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Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

I think we need to distinguish between "faking", "demonstrating" and "supplying". Faking should be reserved for literally providing false data with the intention that it's believed to be true, eg. the dating site example.

Most of those examples were not faking anything. Rentoid actually supplied a serivce, though it wasnt "user-generated". Reddit supplied links their potential users would be interested in.

This is a mixture of demonstrating how the service works, and supplying actual content to potential users.

By way of contrast, what the dating site admins should have actually done, is ask all their single friends to sign up (and any other single people they could get their hands on directly).

It seems a perfectly good and moral business strategy to generate your own content which is representative and useful. I think "faking it" is a bit more questionable.

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Your examples are mostly still "faking" - faking consumer interest, faking popularity.

Companies do that all the time.

In the case of the dating website it is faking. Because there's no way you'll end up dating the fake profile

Not sure how it was in the case of Paypal, if it was a false order or they would just go ahead and buy small stuff then.

But in the case of Reddit and Rentoid, it's not fake. You're getting what you want. Links and the products to rent.

It doesn't matter if it's being provided by the founders, you're getting the service

But the founders were lying about their identity when posting the links. If the user considers the service to be "links from other users" then yes, the content is fake. If the user considers the service to be "links", then you're correct. Personally, I consider the service to be "links from other users" and therefore, from my perspective, the content was fake.

Lying may be too strong of a word. The users have pseudonyms; there was no reddit real names policy. It seems reasonable for multiple pseudonyms to be controlled by a single person.

Users may have been surprised to find out just how few other people actually existed. But I see this as legit. It would be like a big corporation hiring "Esprit Legal Firm" for their defense, winning in court, and hen finding out that the company was run by a single lawyer. Obviously businesses can't lie, but you're not required to list your own flaws either.

Businesses lie all the time. I believe AT&T was busted a year or so ago for misleading consumers that the fees attached to their phone bill were mandates by the government. Bestbuy was busted on using different instore flyers then the ones they shipped out.

Do you think "faking" something is more questionable or the word itself sounds questionable? The author doesn't share your definitions of the word faking or its pejorative connotations. So the only reason to go about doing everything in this post would be to satisfy not using the word faking itself.

That's not actually achieving anything. It's just more complicated term usage because you don't think the word can be used positively.

It's all semantics. I think the author was very clear and the whole concept made sense to me despite the use of the word "faking"...it didn't bother me at all.

I was pointing out that undue author was overloading the word "faking" and in doing so obscuring what was actually going on and lumping together a lot of different practices.

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