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Comment by biznickman | Hacker News Reader

Why are all the comments so negative on this thread? Aaron has personally contributed a ton to the communities he's a part of and I have no doubt the same goes for LivingSocial. It's a company of thousands of employees and one that most definitely has a massive consumer impact. Whether or not the business thrives or fails, few people on this site can say they founded something with anywhere near as much a reach as LS. That's an accomplishment.

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I think the comments on this and other LivingSocial threads are negative because many have the perception that LivingSocial was a net negative force on the world. This is a pretty reasonable reaction.

Things like "impact" and "reach" are orthogonal to whether or not something of value was contributed. Let's face it, it was a boiler room with immense reach. Technically I suppose you can call that an "accomplishment", but I wouldn't call it an admirable one.

I'm not saying he's a bad guy (I know nothing about him), but I think that their founders should be doing less boasting and more apologizing. I don't know that the problems they caused were intentional, but I have to think that they must have taken some notice when it was apparent that they were pushing their staff to sell unsustainable products. Sometimes it's hard to notice these things when you're pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars by cashing out early though.

A net negative force on the world? Seriously? How is that? I got good deals, businesses got to try a new marketing method, many did well, some poorly. No businesses were coerced or forced into offering a coupon on LS. I fail to see how they are a negative force or anything worse than a publisher like Yellow Pages selling ads.

If only this had been discussed thousands of times in hundreds of different forums...

Whether you want to talk about damage to local businesses or another company that VCs poured millions into with no return, its pretty hard to argue that this company did much good. You getting good deals and ignoring what was necessary to get them isn't really the metric by which we decide if a business is doing good or not. If you're comparing it to the Yellow Pages than that says it all really.

If you really don't see how LivingSocial caused more problems than the Yellow Pages, I don't think we will be able to start a discussion.

Nobody was forced to buy those mortgages either, right?

To be fair to parent, they may not know about the terrible experience of a local business who works with Groupon, LS, or another daily deals site.

Oh, I don't know. Yellow Pages seems like a far more pervasive problem, even if they do lack the severity in harm. Yellow Pages litters their unwanted obsolete crap everywhere. Those coupon startups are worse than littering, but lack the reach.

Many did poorly. Few did well. Groupon/LivingSocial was a classic pump and dump kind of business, only difference is Groupon reached IPO to dump it on your mutual funds.

You say this as though the founders got together and made a plan to screw people over. The people running a boiler room operate with the intent of screwing people. The founders of livingsocial, as I know them, never operated with the intent of screwing everybody involved.

No, to be clear, I don't want to suggest that they did that at all. I'm sure they went into it with legitimate intentions.

I don't see anyone making negative comments about this guy as an individual, just Living Social as a business.

Personally, I couldn't find much positive to say about them when they started laying people off back in November[1] and I don't see much positive now.

You're right, I can't claim to have created anything with "near as much reach as LS" or as the same "massive consumer impact".

However, I can't see what reach or impact LS had that fellow failing business Groupon didn't.

As I said back in November, it sure looks like they just copied a momentarily hot, yet broken business model, snagged a bunch of fancy office space and sought tax breaks [2] while posting huge loses.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4845253

2: http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2012/07/10/living...

When you're a co-founder of a business, and someone rags on it, they take it very personally. They might not make it apparent to the public, but they care, a lot.

If he cared that much, then why would he leave? A captain should go down with his ship. Here's a guy who made a boatload of money, and now he's leaving 4,000 employees behind who are probably going to be looking for new jobs inside of a year. He should take it personally.

Because it's Hacker News. Nothing gets reported here without half of this community being obnoxiously negative about it, as if we've all could have built something like LivingSocial if we wanted to.

Or, because, you know, the many, stated legitimate reasons people have? But yeah, why consider those when you can just pretend like an entire community is dumber you?

I'm not sure who you're responding to, because:

Not entire: half. And not dumber: negative.

But I rest my case.

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... and welcome to Hacker News, ladies and gentlemen.

> "obnoxiously negative"..."as if we could have built anything like LivingSocial"

That's certainly implying that the negative posts are both un-constructive and omitting important & obvious context. That sounds a lot like "dumber" to me.

[insert obligatory copy-and-paste of Man in the Arena]

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