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Comment by olliesaunders | Hacker News Reader

I want to agree with you. Could you be specific about what exactly is dishonest here and why?

I am having trouble phrasing it but.... a long time ago I had the opportunity to make lots of money through a popular Facebook game I created. OfferPal was interested in having me sell credit card leads. I didn't like the idea of irresponsible younger people signing up for credit cards and giving their personal information out and accumulating debt just to get more XP in my game so.... I declined. This guy did that but then took the high ground and reversed. Not because he didn't like selling leads but because he valued his freedom of expression more.

I think the key difference here is the audience. Offering credit cards to college kids is very different than offering cards to a more mature audience. Especially when you've been teaching that audience how to use credit cards as what they are, tools.

There's also a significant difference here in that in your situation, you would have been providing the rewards and you would have had power to artificially manipulate the value of those rewards (make it harder to win your game without reward points. Here, the author doesn't provide the rewards he is simply stating what offers the credit card companies themselves are making.

At the end of the day, there is certainly still a moral hazard here but it is also a very different situation than the one you described.

I don't think it's inherently dishonest, but I do think that you have to have enough self-restraint to avoid pushing things that are questionable, but give good lead-gen kickbacks.

It's not 100% obvious where that line lies, admittedly. I run a small side-project site (started as just something for friends/family) that lists checking and savings accounts that are free of "gotchas": free checking w/ no minimum balances, online savings accounts without weird caveats, etc. (http://www.pfstuff.com/checking/ and http://www.pfstuff.com/savings/, fwiw).

But, I also show some AdSense ads alongside some of the pages... which have the bad habit of advertising precisely the accounts that don't fit my criteria, and which I'm trying to steer people away from. Not always, but Google's algorithms rotate in such "bad choice" accounts more often than I'd like. I can ban some of the more egregious "10% guaranteed interest!" type stuff via AdSense's settings, but not everything. Perhaps I should just pull the ads entirely? That'd be the idealist thing to do, but of course would remove the (modest) monetization potential.

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