Mormonism and Multilevel Marketing Companies | Hacker News Reader

Mormonism and Multilevel Marketing Companies

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139 pointsmadpen104 comments

Stay-at-home moms are another big reason for this besides the missionary experience. It is very common for Utah Mormon women to stay at home raising children.

The traditional full-time workplace totally disrespects that choice. SAHMs are not compensated for the hard work they do. It makes sense they would look for something part time to do to make a little money and think about something besides kids. But how can they do that in the traditional American workplace that expects 40+ hours a week and a resume with no gaps?

Many MLMs are built for SAHMs. They build on SAHM social networks and many of them are explicitly about making domestic life more bearable (kitchen gadgets, home goods, clothes, beauty and health products).

I think there’s a story here about SAHMs as a neglected overlooked and disrespected population, and how MLMs fill a need for them.

BTW, I hate MLMs generally, I’m just pointing out that Mormon missionary service isn’t the only thing attracting MLMs to Utah.

Is there any region of the world that respects SAHM besides Scandinavian countries? I feel like this is one of the most important issues we're facing today. Separating kids from their parents for most of the day after three months can't possibly be good.

Depends on the quality of the average parenting skills.

Not just skills, but also buy-in.

My mother was a SAHM by social convention, but it's not what she wanted for her life. She was miserable and it effected our lives deeply. She went back to work full-time (making more than my father even after >10 years out of the labor force). My younger siblings went to a well-run up-scale daycare with professionals who were passionate about child development and had none of the self-loathing/depression of a reluctant SAHM.

Suffice it to say: I need therapy and my siblings don't.

I think the social value of the SAHM is vastly over-estimated. It's basically a "good old days" lemonade and football fallacy.

>not compensated for the hard work they do

Really? Their SO pays for the mortgage that puts a roof over their head. Their SO pays for the groceries (i.e. food on the table). Their SO pays for the gas they use, the electricity they use, the internet they use, and so on. While this isn't the case for single stay at home mothers, to say "IT'S UNPAID LABOR" is just incorrect.

It's a distortion of your statement, but I can't help but think that it is not far from:

"But slaves sometimes even got a little spending money!"

>slaves sometimes even got a little spending money

Wew lad, I didn't realize you were an olympic athlete but you picked up those goal posts and rocketed 'em down field. Nevertheless I'll bite.

Average american mortgage: 1100$/mo Average food costs per month, with kids: ~350/mo. (Bit of wiggle room here, but I know plenty of stay at home moms that spend this or more on food.) Utilities: 150-200/mo, depending (water, electricity, gas) Internet: 40-80$/mo depending. maybe more Entertainment: differs from family to family so on, and so on.

What about future investments? A stay at home mother's work eases after a child hits their teens, because they can start helping out. Once they leave the house, things become even easier. Meanwhile their SO has been not only paying for everything this whole time, but also investing in their combined future via 401k, other retirement, etc.

Boy that sure is slavery!

Now re-work your math replacing a SAHM with the cost of a maid, a cook, 24-hour childcare, a secretary, a phone answering service, on-demand car service, shopping service, and a butler and get back to us.

Again we move the goal posts, from "not compensated at all, they're slaves" to "not compensated enough, pay them the salary of 5 people"?

I don't have the effort to deal with these fallacies. I've made my points, feel free to forget them and take none of it to heart for the rest of your days.

Plus my husband is working today so I'm taking care of the kids and my 2 year old just spilled spaghetti everywhere :)

We should have part-time remote jobs (20 hours per week). Something like maintaining WordPress website or designing mock-ups with Sketch. Too bad these kind of jobs are rare.

> Too bad these kind of jobs are rare.

MTurk is basically this, so they're far from "rare". They're just not very interesting for first-world workers.

A big part of why they're not interesting is because they generally pay a small fraction of minimum wage. The median is about $2 an hour. So I don't think MTurk serves as an adequate example of the type of job the op referenced.

Much of the work done by stay at home moms pays less than minimum wage, though: Etsy stores, clipping coupons / general penny pinching, these MLMs.

I do think that the main difference is that the mechanical Turk work is just soul-crushingly boring.

Clipping coupons is soul crushingly boring as well. I also run an Etsy store as a side activity and make about $25 per hour, 5-10 hours a week. Median for all Etsy is still about minimum wage, which, again, is significantly better than MTurk @ $2 an hour. And I'd argue the high volume low margin work for Etsy stores looks every but as soul crushing.

We can't all have that particular style of job, but we could move towards a work structure where 40 hours wasn't the gold standard of "full time". As we become ever more automated we could gradually ratchet that down. 4 days a week, or 6 hours a day. It's not like 40 hours was always the norm. Go back 100 years and people worked many more hours. I'm not sure why that downward trend stopped.

To say they're not compensated is a fundamental misunderstanding of such a relationship, when it's really very simple: there is a pool of tasks that need to get done, and between the two partners there is a division of labor on who performs which tasks, often with at least a little overlap. If the person who works for pay happens to mop the floor at home, is that "uncompensated"?

Take a relationship where both people work, mine: My spouse does laundry. I go food shopping and cook. To say that either of us is uncompensated for those tasks is a complete misapplication of the term, and a gross oversimplification that attempts to reduce the rewards of effort to solely lie in the monetary realm.

You write as if there is a division of work between the couple. That would be true if men and women could decide who would stay at home and who would work at a company. In fact, women are required by their society to stay at home, so this is in fact a relation of oppression.

given the context of the article, I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.

If your entire social and economic network is built around the totalizing influence of (the conservative end of a) religious institution, and if that institution says that women should stay at home, then there's a de facto barrier to full participation in the labor force. So, the stay-at-home parent will be the woman.

Fortunately, there's a "way out" that there wasn't in previous generations: "just" leave the church. Unfortunately, saying that's far easier said than done is the under-statement of a century.

Apologies in advance for the snark, but I find this statement equally valid:

> You write as if there is a division of work between the couple. That would be true if men and women could decide who would stay at home and who would work at a company. In fact, men are required by their society to go to work, so this is in fact a relation of oppression.

So I reject your assertion that this is a relation of oppression, unless you are conceding that both members of the relation are equally oppressed (in which case, I would argue that nobody is).

This inversion is a bit misleading: being able to work is how people achieve financial independence, and if society discourages women from seeking financial independence the result is obviously an imbalance of power between men and women.

No, I don't write like that. I'm fully aware of lack of choice and societal pressure. It is not strictly relevant to the "compensation" question. The imposition of the social order doesn't mean there isn't still just a set pool of tasks that have to get done, and each person does some of them. My partner can't cook and go food shopping to plan out meals. Not in their skill set. I have little choice in bearing that responsibility for my household. That still doesn't make me "uncompensated" for the task. The situations you speak of are just a matter of degree in that way, not a difference in kind.

You appear to be conflating value with compensation. Unfortunately society often seems to value the work done by the at-homeartner less. That is a different issue than compensation. The issue of compensation is personal to the relationship. To say one person is uncompensated completely ignores the fact that it is a partnership with a pool of resources and a pool of responsibilities. Sometimes there's more or less choice in involved in how those responsibilities are distributed, but dividing things into one person does this and gets this etc., acts as if there were two separate systems. There aren't. It's a relationship, a single system.

I think it’s fair to say that, generally speaking, individuals conflate value and compensation, especially when it’s related to a job being done.

That feeling of performing uncompensated work is what OP is claiming MLMs are taking advantage of.

I would change "fill a need" to exploit. The reality is that these are women are underpaid as you say and have no other option than work for a multinational company with little or no compensation, just to pass time. A similar thing happens in third world countries, where MLM companies exploit the fact that many people cannot find jobs, and then provide "jobs" with no benefit and little hope of career improvement.

This all sounds right from my observations. It's mostly women who get involved in MLMs. I would bet that most of them don't make money. I've known only one person to actually make a good living doing it.

I believe that the majority people dislike MLMs, but they may still participate to support their friend. Which also blurs the line between friend the customer uncomfortably.

You are going to find this effect in any strong community where social capital is present and influential. There's nothing specific to Utah's LDS community that leads to MLM peddling/participation. It's just that this community is one type of community where social capital plays a large role.

By the way, tech communities are not immune to it. It might not be MLM, but think about how frequently you encounter tech products and services that seem to be flying on nothing but hype and charisma.

Agreed. You may find the documentary Betting on Zero, and how Herbalife gets into communities.

Yup, from the abstract: "Successful MLMs require a social capital structure where members can access and mobilize both strong and weak social ties. ... The LDS Church's institutions foster a social capital structure where (almost all) members have access to and can leverage social capital in all its forms. LDS institutions encourage members to make meaningful social connections characterized by trust and reciprocity with other church members in local neighborhoods and across the world." This is the point of this article; not so much MLM itself, but how even something "weird" like MLM can be a relevant indicator wrt. the strength of social ties.

Social capital is a very good thing indeed; it is the foundation of a truly inclusive society where people are not going to be marginalized and neglected in their most pressing needs, regardless of outside factors like income, class or socio-economic status. And we know of very few ways of sustainably fostering this kind of grassroots social capital, other than community-based groups, often based on some sort of established tradition or religion.

It seems that social capital provides a fertile field for MLMs, but there are other cultural factors that contribute. For example, the tradition of missions trains a charismatic workforce used to selling and being rejected. And traditional family roles lead to a large group of women outside of the labor force looking for a way to help support their families.

Eh, I’m not sure about separating class from social capital. In Bourdieu’s framework (which tbf is dated), there are definitely haves and have-nots. The way different forms of social capital are valued in different contexts is one of the major ways that social hierarchies gatekeep and maintain themselves.

Even in Bourdieu's framework economic, cultural and symbolic capital might well be more relevant to class distinction. That would seem to be the gist of his work on distinction and the judgment of taste, at least. Social capital plays a role in that it can be downstream of the distinction created by other dynamics, but not necessarily in "more" social capital throughout a community leading to "more" distinction. If anything, one would expect the opposite.

That’s fair. In retrospect I was thinking more of cultural capital (which I’ll chalk up to how contemporary critiques of Bourdieu tend to conflate them).

> By the way, tech communities are not immune to it. It might not be MLM, but think about how frequently you encounter tech products and services that seem to be flying on nothing but hype and charisma.

Kubernetes?

It has nothing to do with a population that's trained not to question what they're told and to have blind obedience to authority figures?

As a former Mormon, I can vouch for this.

Mormons are taught: "when the prophet speaks, the thinking has been done".

Data point: I once went to an "employment presentation" by a member of local Mormon leadership, when I lived in PDX. The meeting was held at his large and rather conspicuous residence. The event had been pitched to church members.

It turned out to be a presentation on a health products MLM with some crazy amount of buy-in required up front. The presenter had a huge amount of the social capital that the research talks about. He was very charismatic in addition to holding the religious rank, so to speak.

Also relevant to another article on the front page, his wife walked in mid-presentation to show us the MLM pills she was taking to fight cancer.

I was very angry to realize that the meeting was MLM related. Meanwhile the local employment center run by the same church was staffed by a member of the boards of several high-profile fast food chains (you'd know them), and he basically showed us that there was a fax machine and computer we could use. He was a nice guy but this was very frustrating in comparison to the comparatively warm and attentive MLM pitch.

You can read the full paper here: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/j...

Thanks! It actually ended up being pretty interesting.

I don't have access to the paper so I can't comment on its entirety, but the abstract is spot on in my personal experience.

One thing not mentioned in the abstract (but perhaps it's mentioned in the paper) is how many missionaries do door-to-door sales when the return home. Many don't, but a nontrivial number do. I suspect that that missionaries play a role in the popularity of MLMs: either because of former missionaries joining MLMs (because some missionary skillsets are applicable to MLM marketing/selling), or because a nontrivial number of people in Utah have a soft spot for missionaries and I think MLMs often exploit that same soft spot.

I would have some doubts about this because the LDS members who go on missions are predominantly male and from what I'm aware of, those members involved in MLM are predominantly female.

There has been a large increase in the number of female members serving missions since a few years ago though, but has MLM already been popular since before that?

These are verifiable things though, if you have the data.

There is a large amount of male returned missionaries who do stints at a handful of companies (e.g. some solar one) who do door-to-door sales though, and can leverage their former experience.

I'd imagine going door to door offering X% savings on your monthly electric bill is so much easier than pitching the Native Americans are actually just a 3000 year old lost tribe of Israel. [0]

[0]https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/places/related-articles/morm...

Scanning the paper, it looks like it does discuss the impact of prior missionary experience on MLM growth.

Having seen it first hand, the relationship between pausing college for a couple of year to go door to door discussing religion, followed by returning to college and paying for it by going door to door selling security systems, solar panels, kitchen knives, etc. has always been obvious.

Don't get the wrong impressions. Only a minority of returned missionaries go into sales. And most quickly become disillusioned because it's harder to stay dedicated to flogging a mediocre kitchen knife. But it only takes a fraction of a fraction of the population.

This is recognized and lampooned even from within the LDS community.

For example, in the LDS film "the RM", the main character's parents are running a ridiculous MLM scheme called "LD3" (Latter Day Discount Distributors).

Absolutely. I'm LDS and myself, my family, and my friends that are LDS abhor MLMs. But I guess I self-select into a lot of that group.

I live in Utah, can confirm this is a huge thing here. Fortunately (I say fortunately because I hate MLMs) the leaders of the dominant religion here have been pretty vocal about being a little smarter with "shady investments", and I think some of them are trying to allude to MLMs. Hopefully they just say it outright some day

I also see that this seems more specific to the culture of Utah than of the Mormon religion as you don't see this same behavior in other places with large Mormon populations such as Mexico or Brazil.

Do Mexico and Brazil have a lot of MLMs yet?

That’s interesting in the context of this other post also submitted to HN:

“How Mormons Built the Next Silicon Valley While No One Was Looking”

Direct link: https://marker.medium.com/how-mormons-built-the-next-silicon...

HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23882224

I've heard this phrase, that SLC is supposed to be the next Silicon Valley quite a few times, but in all of those cases it was from people living in SLC or around it.

"Silicon Slopes"

Qualtrics, Blendtec, LucidChart, Domo are all successful Silicon Slopes startups

They don't say it explicitly in the summary, but there's obvious power structures in play as well...real pressure to participate.

I remember once getting a haircut, and the barber starting to pitch me an MLM holistic health thing in the middle of the haircut. Tried my best to say no in the politest way.

"Under the Banner of Heaven" explains this effect a bit.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CZCGPUA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

I grew up outside Utah, but have lived here now for 20 years.

To me, the abstract reads like "water is wet". Both true and obvious to anyone experiencing it. Because I'm not willing to willing to pay for the actual paper, I don't know if it contains any inaccuracies or misunderstandings—there often are when describing Utah's peculiar culture—but scanning the citations it appears very well researched.

While MLMs are unreasonably successful in Utah, don't get the wrong idea. In my experience, the majority of Utahns dislike them just as much as everyone else. It's just easier for MLMs starting in Utah to target the willing minority and expand globally.

Update:

Having read the paper thanks to the free links in the comments, I can say it's pretty accurate. The description of Church programs is a bit idealized compared to messy reality, but that's to be expected. I really only disagree with one statement:

> In addition to the social capital and cultural explanations, legal institutions may also be contributing to the prevalence of MLMs in Utah.

It's a generous statement, but as a local I believe the opposite to be true. The prevalence of MLMs has co-opted legal institutions resulting in more friendly laws.

It’s not purely based on religious structure and institution, it’s also a convenient “side hustle” for large families (though that’s a religious consequence), especially with the common stay-at-home mom in Utah - Utah county in particular.

I'm unable to open this without permission, but I'm curious about the extent to which they interrogate the combination of rigid gender roles and wage stagnation.

I'm not mormon, but grew up in an evangelical christian community that held many similar cultural ideals, especially the importance of maintaining a "traditional" nuclear family, where the father is expected to be the primary breadwinner and the mother is expected to play the role of homemaker and often home educator.

I'd speculate that a big factor in its adoption is that it's an income supplemental that allows you to continue childcare or homeschooling.

Is there a way to read the full paper? Seems like a fascinating read. ( not sure what it has to do with tech though )

https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137420000284

Thanks!

I know very little about life in Utah, but it seems to me that MLMs provide a way to monetize social capital, for those who wield it. It's well known that many MLMs do an insignificant amount of sales outside of the org, and mostly serve as a pyramid scheme, where earlier players are compensated by the startup costs of later players. Most players will never recoup their startup investment by recruiting or external sales.

It strikes me that the mid-level players who make it to profitability probably have enough skills that they would make far more money in something closer to a regular corporate or sales environment. If handy work and piece work were the original gig economy, and the app-driven gig economy is the modern incarnation, MLMs are the intermediate wave.

Passes the sniff test. I spent a good deal of time in SLC when I was 18/19. This was the 90s and I remember even back then that almost all of the classified job ads were setups to entice you into a MLM presentation.

Also industries that require the ability to relentlessly “sell, sell, sell”.

Many political advertising and online DTC mattresses companies (to name a couple) are based Utah.

It is one of our weaknesses as a people, honestly. I love my church, but we have a go-getter culture that often conflates hard work (and sales is hard work, just not necessarily good hard work) with virtue.

We tend to do well in corporate culture---which says good things about corporate culture, and bad things about us.

This is a well noted connection between MLM and religious fundamentalism.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rolltodisbelieve/2018/02/28/ov...

I've got to commend the OP here for having the guts to title this appropriately whereas Cambridge titled it "Institutions, the social capital structure, and multilevel marketing companies" when the abstract states that they explicitly (exclusively?) focus on MLMs in relation to Utah/Mormonism.

Wouldn't it even be better to have titled it "Utah Mormonism and Multilevel Marketing Companies" then?

As a Washingtonian Mormon, the social system is different out of Utah than in. And again a change as you move out of the northwest to areas where there are less adherents again.

The cultural aspects of Mormonism are muted out of state, but even out-of-state Mormons are inextricably tied to the Utah (University, relatives, friends who moved from or to Utah).

I've hit all four quadrants of the Mormon/Non-Mormon, Utahn/Non-Utahn matrix and from my perspective, we still shared much of the Utah culture (though I never would have admitted it at the time) when I grew up in another state.

I think this is an academic thing. The authors are studying the topics in the title, and doing so by examining the LDS Church as a good example of where there is high social capital structure in the institution.

This is common knowledge in the U.S. Of more interest to us is “Mormonism and Intel Corporation.”

TLDR: Mormanism is a very missionary-driven religion. Success in MLM's requires a similar missionary-style dynamic. Therefore Mormanism is fertile ground for MLM's.

Herbalife is very popular in Hispanic church communities in Chicago, Texas, etc. John Oliver did a story on how 60-80% of new members were Latino.

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2013-feb-15-la-fi-he...

>"In multilevel marketing companies (MLMs), member-distributors earn income from selling products and recruiting new members. Successful MLMs require a social capital structure where members can access and mobilize both strong and weak social ties. Utah has a disproportionate share of MLM companies located in the state and a disproportionate number of MLM participants. We argue that Utah's dominant religious institutions have led to the emergence of a social capital structure, making MLMs particularly viable. Utah is the most religiously homogeneous state; roughly half its population identifies as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). The LDS Church's institutions foster a social capital structure where (almost all) members have access to and can leverage social capital in all its forms. LDS institutions encourage members to make meaningful social connections characterized by trust and reciprocity with other church members in local neighborhoods and across the world."

I intuited this interesting relationship when I worked in Utah for an MLM in 2007-2008.

But MLM's and LDS -- is not the end-all understanding of that relationship!

You see, if you wanted the bigger picture, the larger understanding, you'd compare the above things with Corporate Hierarchies, Government Hierarchies (foreign and domestic), Social Hierarchies, Financial Hierarchies, and even such things as the hierarchies of Ancient Rome (probably the biggest MLM (and later in its history) Ponzi Scheme that ever existed(!), in that the earlier you were a settler, the more you were rewarded (earlier settlers and their descendant families became Rome's Patrician class, at the top of the social hierarchy), while latecomers to that party got increasingly smaller shares of land, property, privilege, etc. ("Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup" -- to quote the Mel Brooks film, "High Anxiety" <g>))

Also, you'd clearly define MLM Vs. Ponzi schemes -- they're basically the exact same thing, except that one has an underlying good, service, or something of value which is fairly exchanged, whereas in a Ponzi scheme, the underlying good, service or value either doesn't exist, or exists only in a partial, malformed state. (That is, the value exchange in transactions is asymmetric -- due to fraud of some sort...)

But let's kick those understandings up a notch!

Let's throw some gasoline on that fire!

To this ecclectic mix, to really get an understanding, you'd throw on some Jordan Peterson, specifically what he says about Dominance Hierarchies in society!

And then to season it, you'd add to this some Adam Smith, who can probably be said to be not only the guy that codified Capitalism, but could safely be said to have been the ultimate master of games relating to anything having to do with finance, but more broadly, with the broadest definition of capital.

Basically what Sun Tsu was to War -- Adam Smith was to Capital, in its broadest definition.

So, if you really wanted an understanding, you'd take all of these ecclectic ingredients, mix them all together, season, heat and serve!

But this article is a great first step in that direction!

You can be Mormon and also not engage in MLM. Nothing about being Mormon means you have to be stupid enough to fall for such scams.

Exmormon and former missionary here. Pretty much, makes sense. And that's all that I can charitably contribute to the conversation, IMO.

"How can you tell if someone is Vegan" applies pretty well here.

Or exvegan.

My uncle was raised LDS. When you lapse from the faith but remain friendly and on good terms with active members you are considered a "Jack Mormon," which he classified himself.

Coffee is a prohibited food for active members which is why he would occasionally send me a pound of Jack Mormon Coffee on my birthday.

https://jackmormoncoffee.com/

Great guy, gracious, engaging, and always liked to laugh.

Religion and MLM go hand in hand, that's interesting.

I will push the concept further: Are religions another form of MLM?

In both cases, we are trading our time, effort, and money for status within a community; there are hierarchical ranks, obtained by recruiting more people and proselytizing effectively...and MLMs and religion both seek to answer tough questions, whether that be creation or health, salvation or financial freedom. And both MLMs and religion rely upon false premises, mythology, peer pressure, and irrational fears.

Lastly, If MLMs or religion had extremely solid evidence behind them, would they truly be MLMs or religion? This seems the most important linkage, these institutions (and many others) prey upon inherent weaknesses in the human psyche for their own advancement.

Downvote brigade has arrived, I love receiving downvotes for playing devil's advocate; respond to me if you're disagreeing, don't downvote and bury what you dislike.

I didn't downvote, but I suspect you ran into two things here: #1 yea duh, there's a lot in common. it comes off as "iamverysmart"

#2 imho you have the order backwards. MLM is what happens when the profit motive, "consumer capitalism" and hustle-entrepreneur culture gets mapped onto religious communities/social-structures. Other religions arent a form of MLM, MLM is a new form of religion.

Mormons are a vanishingly small percentage of all religious people. You asserted that MLMs are correlated with religion (with no qualifiers), and instead of backing up that assumption with data, you went right into sociologically theorizing of why it might be true. With even more unsubstantiated claims about religion. No downvotes from me, just pointing out flaws.

" we are trading our time, effort, and money for status within a community; there are hierarchical ranks, obtained by recruiting more people and proselytizing effectively...and MLMs and religion both seek to answer tough questions, whether that be creation or health, salvation or financial freedom. And both MLMs and religion rely upon false premises, mythology, peer pressure, and irrational fears."

Or is this the University system?

> Are religions another form of MLM?

No. The lowest "tier," parishioners, generally have no interest in moving into leadership. The defining trait of MLM is that people join, hoping they can recruit someone who will generate them more income. This isn't why people join religions.

> we are trading our time, effort, and money for status within a community

I wouldn't call MLM a "community" in the same way, and donations to religious organizations tend to be private, so donating more doesn't lead to a better status.

> there are hierarchical ranks

This is true of most organizations.

> And both MLMs and religion rely upon false premises, mythology, peer pressure, and irrational fears.

These are standard sales tactics.

I left the church and have a fairly negative view of it, but claiming that there's no difference between devoting your time to a religion and a scammy company is pretty dismissive of the positive impacts being part of a religious community can have for people.

You're being downvoted, I assume, for breaking HN guidelines, specifically around the accusation of brigading: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I just upvoted this person. I have always felt MLM was a fusion of (secular) religion and business. Similar testimonials, group social support, groupthink, and reliance on faith are employed. This is saying something completely different than the connection between MLM and organized religions, which in the case of Hispanic evangelist groups and Mormons, is well established. It is saying that for some, MLM participation confers some of the benefits of a religion.

I should have included the following characters "Edit:"...I was downvoted multiple times before I even mentioned brigading. That was a post-hoc edit after I'd been downvoted multiple times, I think I was at -2 within 1-2 minutes.

HN commenters simply downvote things they disagree with, even if it pushes the narrative further and promotes more thought. IMO, downvotes should be reserved for low-effort wastes of space comments, not dissenting viewpoints.

The spread of Christianity, and to a lesser degree, Judaism, has a lot in common with MLM. Genesis 9:7.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com