Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

Is anybody else slightly disturbed by all of the 'attaboy!' comments here on a post exposing unscrupulous and probably illegal business tactics?

Think the response here would be the same if it was MicroSoft or the RIAA caught in something like this and not a YC alum?

Anyway, great investigation and great analysis here, I think.

View on HN

I am slightly disturbed. I don't mind startups using Craigslist to market and heck, they might even be allowed to do this if they have an option on AirBnB to "market my property on my behalf" to just post the properties on CL every two weeks but what bothers me is this:

1) They explicitly violated the posters request to not receive "commercial" mail of any kind. This is basically the same thing as SPAMing. Would HN condone any type of unsolicited SPAM from a YC startup? I think not. The intent of the poster was to receive only credible inquiries from people interested in renting their property, not from competing services or people wanting to sell them on services, etc.

2) They tried to hide the fact that it was SPAM by using fake Gmail aliases and pretending to be normal folk just trying to help that vacation rental owner out. If you're going to push your service out there to people, be transparent about who you are and allow people to tell you to not contact them anymore.

I think startups are held to a looser standard and of course we all love to be "hustlers" but the idea that this behavior should be applauded regardless of it's ethnical nature seems wrong.

The analysis seemed to be from 2009, perhaps things are much different now.

What bothers me more is that Craigslist is one of the great Silicon Valley stories of something that grew from nothing (an email list that one person created). They weren't always big. Long ago they were a small, scrappy startup. It took years of perseverance, hard work and providing a useful service.

It's a story startups should aspire to. Instead AirBnb seems to get a pass because they are a YC company. I can't wait for irony to strike when another startup does this to AirBnb.

This. I used to think they were clever, but now we know they're such repellent scumbags willing to abuse public resources for private gain that it's actually a black mark against Y Combinator to have been partly responsible and holding dirty money.

Seriously?

Of course. Email is the main immediate worldwide communication medium that isn't under the arbitrary control of one private owner. Spam is an existential threat to that, which makes it pretty much unforgivable. It's the price of a free society (and here's where I try to remind myself that really is worthwhile) that we can't impose an http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/I/Internet-Death-Penalty.htm..., but if we had some legitimate way to pull the plug on these douches today I surely would.

How is spam an existential threat to email? Spam filters have gotten exceptionally good, to the point where I find it hard to believe that anyone using a decent filter receives enough true spam in their inbox to make them stop using email altogether.

Unseen cost of all that filtering. And for how long is it going to keep up with spammers?

Oh and all the false positives that are a nightmare for so many legit uses.

If you don't think so, please post your email here for us.

Multiple of my email addresses posted online unmasked multiple times, so I certainly get spam. My point is that filters are quite effective.

I still get spam in my inbox regularly. I'm using google postini to do the filtering, in my situation I wouldn't classify it as "quite effective".

Are there better alternatives I am not aware of?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_techniques

I use the default GMail filters - perhaps I'm just lucky and receive easily filtered spam. I get hundreds of spam messages per day, and none break through on the average day.

Hundreds a day sounds plausible. So with that much crap to wade through, how long does it take to finally discover and rescue false positives from the spam folder?

The spam filters today are good not because of magic, but because billions of dollars have been spent securing email.

What a complete and utter waste of resources.

It's hard to say. Microsoft can push out new products with splashy announcements, TV ads, etc. Similarly, they can afford to do "proper engineering" these days. But Microsoft as a startup, and as a growing company, was extremely unscrupulous. Likewise, the majority of the "scrappy" web startups cheat on their tech and cheat on their marketing, in the hope that they can find traction before they lose goodwill, and get profitable so that they can go back and fix the system before it blows up.

On a personal level this is very frustrating, because we like everyone we know to behave in a honest and straightforward fashion. But from a business standpoint there is a huge tradition of using some amount of misdirection to push new products to people. Parallels can be made with the animal kingdom and the use of camouflage, bright colors, and social interactions. Sometimes your business is in a position to strut your stuff, because you're the lion in the room. Other times you have to sneak around or be deceptive. Sometimes, fragile, trust-breaking tactics work - at least for a time.

In the end, the real condemnation for this behavior has to come from yourself, not from others. The market sees what is in front of it at the moment; it rarely knows the truth.

I agree the 'attaboy' comments are way out of place, but there is also an over the top reaction the other way with the criticism being heaped onto the AirBNB guys in my opinion.

It was technically wrong of them to leverage craigslist by circumventing the community's own "no commercial email" request, and they should get dinged for it.

But in the grand scheme of things, when you are a tiny start up struggling to survive, this is a relatively benign grass roots attempt at marketing which the AirBNB guys even probably regret doing.

Comparing RIAA's scare tactics to this seems a little out of place, but it is right in line with Microsoft's shady attempts at astroturfing.

Can we all agree that a $1Bn valuation stops you being "a tiny start up struggling to survive"?

Sure, but the story is from a year and half ago.

AirBNB didn't become 'ramen profitable' until April 2009.

http://www.quora.com/How-much-money-did-Airbnb-raise-What-is...

"But in the grand scheme of things, when you are a tiny start up struggling to survive, this is a relatively benign grass roots attempt at marketing which the AirBNB guys even probably regret doing."

Hmm. Maybe. If you built a billion dollar business would you look back and regret a part of it that may have been instrumental to your success?

I'm definitely not excusing them for their actions but if I were in their position, I don't know if I could honestly say I would've regretted the past.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/uu/why_does_power_corrupt/

Well, as long as the spammer vaguely regrets it later, it's okay for them to spam me!

I agree. Likening this to spammers sending out millions of wholly untargeted emails is incorrect. These were extremely well-targeted communications likely sent out one-by-one by humans who had done some research.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com