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Comment by wangwei | Hacker News Reader

I maybe downvoted to hell for speaking against a yc company. But I am going to say it anyway because it's downright wrong.

Now that their dirty practice is out in the open. What do they do?

Oh, It's actually a bug in our software, and we'll fix it.

This is just way too dishonest.

In 2008, when users signed up for loopt, they sms/spam everyone from the address book of users. When people complained about the spam, what do they do?

Oh, there's a bug in our user interface.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt#SMS_invitation_issues

If companies like Loopt succeed, it might give people the wrong idea that in order to succeed, you need to adopt sketchy practices like what airbnb and loopt have used. It doesn't matter if it's unethical or even illegal as long as you benefit from it and get away with it.

This is just sad.

Now it might give people the wrong signal that in order to be accepted by pg/YC, you need to be as sketchy/evil as Loopt or Airbnb founders

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I can't speak to anything about u-Deals since I didn't work on it, but the SMS issue was actually a bug. The guy who wrote the invitation flow forgot to clear a collection during initialization of the screen. If the user invited one contact at a time, each subsequent invitation would send another invitation to everyone the user had already invited. Within 30 minutes of hearing of the bug I had updated the Loopt server code to drop all SMS invitations from that build.

There were no instances of invitations being sent to people that weren't marked as selected or who the user hadn't already invited. Ever. It's too late for anyone to download that version and verify my claims, but it's true.

There was no rational reason for the behavior the app exhibited. Does pissing off the contacts of all of your users lead to success? No way. Was the SMS issue a fuck-up? Absolutely. Was it a bug? Yes. Was it malevolent? No.

If you move fast enough you will miss things. It happens.

> If you move fast enough you will miss things. It happens.

Surely at the point it's pissing off your users (which has a financial implication too), you're moving too fast?

Personally I don't like the idea of missing basic things, and from your description that really sounds like a bug that should have been caught - but that might just be a brief summary. Can you recall how frequently the bug manifested, or any reason it wasn't caught in testing?

The invitation UI showed a list of all your contacts, and let you select which ones to invite. It was pretty clear you could invite more than one person at a time, so our testing never caught going to the screen multiple times in one app run to invite multiple people.

Also, the person sending the invitations didn't see the bad behavior. On the receiving end, when I got multiple SMSs, how was I to know if QA invited me once or multiple times?

We did change our SMS testing process after that though, and haven't had any more similar incidents to date.

You can't catch everything or you never release. It wasn't an obvious bug until we heard about the behavior users were seeing. Sometimes the things you miss have a small impact. Other times they're a bigger deal.

Now it might give people the wrong signal that in order to be accepted by pg/YC, you need to be as sketchy/evil as Loopt or Airbnb founders

You just have no idea what you're talking about. The Loopt and Airbnb founders are all among the more upstanding people I've met. Anyone in the YC community can testify to that.

This problem with u-Deals was in fact a bug. And as Nick points out (http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=2697523) the SMS problem was a bug too.

Your comment is a classic instance of people on a forum rushing to judgment based on incomplete information. It's isomorphic to the sort of thing one sees on reddit, except that it's about startups rather than the federal government or international bankers.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. "It's better that 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man be wrongly convicted."

Your anger against Loopt is understandable (not agreeable but probably understandable). What have you got against the Airbnb founders? I have heard stories of their hustle but none of them were even close to being sketchy or evil.

In their defense, the problem with U-deals is no where near as obvious as the problem with spamming.

If they just offered a white label U-deal (get 20% off ice cream) without saying the brand, even if they had the particular brand in mind, that would be another possible fix.

Also, let's retain a sense of perspective. Napster was initially ethically shady, but because everyone did it ethics changed. Same with Youtube or Kazaa. Same with using Google or Bugmenot to bypass NYT or WSJ paywalls. Same with using Adblock or the Pirate Bay, or internet porn.

What was really bad and weird and out there became normalized and useful. Startups won't always get this right but it's better to have some mischief than total hidebound obedience to convention.

Your definition of ethics seems strange. If people don't like what they're doing, they'll stop interacting with them. If they're lying about the bugs, people will stop trusting their explanations (as you have), and evaluate them accordingly.

They may be taking a risk by engaging in behavior like this, but its up to the public to judge them. Within the context of this forum, I think seeing their experiment and seeing how people react to it is tremendously valuable.

They may be taking a risk by engaging in behavior like this, but its up to the public to judge them.

wangwei isn't a member of the public?

I'm going to start a store that sells only stolen goods at ridiculously low prices. Rather than judge it right away, please wait and see how the public reacts. Let them decide. Then we will know if it is wrong.

This line of thinking makes no sense.

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