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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

I hate these kinds of articles. If you are willing to do morally gray things, there are all sorts of "life hacks" you can use to take advantage of people and companies.

It's like writing an article about "How I hacked the system to never pay for honey" and then when you read the article, it's like:

"Once a month I buy a sandwich at Chick-Fil-A and then take every single honey condiment packet and stick it in my backpack!"

Like... that's not a life hack, that's just taking advantage of someone's goodwill for personal gain.

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at least your paying for a sandwich, I feel like this guy is doing the equivalent of using the bathroom at a Chick-Fill-A and then stealing all the honey on the way out

Wait but what about what he is doing is unethical? Isn't he promising restaurants a promotion on the instagram page in exchange for a free meal? And aren't the restaurants getting promoted on the page and giving him a free meal? What's morally grey about it?

Uhh, he's taking other people's photos for his own gain. He even thinks crediting them makes it okay, when in fact it works against him by showing that he knows he is stealing.

Forget about all the other morally grey things about this, this is blatant copyright infringement. There truly is no such thing as a free lunch, the content is where 100% of the work and money is, and its completely stolen.

I re-read his article to see if he took steps to work around this. My god, he even seems proud that he directly scrapes from other people's instagram. I would go as far as to report this guy.

I mean, I agree with you philosophically, but he's not stealing their photos - he's re-sharing other people's photos and giving credit back to their pages. This is common Instagram practice - it's essentially a "re-tweet".

If he were copying and pasting the images, that's one thing, but what he's doing has no losers - it amplifies the original user and falls within acceptable instagram practices.

That doesn't mean that I don't feel slimy about the whole thing.

It's a rather common practice on instagram. In the absence of some sort of official "retweet" mechanic, this is what people have taken to doing. As he mentions in the article, the response is often very positive from the original content creator, since he credits them (and presumably drives traffic to their property).

He is promoting a business to his followers as a place they should patronize without any actual belief that they should patronize it (other than his belief that businesses that pay him should be patronized).

He is behaving honestly with the restaurants but not with his followers. Unless he is actually posting things like:

"Hey, I've never been to Moe's Tavern but they said I could have a free burger if I posted this picture, so here it is. Go check it out! You should totally spend money there. Moe's is awesome!! (at least, they were awesome enough to offer me a burger to type this!!11!!!)"

Ok, I'll accept that. I hadn't wholly considered the relationship with the channels followers.

That's what all so called "influencers" do: selling their followers to a highest bidder. Actually, that's what every advertisement business do.

I wish this craze go wider and wider, so people finally stop believing what they are told from billboards, TV screens and social media apps.

I don't think that agency selling places on bus stops has actually tries any of the promoted products.

I think the difference here is that he is actively making a claim which is based on a completely false premise. I know that Roger Federer gets paid a pretty penny to wear a Rolex, but in every ad for it he is still wearing the Rolex; Golfers swear that they trust ball X or club Y, and even though their equipment has been individually engineered to a point that mine never will, they do head to the golf course using those clubs. Giselle Bundchen never says she actually wears Victoria's Secret underwear; she just has pictures of herself taken in it.

Influencers are regulated by the FTC and have to disclose that they're compensated for the review: https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/foia/frequently-requested-reco...

So ethical or not, it's illegal to not disclose.

Isn't that what ad agencies do? And many paid reviewers.

Which is why I hate ads, and most online reviews.

"Homer: You mean the mob only did me a favor to get something in return?? Ohhh, Fat Tony! I will say good day to you, sir!"

I did not read the article, but that is a false dichotomy; most places have at least a few good sides, could be location, could be opening times, could be the music. I do not know what kind of reviews he is offering, but positive reviews do not mean he is lying.

In addition to what several others have said, this has the problem of being a strategy that only works because most people wouldn't do it. If everyone were running bots asking for free meals in exchange for good reviews, no one would bother reading reviews, and consequently, no one would give out free meals.

This isn't complicated. This person is a freeloader. It only works while times are good: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4713

Worse, I read most of the article, but I never found the part where he actually writes the promised review.

I read the whole article and it doesn't talk about that. I hope that it's an honest review.

It's crappy in 3 of the 4 scenarios:

Gets free meal, writes a guaranteed positive review when the food was good. He, the restaurant and other customers win.

Gets free meal, writes a positive review when the food was bad. He and the restaurant win, but other customers get a false review.

Gets free meal, doesn't write a review. He's taken advantage of restaurant's good will.

Gets free meal, writes an honest review that's neutral or negative. He's taken advantage of restaurant's good will, but other customers get a real review.

Yeah I know - pretty much any restaurant can get by with providing a single free meal, but this is about the principle. And shame on the restaurant for attempting to inflate their reviews.

I have no idea, but do newspaper/radio restaurant reviewers pay for meals? I'm not sure how that would be different other than the automation piece?

Usually the publication would pay for it to ensure a fair review and to hide the fact that they are reviewing it, which may skew the results.

Its not really taking advantage when you advertise the business though

It's taking advantage of the system overall, because it's based on abusing the trust implied by the rating system.

As a user, I'm reading a positive review of a place and I'm unaware this review was posted in exchange for a free meal (in other words, bought).

This is what bothers me the second-most about the whole Influencer system.

What bothers me the most is how many people see no problem with that, which feels to me like a much bigger problem we have as a society (essentially: the growing disconnect between motive and perceived motive in information distribution and the fact that everyone is OK w that).

i believe not disclosing that you were compensated in some way violated US federal law.

I seem to recall that Kim Kardasian get busted for such.

https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/foia/frequently-requested-reco...

https://xkcd.com/1499/

"Arbitrage"

Scene: Mexican restaurant with free tortilla chips.

Diner, stuffing free chips into his backpack: "_They're_ the ones giving chips away. If they don't see the arbitrage potential, sucks for them."

Caption: In a deep sense, society functions only because we generally avoid taking these people out to dinner.

Alternative text: The invisible hand of the market never texts me back.

He's tagging the original source, so presumably the actual authors get notified, and they can request the photo to be deleted... But obviously most won't, because their photo being shared, benefits them too!

How is it morally gray? Who exactly is being harmed? What this guy did is the definition of the hacker ethos. I could even make a compelling argument that he's made the world a better place through this project.

Taking content from public accounts to repost without permission for your profit is definitely morally gray.

It's no different than, say, "re-tweeting".

Retweeting/Quote tweeting preserves the source tweet intact.

Sites like Reddit are also profiting off of content produced by other companies such as NYTimes. Companies whom Reddit has certainly not obtained permissions from. Is that morally gray as well?

If the "aggrieved" party in his manufactured controversy are the other content creators on Instagram, shouldn't they be the ones to decide whether his behavior is problematic or not? If the allegedly aggrieved party isn't flagging his account and isn't upset about his behavior, why do uninvolved 3rd parties feel the need to jump in with moral judgements?

It's not manufactured controversy, the biggest accounts who are successful from these aggregation without permission practices are constantly under criticism from the creators whose work they are profiting off. If you think this is "manufactured" google "Fat Jew" or "Fuckjerry" those are 2 Instagram accounts that creators led unfollow protests against because they profit from other's content.

There's a ton of criticism of these practices, it's morally grey at best, I believe it's morally wrong.

It's not hard to see why this upsets creators. There are thousands of actual content creators, artists, comedians, writers, etc working on social media to make a name for themselves and develop a following (or maintain a following, some of the people aggregators steal from are very successful). These people do the hard work of making original content that is interesting. They suffer failure, they launch new projects and ideas and do a ton of hard work. Then the aggregator accounts skim off the top of the entire network, don't pay the creators and end up with thousands to millions in ad money without doing any of the original & difficult creative work. Rip off at scale is far more lucrative than doing the hard work of making original material.

But the lower effort rip off at scale is only possible profiting off of people doing hard work for free.

I googled fatjew and fuckjerry as you suggested. Their entire controversy originated because they reposted other people's content without attribution. That's what made it a valid controversy. That's what makes this a manufactured controversy.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/how-instagram-enables...

"Threatened by the backlash, Ostrovsky promised to attribute everything that he posted to its source in the future... Tebele and other meme account admins instituted similar policies, and the controversy died down"

Well, 2 things mainly:

1. Auto scraping other people's photos and reposting is a bit morally gray. He claims he stopped doing this in an edit to the article and now only scrapes royalty free stock photos

2. (Automatically?) posts guaranteed positive reviews for restaurants in exchange for goods (without disclosing this fact?)

It would be one thing if he got a free meal in exchange for an honest review (good or bad). But an automated, guaranteed good review without disclosing you received a free meal is slimy in my book because it breaks down the trust of the review system.

How can you tell if the ratings are from real people or paid bots?

"Cool Movie" was rated two thumbs up by 10/10 critics!!

vs.

"Cool Movie" was rated two thumbs up by 10/10 critics!!*

*All critics were given a free trip to Disneyland in exchange for two thumbs up rating

If the author is making it public then it's technically White Hat hacking and it's now up to the company (if they care enough) to resolve this exploit which potentially many others are using.

The grey area comes from the fact that taking honey packets does not reduce the number of honey packets availble in the bucket at chick-fil-a.

I think this is another entry to the startup version of "homeless or hipster".

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