If you run a contest as a startup, don't be dishonest. JPEGmini scammed me.

I believe the intended takeaway is 'if you find need of this company's product, use their competitors' instead.'

And yet posts like these usually get right to the top of the front page. People will continue to treat HN like mommy when HN continues to act like mommy.

Some of the issues that have come to light on HN have been genuine, but in this case I feel like this guy has spent more time complaining than he did participating in the contest... They scammed you out of what? 5, maybe 10, minutes of your time?

An alternative point of view is that people are complaining on HN to warn others about scammers and unsavory companies in their mix.

Without being able to name and shame, how are we supposed to create a social stigma towards the bad players?

I realize that the author spent more effort in drafting the complaint than in entering the contest but isn't that a good thing? Many scams rely on people being unwilling to complain when they are nickle and dimed.

Have you considered flagging this story?

Sounds like the makings of a YC W12 Company.

loud.ly - Complain with the crowd.

Its the "People's Court" :-) But more seriously there is a challenge that in the poorly regulated world of the Internet its often difficult to find justice, either from Joe Jobs or scams. If you have a popular blog you can taunt the scammer with cartoons or dry wit, but if you have no soapbox you're left trying to leverage something else.

Like you I find it annoying that this is something folks use HN for but I understand the motivation. I know there have been times when I've filed a complaint with a regulatory agency, or written a representative, and knew in my heart it would fall on presumably deaf ears, but I count on the law of averages to motivate others to do so as well. Sometimes that works, other times, not so much.

Which is why we have popular segments on the local news called <news-outlet>-on-your-side or ActionLine or any number of things like that. Perhaps there is a startup opportunity here, BobsHitList :-) Some folks who are not particularly moral, like RipoffReport, do quite well at it.

Given how rapidly I was downvoted for saying the same thing, I have a feeling (but no evidence!) that the "community" hasn't really driven this post to the #1 slot.

After seeing this, I certainly will use one of their competitors if I need a similar service.

Solid proof was sent to the company several times. They chose to ignore it and even claim that I violated their rules by entering multiple times, which I never did. I have 84 followers, what good what it do for me to tweet the same thing many times when the goal of the contest was to get the most retweets on one tweet? I tweeted once from their app and got 15 retweets on that single tweet.

They ~scammed~ the OP by fraudently getting free advertisement through twitter, by giving a promise they then broke.

Sure, we can only go on the OP's word here, so let's see what the company has to say.

Even if the OP did tweet multiple times, according to the supposed statement by the company that's fine with them, so short of some other adventurous interpretation or misrepresentation of the rules of the contest, we can probably use publicly available information on twitter to come to a preliminary opinion until the company makes a statement, and then decide who sounds more credible.

Edit: For now, this tweet - http://i.imgur.com/At4py.png - by the company kind of comes off as trying to entice random popular twitter users into participating in the contest, which seems consistent with the idea that they didn't let the OP win because of follower counts.

>"but I don't really see what the point of this post is- shaming this company for... what?"

Rarely is it the case that I feel like some dispute should be kept private, rather than brought public. In my opinion, the internet is the great-leveler in that context; it's so easy to get things into the court of public opinion. Governments and companies can get away with far less than years past.

The OP felt he was misled, or worse. He tried to deal with the company through private channels, and they ignored him. Bring it on. Let me be the judge of whether I'd like to deal with the company.

Now, whether it belongs on HN is another issue...

Things I find odd:

- OP runs his own online contest company (http://www.linkedin.com/in/giancarlomassaro -> http://anyluckyday.com/ ), but did not disclose it. (Edit: the significance of running a contest company is that people may believe OP has incentive to undermine other people's contests, especially if they are run by a competitor. I don't know that's the case, but it's a fact that should have been disclosed and it suggests that there may be more).

- A couple of the RTs of OP's tweet are suspicious, in that they are from rarely-used accounts (especially https://twitter.com/DailyShitReport and https://twitter.com/vinmassaro ).

Are those the problem? Maybe. Maybe not. But we only have one side of the story here and it's possible that the company sent more information or simply decided to not further accuse OP after deciding that some of his RTs were not valid.

They scammed him - he posted ads, he won the contest according to the rules, the camera is legally his.

Did you read the whole thing?

Here you go, https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/Just%20saved%2029.4%2...

Don't count tommytrc, or JustIs that tweeted twice. 13 total.

Edit: Looks like I missed the direct retweet, so 14 total.

I bet the company already regrets giving out the first camera, given the low turnout.

This is exactly it. Obviously the purpose to this silly contest is marketing. How is that served by getting into a public fight with one of your users?

There's an obvious slippery slope you don't want to go down: Just shelling out to shut up any random guy with a dropbox account or even be bullied into responding publicly to said random guy. Assuming, of course, you're sure you did everything right. We have, as you point out, only heard one side of the story.

Right now, the fallout, as in negative publicity, is pretty limited. The guy comes off as bitter and with an axe to grind. If you're in the market for the product and you come across this thread or the current five clicktivists on twitter, are you going to steer clear of the product?

Of course, they shouldn't be smug or arrogant if they happen to be forced to respond later, but ignoring at this stage is definitely the right strategy IMO.

Either that, or the fact that they have 130k+ followers (vs my 84 followers) so the company thinks they'll get free promotion from them.

Have you proof or are you just tossing another unfounded accusation on the pile?

I wish people didn't participate in contests on twitter because I read twitter to see what my friends are up to, and not which products they are using.

You would write off an entire company based on one misspelling?

Only reason why I entered was because I was using their service, saw the contest, and I needed a camera upgrade. Checked the entries and no one had really entered, so I entered, and won....or so I thought.

I actually just won a hotel stay and dinner in a tweet contest:

https://twitter.com/CarnabyLondon/status/220192719958581248

But then again, it's not some unknown startup, it's a local marketing initiative and I can meet the organizers face to face just around the corner.

I've entered plenty of "(re)tweet this to win" type contests. The barrier to entry is incredibly low, and I've won enough times to keep myself encouraged.

If your time is so valuable that taking the time to (re)tweet something will be a drag, or if your twitter account has some intrinsic worth that could be brought down by this type of tweet, then yes, there's no reason to enter, but then again, if you meet either of these criteria, you probably don't even need to enter contests...

The winner never had any retweets on his actual tweets. People did quote his tweet, and as stated in our emails back and forth, he had 13 mentions while I had 15 retweets.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, retweets by users with private accounts are not added to that count.

I dunno, "all the image quality and none of the filesize" sets off my snake-oil alarms.

Here's the key: "an image quality detector ... to determine the maximum amount of compression which can be applied to each individual photo without causing visible artifacts." ( http://www.jpegmini.com/main/technology ) So they can detect that, say, the image looks the same at quality 30 as it does at quality 85, then they compress it at 30 which saves space. Sure, you could have done the same thing by eye, but they're doing it automatically.

See also http://link.aip.org/link/doi/10.1117/12.872231

You are far too trusting. When people start spewing this nonsensical BS and then go dark, nine times out of ten you've been had.

Are you saying they 'accidentally' scammed him? Wow

It sounds to me like 'understanding their own rules' isn't the only problem here. Perhaps a lesson in counting tweets correctly.

So, your life is pain, and you wish said pain on others? Gotcha.