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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

I’m kind of fascinated by Nikita’s popularity. Normally if you told a tech community like Hacker News that someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts, it would seem like a checklist of things people get angry about here. Yet because he’s Twitter-famous and seems like a nice guy who posts memes and snark, he gets a pass.

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There's a split in the Hacker News community between the "traditional" hackers who look down on this kind of stuff and "growth hackers" who actively encourage it. In my experience X leans much more heavily to the latter.

A casual glance of his twitter stream makes him look like an ass hole. I dont see anything nice about this person at all.

For everyone getting angry about those things there are three people who’ve personally had a hand in them, I imagine.

Done plenty of "growth hacking" myself, I recognize that any successful social site did something spammy at one point, but I never targeted kids.

> someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts

Just curious. Any YC companies that have engaged in these tactics?

Most of them.

His work may be unsavory, but he's good at his craft.

Frank Abagnale committed financial crimes and had a wildly popular movie made from his story.

> Frank Abagnale committed financial crimes and had a wildly popular movie made from his story.

People are talking about Nikita Bier, not a movie about Nikita Bier.

You can be hated and reviled, and media about you can still be popular.

Ironically, most of his stories were blowing smoke. He wasn't actually nearly as successful at any of that as he was at making up stories and convincing everyone how successful he had been at it. When dealing with a con artist, rule number one is believe nothing they say, certainly not about what they've done!

What's the source on the making up stories part?

There's a huge section about it on Wikipedia and multiple books written about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale#Veracity_of_cla...

Ah, thought we were talking about Nikita Bier still, my bad.

I still find it funny that a con artist conned people about his life as a con artist. He peaked.

I have a suspicion some people might draw a distinction between financial crimes and exploiting children. I don't have a dataset for this at the moment but that is my suspicion.

Jeffery Dahmer has books, TV shows and films too. Your point?

Yeah, and? The netflix show about Dahmer was popular too... So what?

> a checklist of things every person who made it in silicon valley has done.

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