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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

There's this sort of idea that I can't wrap my head around, which is that if there's this fact A, and you don't like it, you can somehow make it not true by... explaining in detail why it is true. OK, so EE has its reasons for doing what developers didn't like... the end result is still that developers didn't like it. You explained that fact quite well, but I'm at a loss as to how that's supposed to translate into a negation of what you just explained.

I see this argument pattern bizarrely often online. It boggles my mind.

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So the fact A is that developers didn't like EE. I don't dispute that. What I'm arguing is that sometimes it's worthwhile to take a nuanced view of something that goes deeper than the surface level.

In this case, I'm asking you to consider EE from a different perspective, and whether what they did was worthy of scorn. My hope is that you'll soften your hatred of EE, but I don't expect everyone to come to that conclusion. Not every argument is a total negation of the counter position, I suppose.

I don't care about their internal motivations. Why should I? It's not as if what you said is even all that different than what we thought anyhow.

Now, I realize that may sound like snark, but I actually mean it on a deeper level than that. Why should I care about their internal motivations? EE chose how they would interact with me. It was their choice. They get to live with the consequences. If they had wanted to be perceived differently, it's incumbent upon EE to decide to treat me differently. It's not my responsibility to try to "understand" them, any more than it is my responsibility to interact with any other company in exactly the way they want. That's freedom, for the both me and EE.

You're equally free to defend them, and I was free to read the defense out of curiosity, which is why I'm posting at all. But the end result is the same; I know EE by their actions, and the result is what it is.

I get what you're saying, but haven't you ever made a judgement on someone only to later learn more about the circumstances around them and then modify your judgement?

To me, EE is not deserving of the campaign against them. They're not patent trolls - they built a business that added value, and then they applied some spammy marketing to it. Patent trolls deserve to be taken down with a passion. EE, not so much. Thanks again for your comments.

The issue I had with EE was that their "spammy marketing" took more value than their answers added.

Also this:

>It’s a little known fact that top contributors to EE got VIP treatment. They were flown to different locations around the world, wined & dined, and got lots of cool swag (computers, tablets, etc). When the experts came to visit us in San Luis Obispo, it was all-out fun for them. Experts on Experts Exchange have the potential to get some sweet perks.

Some of that money could've easily gone into improving the UX and adding features to the site which seemed to be stuck in 1999, or failing which, reducing the price of subscriptions. Throwing expensive swag around when there are better places to put it is a bad idea.

They wasted more of my time than they ever saved, with their pollution. To hell with 'em!

Yes, that happens all the time. But in that case, there was already a judgment about someone and then I got to know them and then realized that what was said about them was either gossip, or the person changed.

The thing about EE is that it is not gossip. People hate EE and they don't hate it because someone told them to hate it--they already had come to that conclusion on their own. I always hated EE and when I talked to other people about it, I found out they also held the same opinion, many times a fierce hatred of it. There was no campaign to build the hate; the hate was already there, all discovered independently by frustrated coders looking for an answer.

Maybe the evil intentions of EE were not real. But there are moments when I am coding when I want to tear all of my hair out. That emotion is real and won't be forgotten.

Admittedly, they generated plenty of frustration for me, as well. SO has changed everything, but it's kinda funny to me that when we encounter content that isn't free, we have a visceral reaction against it. Yet when people demand our software be free, we'd laugh them to scorn. Thanks for your comments.

> Yet when people demand our software be free, we'd laugh them to scorn.

Speak for yourself. I think free software is pretty much a net good. It's a shame we're not at a point yet where it's the status quo; I'm glad it is for content.

You yourself admit that EE used grey-hat practices and spammy marketing. If, after being named and shamed they apologized, and admitted that they were doing morally wrong stuff, and stopped doing that - then they wouldn't deserve a campaign.

They didn't, and apparently still don't - so they deserve whatever people think about them. Instead of making excuses, you need to apologize - it's that simple.

If your business model really, really, needs cheating your users - then the ONLY moral way out is to quit, no matter what other good things are there.

I have a company that assassinates babies. It's really profitable! The parents of the dead babies don't like it, but the working environment for our assassins is the best -- they get paid well and they can choose from the best weapons available and have unlimited drinks and snacks at work.

The serious point is, it does matter what you as a company do and employees are responsible for that. You made Google searches work worse, you made our lives difficult when we looked for information. You polluted the web.

Experts Exchange sells access to content - that's my whole point. That's literally all they do. Their crime was ranking highly in Google, while Google said what they were doing was OK. Comparing that to assassinating babies is kinda silly, don't you think?

"Their crime was ranking highly in Google, while Google said what they were doing was OK."

There's the letter of the law and there's the spirit of the law. EE may have been compliant with the letter of Google's law at the time, but if you'd asked Google and Google users specifically they would've told you it was sleazy/not ok.

Google eventually understood the sleaziness and changed their policy to address this specifically. End users also understood the sleaziness and went elsewhere.

White Van speaker guys sell speakers, that's literally all they do. Their crime is their super efficient marketing - they stop their van next to you while you're walking in the street. There's no laws against that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_van_speaker_scam

If their crime was only that they ranked highly because of the text in the questions and sold access to answers, I would be okay with that, but EE decided to let Google index the _answers_ too, for SEO purposes, and then hid the answers to non-paying members via various CSS tricks, hiding them below a large wall of boilerplate footer text, etc. The babies analogy is certainly silly though.

Their offense (now a crime by Google Law) was showing Google one thing (full content) and users another (squeeze pages). There's a reason Google started kicking sites out of the index for this.

Sure, I understand that the company was just trying to make money and keep the jobs of 50+ people. But that doesn't change the fact that the company wasted my time and made my experience miserable.

So, yes, what they did is worthy of scorn.

> My hope is that you'll soften your hatred of EE ...

Okay, as a favor to you, I will hate EE 10% less for 24 hours. But I'll still filter their links out of my Web searches, and warn people away from them at every opportunity. The reason? They're unapologetic parasites.

Happy now?

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