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Comment by Crazyontap | Hacker News Reader

Just for arguments sake if this was titled "How I made $200,000 gaming Hacker news" where it's the exact same story but instead of writing for RSbots he was writing bots for a site to game HN submissions and comments and manipulating HN rankings instead we would have a completely different reaction, regardless if it happened years ago.

Just a thought to put things into perspective.

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Yeah, it's kind of concerning that an article about essentially black-hat behavior is earning so much praise in the comments. You have to remember that this kind of thing put a huge strain on Jagex when they had to (and still do) spend resources fighting against bots and gold sellers rather than development of the game. And in fact the difficulty of dealing with this problem led to the update which restricted free trade and did a great deal of damage to the game and the people who played it.

Aren't the MMORPGs also at fault? By requiring a long, boring "grind", they are encouraging players to automate their gaming hours. After all, we play games to be entertained, not to repeat boring tasks.

That's a good reason why this activity (writing bots) is not seen in a negative light even if it may cause problems for the company running the game and/or other players and the game economy.

The repetitive tasks are the fun aspect for many people. If it isn't fun for you, you have two choices: Either quit the game and find something you actually like, or use bots and ruin the fun for other people that like the game.

Not every bot ruins the game for other players.

Yes. As criticizing and nitpicking which HN can be, it’s amazing how uncritical many people here are as long as something simply makes money. Doesn’t matter what it is – if it involves technology and makes money, then it gets nothing but heaps of praise from the HN crowd.

Whenever a post about privacy or freedom or some other unethical practice of a tech company surfaces, I always wonder if people are critical for direct reasons or because they can't have a piece of the pie.

There are white-hat hackers out there and people driven by passion, but even Richard Stallman has enough income or social capital to lead a decent life. Being a paragon of virtue is a luxury predicated on meeting a minimum living standard.

I notice a similar phenomenon with posts about Bitcoin; I always wonder if criticism is due to genuine belief or jealousy/regret in missing out on the first several orders-of-magnitude increase in value.

They were offered an easy, fun, tech-intensive, intellectually stimulating game to play with the possibility of becoming a multi-millionaire if they simply played. And they didn't. So now they wish for its demise.

Precisely. They either wish its demise (“Bitcoin sucks and/or it’s dumb”) or they want to invent a new game (“buy my altcoin!!”) in hopes that it generates the same success.

I’m pretty convinced that anti-Bitcoin sentiment will be forgotten and/or disdained in a few decades.

Are you accusing me, and/or any critique of something making money, of simply saying “sour grapes”¹? It’s always a theoretical possibility, but I don’t think this possibility allows you, or anyone, to dismiss all criticism that easily. It’s too easy; it’s like saying “a wizard did it” – sure, it’s possible, but unlikely, and this argument doesn’t help the discussion, since it doesn’t lead anywhere.

You make a similar dismissal of people being virtuous, saying that they can only be virtuous since they otherwise can afford it, thereby implicitly excusing anyone else’s non-virtuous behavior if they aren’t feeling rich enough at the moment. This is similarly seductive argument, but it has real practical limits. If you are stealing bread because you are starving, that’s one thing, but as soon as you go a little beyond that, it’s certainly on you to live up to your own ethical standards.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

I see a lot of posts about people relating to the story and how they had a similar start in their engineering career.

I have not seen a single post praising the author's unabashed ruthlessness to make money illegally through the company's efforts.

All stories have multiple perspectives that everyone can relate to, agree with, and disagree with. In this case, many more people feel a relation to the story and want to voice it. If there is a large part of the community that disagrees with the author's way of going about it, either they are not as passionate about their disagreements, or did not wish to comment on the article, but these things are not mutually exclusive.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I remember someone doing a Show HN and getting heavily criticized and downvoted for their spam practices (as I recall, their tool was designed to bypass Gmail's antispam measures for "marketers") - despite making a lot of money. So, not all is lost.

This is a good example of an uncomfortable aspect of human nature. Deep down we don't really want to follow the social contract so we respect and sometimes glorify people who don't, at a conscious or unconscious level, and even if they turn out to be monsters.

It's only when the person is framed to be in opposition to us that we stop doing this and start complaining.

That's why you can have people loving Iron Man as a character when they would hate him in real life. In fact the character's creator explicitly wrote him as a personal challenge: someone who went against the morality grain but whom audiences would learn to identity with regardless.

Of course the kid was hardly a monster for making bots but he did play a part in hurting the game and players who didn't cheat, and is cheered for it.

And similarly if a piece written by Escobar that had never been seen before surfaced and was published I imagine it would upvoted to the moon with a title like "How I made 30 billion dollars capturing 80% of a U.S. market"

Well the show Narcos is exactly that, glorifying Escobar to some extent.

Debatable. He was portrayed as a piece of shit and his death shown as a celebration.

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