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Comment by ghoomketu | Hacker News Reader

This is quite common unfortunately and has been used by billion dollar companies like Airbnb to get traction(1). Back in the days this was just plain old spamming but nowadays it is called growth hacking

Craigslist growth hack —very early on, anyone who listed on Airbnb could cross-list on Craigslist with one click, Airbnb helped by filling out all Craigslists forms with a ‘bot.’ The hack required some technical gnarl to perform, but it was perfect for this early stage. The team also appeared to look for all listings of vacation properties being listed on Craigslist, and emailed the owners to list also on Airbnb. Yes, it’s spam. But yes, it worked.

(1) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140918020352-142089-airbnb-...

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Why is every growth hacker I meet IRL an ex-SEO guy who is convinced I want to buy their NFT bs?

What's worse an SEO black magic or NFT nonsense?

> The team also appeared to look for all listings of vacation properties being listed on Craigslist, and emailed the owners to list also on Airbnb. Yes, it’s spam. But yes, it worked.

That was arguably expressly disallowed on CraigsList since very early on. (Post pages would have a checkbox for whether people could contact you for other purposes, and displayed/scraped posts would indicate how the poster answered. I don't see how "growth hackers" could've missed that.)

CL was built on a Californian flavor of warm-fuzzy, and it was a shame to see Californian-style startups then abuse that. (Well, when CL grew mainstream, the anonymity and hookups attracted sketchiness, but was another corruption.)

Funnily enough, Airbnb also expressly stated that you were not allowed to scrape their listings early on and went to (moderate) lengths to make it difficult to do so, even when they were breaking, and/or empowering people, to break the laws in given areas.

Everyone wants to keep their data secret, but no one wants to respect others wishes.

Same thing with Facebook. They scrape everyone’s website but if you open the console on their website: a big legal disclaimer say it’s their code. The only website I have ever encounter that does that. Even Google doesn’t do it. The hypocrisy is astounding.

Wow. I thought you were joking, but nope. That appears to be real. https://i.imgur.com/jCtREao.png

It doesn't say you can't copy anything from their website, it says don't copy paste code here because you'll end up pwning yourself, with a link to "selfxss". That's an anti-scam message, doesn't sound that bad to me.

Fair point.

It seems like they recently changed the message. It was much more aggressive in the past. Something along the lines of reading it could be consider copyright infringement.

The only thing that seems to have changed in that screenshot is that the word "STOP" is not printed in red. Otherwise it's the same message I've recalled seeing for years.

Discord also has a similar message in their console.

Can you share it?

Discord "Wait!" anti-scam attempt:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/711974054088933446/96...

That doesn't contain anything related to copyright infringement.

Yeah, this is not even related to your post, sorry for the wrong reply.

> nowadays it is called growth hacking

Nowadays it’s called illegal. At least in the EU.

Do you have a source for this?

> Do you have a source for this?

https://gdpr.eu/

It's quite comprehensive, but article 4 on consent.

They'd probably try to rely on legitimate interest rather than consent, but it would depend to a large extent on how personalised and automated the messages were.

Good luck with that. Most legitimate interests require the reason to be defensive or a relationship to exist where there's an expectation they would need to process your data. I am legitimately interested in spamming you is not really a defense.

To be clear, I wasn't defending it - I was just saying that they'd probably try to claim that rather than consent. I agree that they'd likely fail if it actually came to a court case.

Legitimate interest is not a valid legal means of processing data that has been scraped for marketing purposes.

Legitimate interest is not vague enough to be relied on.

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