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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine you have a friend. A good friend.

One day, when you're not paying attention, your friend says to you, in a tonguetwister, "ifyoudontmindmelookingthroughyouraddressbookandcallingeveryonesaywhat?"

"What?" you reply.

"Nothing.", says friend.

Later that day, when you're not looking, your friend copies all the numbers out of your address book and starts calling everyone. If they pick up the phone, friend says:

"Good afternoon, Friend's Name, Your Name said you'd be interested in my new social network, would you like to sign up?"

If you found out that this had happened, would you still be friends with this person? Would you still talk to them? Would you still want to know what they have to say?

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Yeah, this resonated with me. It's strange we need real-world equivalent stories to get a real sense for how strange some of this conduct is.

One problem I see is that the invasion/violation is abstract, instantaneous and committed by an inanimate thing. I wrote something about it here along the same lines:

https://jessems.com/hairdresser-analogy

Is this the right place to share the story of when LinkedIn attempted to add the entire email directory of a 10k+ person company?

Including the automatically generated page-$USER@ aliases, which would send a page to the related employee?

Fun times.

It’s even worse than that, because LinkedIn actually pretended to be you —- its invitations to “connect” were crafted to look like they contained a personal note from you.

ahh man sometimes like a bank app gets me I'm like "nooo" contacts list (accidentally push yes)

In fairness - a lot of social networks "growth hacked" with similarly seedy techniques, right?

In fairness, I don't like any social network.

Yet you have 14k karma on what is practically a geek social network ;-)

anecdote time: When I was working at Thomson Reuters marketing did some sort of outreach thing to the accountant community, and they had a bunch of accountants in to some sort of social gathering and the marketing person was up talking about how they were going to do social stuff for the accountants, etc. etc.

And finally one accountant spoke up and asked (I paraphrase): You do realize we didn't become accountants because we like people?

When I heard about it, it made me think, you know, programmers sure are a lot like accountants.

Theory time: Perhaps my high karma is derived from all the other geeks realizing intrinsically I hate social networks as much as they do, so they upvote me in solidarity.

Thank you for your time!

This is a forum, AKA a 'bulletin board', and would have been universally recognised as such in the glory days back before what we now call 'social media' existed in anything like its current form.

And what are "forums" and "bulletin boards"?

They're online environments (aka media) for discussions (aka a form of social interactions).

"Social media" is just the mass market name for forums.

Edit:

I'm kind of flattered that someone created a new account just to nitpick a comment of mine :-))

Keep on keeping on, senormenor: https://xkcd.com/386/

Are you pro or con them? Seedy techniques are never fair, just seedy.

If the only way to win in a particular market is through dishonest and scummy behavior, the rules should be changed via regulation.

This has to stop. This is nothing whatever to do with "fairness". Criticising appalling behaviour can stand alone without examining every single one of societies ills and making comparison.

What is fair about this? That there is more than one dishonest asshole out there? Sure, that's true.

Does it make them any less of an asshole if someone else is also being an asshole? Not in my eyes.

Whenever someone acts like an asshole, I stop my dealings with them, avoid any interactions.

With humans, that means no longer talking with them, calling them, or messaging them.

With an online service, that means saving my data and deleting my account, never installing their app, never going to their website, creating a straight-to-trash filter for their email.

In both cases, I will share my knowledge about them close ones if it can save them some grief.

There's something icky about singling out one individual for something a lot of others are doing at the same time, especially if you're in a community that praises those others.

> especially if you're in a community that praises those others

I was with you until this part. I have never seen praise of any large social network _or_ any growth-hacking dark patterns on HN.

You're not looking around enough. What do you think all those articles about marketing, promoting your startup & co., getting to $Nk passive income per month are about? Look past the flowery language.

Look at how many people are willing to ignore GitHub's transgressions. The privacy controls it provides are objectively worse than the other big companies that serve as the go-to examples when people try pointing to evil social networks. You can also step back and watch discussion of its dark patterns get buried in downvotes and illogical, half-thought out responses that attempt to rationalize them as Good Decisions that Make Sense, as if they're selected for any other reason than to drive up user acquisition and engagement.

This sort of behavior is a natural result of the VC funding model. Companies are forced to either explode in popularity by any means necessary or fail fast. Stable, linear growth via word-of-mouth is impossible.

And we're discussing this on a VC site ....

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