll tweet what I tell them. Dance for me, puppets, dance!"

It seems to me he blocked them because he had no solution to offer. He tried to get rid of the traffic any way he could because he had no solution to offer.

Then he shouldn't have told them they could Tweet to get service and then said "hahaaaaa, suckers, there's no service for you anyway!".

I see that as a way to learn how humans work (social engineering. :)

The fact that they are Indians is totally irrelevant here but the fact that they are humans and deserve to be treated like one, is not.

Don't get me wrong, I am against people calling Peter names and I didn't participate in bashing him. I have followed his blog for a long time, I eagerly await his book recommendations and read them, I felt bad for him when he didn't get that Google job and felt happy for the success of Browserling, I own a copy of Perl One-Liners because I enjoy his technical posts.

I don't even expect Peter to relate to his customers to this extent, but I at-least expect him to treat them like humans. I felt that this article's tone lacked empathy for humans which was wrong and although Peter doesn't deserve to be called an asshole for that but he does deserve to be criticized for it.

I wonder if the fact they are Indian is relevant here, especially given the timing of the influx of critical posts. It may be a difference in cultures and values. It seems like an absolute non-issue to me as an American, but I may be in the minority.

From my perspective, the tweets were not a mistake. They certainly weren't done with malicious intent to the tweeters, and they all for the purposes of marketing (with some meme humor mixed in). Isn't this pretty run of the mill for some twitter marketing campaign?

How do you feel about apps that make you like them on Facebook in order to sign up? As far as I know, the majority of people don't really like that, which is why Apple/Google don't take kindly to apps that ask for a five star rating before they start working.

It is jealously. The smartest people in a room are pissed off that someone else did it while they have to go prepare to do more spreadsheet color coding.

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