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Comment by sequoia | Hacker News Reader

They had a contest, you didn't win, he-said she-said and you post it to HN. I'm sorry you didn't win but I don't really see what the point of this post is- shaming this company for... what? Giving away a camera? Without more solid proof you should withdraw your accusations. How do I know you didn't tweet more than once?

More importantly, how did they "scam" you? Did you lose money in this transaction?

Shame on the HN community for piling on this company (which I've never heard of) based on such scant evidence.

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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.

To be fair, if I decided I had to win a popularity contest on twitter, you bet I'd hassle some of my friends who haven't seriously used twitter in months and make them retweet my stuff, and I don't think I'd feel bad about it (other than for annoying my friends). I don't think it's realistic to demand some eligibility requirements for being a proper twitizen before your vote can be counted.

Not sure what my company has to do with this, as I promoted this from a personal account and not my company account.

All RT's were from legitimate accounts from friends and family. Nothing in their rules state that you could not have friends/family retweet, and in fact, they encouraged it: https://twitter.com/jpegmini/status/218018634352689152

In case you don't know, it is extremely common, if not required, for startup types to use the services of their putative competitors. This isn't done to undermine them, but simply for market research, to see how other people are doing stuff. I don't know where you get that this would be distasteful.

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.

> "which seems consistent with the idea that they didn't let the OP win because of follower counts." Or, since you supposedly win with the most retweets, this is a very logical statement

I agree that it is good to make unfair things public but I am pretty weary after seeing so much bullying over this kind of stuff lately (37 Signals debacle for example)

>"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...

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.

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.

> claim that I violated their rules by entering multiple times

Actually, they didn't claim you violated their rules. They claimed you entered multiple times... which you had previously claimed violated their rules. But they had already pointed out that making multiple tweets is fine if it is from the same account. And one of the spots you underlined was not the complete sentence. The rest of the sentence concludes with by using multiple/different Twitter accounts. I think it all needs to stay together.

Also, some people forget there are two ways to retweet. You still have the perfectly valid original RT-style retweet (which you might be calling "mentions") and then you have the "new and improved" retweet function. I would guess that the old RT-style does not get included in the retweet count.

Note: please don't take this as an indictment of your story... just that you may not be seeing everything correctly.

Right, as I had stated the winner did not have direct retweets, but rather the original style (which I called mentions). He had 13 of those.

I'm not entirely sure how to run a good search on Twitter to get a count of how many time a person was "mentioned" with a specific tweet. I'm sure you know better than I do since you ran such a search in order to get to the count of 13. But is it at all possible that you missed a couple? And does that 13 include the 1 direct retweet he got?

Yeah, but what exactly are you accusing them of? What is the benefit to them here? It's not like they lied about giving out a camera, they just picked a different winner- there's really no upside to them screwing you here, which makes me think it's less malicious than is being made out.

Were all 15 retweets from other people with unique histories and no way affiliated to your identity?

Where's the solid proof? All I see is screenshots of web pages, which are near the top of the "things that are easiest to fake" list.

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

Be my guest. I have no dog in this fight- don't even own a mac. :p

Did you read the whole thing?

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

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