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Comment by calcsam | Hacker News Reader

This piece has so many red flags. I'm surprised and somewhat disappointed it landed at #1 on HN.

(1) Why was all of this work worth $88 in the first place? As a talented writer who is at least presumably familiar with software engineering, he surely could have earned that money faster by other means.

(2) Why does he continue to work with merchants he himself describes as unscrupulous, in _affiliate marketing_?

My hunch is that he wrote this article specifically to appeal to the HN crowd (see patio11 quotes) in an attempt to get additional commissions from driving more sales to a vendor _he himself_ describes as unscrupulous.

Do better, HN.

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The idea is to demonstrate a professional method for communicating with companies that are incompetent or otherwise untrustworthy. The amount of money involved and the business practices of the company with whom he is communicating is not strictly relevant.

It's a Form of hacking a company's processes from outside. Basically you punch through to the enterprise layer of communication and get treated better accordingly.

I’ve worked for 50 person companies, and 250k person companies. I’ve found that, (barring outliers), most CEOs, especially of startups, are very interested in the perspective of ‘Joe customer’, if shared in earnest. When you think about it, they’ve placed many layers of abstraction between themselves and their customers for the sake of the larger perspective. But CEOs are also people, and customers (of someone) themselves. And are therefore interested in the individual satisfaction of their customers/partners, to a point.

Michael is a pretty frequent contributor to HN. In fact so much that his latest project is an ebook specifically about how to get on the front page of HN.

He has spent a few years building small one man startup type projects. His blog is quite obviously a way of generating initial interest in these projects.

He specifically notes that he has ended all relationship the affiliate so your baseless conspiracy theory is unnecessary.

Do better, clacsam.

> My hunch is that he wrote this article specifically to appeal to the HN crowd (see patio11 quotes) in an attempt to get additional commissions from driving more sales to a vendor _he himself_ describes as unscrupulous.

He actually sells a course on it! - Hit the Front Page of Hacker News [0]

[0] - https://gumroad.com/l/htfphn/hacker

I don't think there is any agenda. If you have followed his blog, it seems he enjoys doing that. That's all there is to it, really.

Perhaps the poster is interested in additional income, outside the quite narrow range of the dispute?

Re #1: He talks about why a bit in the article. TL;DR: it was for the principle of it and an experiment.

He probably also wanted to burn the vendor/warn others.

Re #2: He didn’t. He states he ceased working with them after he recovered the $88.

To (1): Justice.

Yeah this is a really awful article. Like "I can't believe it's not AI-generated" awful.

"I can't believe it's not clutter!"?

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