Hacker News Reader

Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

I find this fairly repugnant.

In the same way that dumpster diving also gets you free food - but you are essentially a parasite, living on the waste of others. At least with the dumpster diving, the relationship is clear.

He generates literally nothing of value here - everything is stolen from others.

I truly hope we end up with the same social aversions to things like this that we do for other taboo social activities.

View on HN

Dumpster diving is positive in that it reduces waste of real resources. If I dumpster-dive a meal then as a species we're better off on net than if I'd bought the same thing.

This is the opposite, in that we are as a species probably less well off, but its not really any more destructive than other forms of astroturfing (marketers and robots pretending to be real people).

I ultimately decided to scrape directly from other Instagram feeds […]

I stopped reading, right there.

Dumpster divers are commensals, not parasites.

I agree that it's scummy, but I don't think he creates "nothing of value." How is this any different from influencers promoting and following brands manually? He's created a curated feed of NYC pictures that thousands of people follow and like. There is value in that, and the restaurants offering him free meals proves it. I wish he had posted about his follow-ups with the restaurants (does he actually tag them & promote their business?) If yes, he's fine and is upholding what he agreed to do.

> I don't think he creates "nothing of value." How is this any different from influencers promoting and following brands manually?

I agree that he's no different than other "influencers". I would just contend that they also create nothing of value.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com