SMS Spam from a Y Combinator Company? | Hacker News Reader

SMS Spam from a Y Combinator Company?

10 pointswdr18 comments

This morning (at 2am!) I started to get a bunch of text messages from a domain called "theflockapp.com."

There's no opt-out & no way to tell them to stop texting me (especially at 2am!).

I checked their FAQ & couldn't find anything there: https://theflockapp.com/faq

However, I surprised to find that it's an app created by a Y Combinator company, as the FAQ links to their team page: http://bu.mp/company/ourteam

The link in their text spam only takes me to download their app.

The best I can figure, is that to get them not to spam me, I have to 1) download their and 2) give them access to my Facebook account.

For reals?

PG or anyone else, could someone please ask them to knock this type of behavior off? It really does seem over the line.

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Hi all, this is Dave, CEO of Bump (we make Flock). Just saw this thread, and though I've personally emailed with wdr1 already, I wanted to give everyone here the details.

These are not automated text messages coming from our servers. And they are not automated invites sent on behalf of users when they sign up for Flock. They are intentional invitations sent directly by a real user.

The flow is: 1) User navigates to the Invite Friends page 2) User sees all her friends in her address book on her iPhone and taps on the ones she wishes to invite (phone numbers are shown below each friend) 3) User taps "Invite" button 4) User is taken to the native SMS UI with the contacts she chose in the To: field, which is editable, along with the link to download Flock, again, which is editable. 5) User must press "Send" on the SMS UI to send text messages to those friends.

You can see screenshots here: https://bu.mp/aPGzVZ

We've tried to make this flow as explicit and intentional as possible while giving existing Flock users a tool to invite their friends to use the app as well.

If there are examples of apps that do this better than we do, we'd love to hear about them so we can improve the flow.

-dave @ theflockapp.com

Also, here's a screengrab of some of the texts: http://imgur.com/8wNav

I'm guessing someone you know who has you in their phonebook downloaded the app and then it has one of those aggressive "send this download link to all my friends" type of thing and it's created a chain reaction where you have shared friends who then hit you when they sign up and so forth and so forth.

That seems like quite a plausible explanation. However, it's a really scumbaggy and scammy move, especially without an obvious opt-out.

I'm the growth person who spec'd this flow

There is no select all/message all option in our picker. Each contact must be explicitly selected

Reply with "STOP". That's supposed to be the universal "get me off this list" for SMS, though a bad actor might ignore it.

So you want someone else to send an email to them?

Their email is clearly listed on the footer: support@theflockapp.com.

No, I want them to give an opt out or, ideally, stop this behavior all together.

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