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I really don't understand how you can connect the dots of LinkedIn's (admittedly crappy) marketing emails and Intro existing. It seems quite simple really:

People loved Rapportive, people wanted Rapportive outside of GMail, Rapportive delivered.

> It's one of the most basic rules of growing a company that pursuing short-term gains (1-2 years) with dodgy maneuvers, directly translate into long-terms losses in the 10-fold numbers of the short term gains. This is not too hard to understand, is the executive team of Linkedin not intelligent enough to get that?

http://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-stock-performance-20...

Amazingly you've managed to crap not only on the Intro team, not only on the Intro team and LinkedIn executives, but every single LinkedIn employee – please tell me more about how to build this great culture you champion.

don't be evil.

The company that used that slogan had felt "the power of the dark side." :-)

I've said it before on HN (and was attacked for it), but I will say it again.

LinkedIn is not a tech company, it is a bunch of business people who hired technologists to build a website.

Sure, lots of good tech has been open sourced by LinkedIn employees, but none of them sit in decision making capacities (or Intro would not exist). THAT is the culture problem.

You seem to be implying that tech companies can have a higher moral ground. They're still run by people. Technologists can still be culpable even if they're in positions of authority precisely because they are people. Any other way of thinking is a gross over-generalization of people's ability and desire to do the right thing.

Besides, even if they aren't in the positions of authority, technologists can still be culpable. I thought we already had enough examples in history of culpable people who were "simply following orders" to render such types of discussions moot.

The implication here is that tech people are inherently more moral than business people, which I find more worthy of attack than any derivation from that premise.

The premise behind intro isn't a bad one. The employees (technical) who built it were excited about finding a way round Apple's very limiting system. I don't think subscribing to a particular view of corporate ethics is related to your technical skills. The scores of highly technical people working in the defense and finance industries is testament to that.

As a fairly technical person, I think Intro is a fairly neat product. There's definitely some implementation issues that mean that I'm not going to use it (I don't really want a linkedin advert in all my outgoing email), but I'd imagine it'd be pretty useful for some people. I already trust one large corporation with my email despite the fact I know they don't have my best interests at heart. Adding another one wouldn't be a deal breaker.

Thanks for the level headed comment! The LI signature is totally optional by the way: you can turn it off.

No problem! I'd imagine it's frustrating to see something you've worked on be attacked for having an agenda that you don't actually have. As far as I can see, the approach you took is the only reasonable one you could have taken to provide a service like Intro. Hopefully you can deal with problems like the one outlined in the article!

"It's one of the most basic rules of growing a company that pursuing short-term gains (1-2 years) with risky maneuvers, directly translate into long-terms losses in the 10-fold numbers of the short term gains."

That may or may not be true, but my basic position is that I want to do business with people who don't care whether dodgy practices will or will not make money in the short, medium, or long term, they have scruples that outweigh their venality.

If we really think that it's not something to be proud of, we could stop calling these people "growth hackers" and start calling them spammers.

Edit: to clarify, "these people" refers to the type of people the parent was complaining about, who use deception and dark patterns, not to all people working on growth in general. Making the distinction is what I'm arguing for.

Well you know there are also really great/impressive ways to growth hack, such as Noah Kagan who grew Appsumo with his really cool emails that people loved or the guy who made Dropbox go viral by giving 250MB additional data for each new person that signed up.

That being said, LinkedIn are neither of those. They are just spammers.

"Growth spammers" has a ring to it.

"Growth slackers", perhaps. You know, because rhyming :)

So I'm still a bit confused, what is it exactly that's shady and spammy with "Intro". The basic idea is rapportive right? Get the linkein information about the person emailing you.

Is the implementation that's shady/spammy? I don't see how Intro isn't useful for recruiters to instantly have the linkedin profile of the person their emailing available to them on their phone. That way it's a quick reference check.

You can do that in secure ways too. We did that (another YC company) with Ark Mail:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/13/ark-is-like-a-rapportive-mo...

That's actually a really neat way of tackling the problem, but it does require people to change habits and use Ark instead of Mail.

So while Intro seems to have less friction, you have to give up privacy (HAH. Email and privacy always makes me laugh) to achieve it, which does suck.

Shame there wasn't a cooler way to try and handle it by only using headers or something, rather than MITM the whole damned email stack.

Ark is neat though. Out of curiosity, how do you handle double notifications? As in, I get a new email, now I've got a notification in Mail and Ark? Or does Ark replace Mail entirely?

The shady part: The way they implemented it allows them to read every single email you send and receive, and that is not obvious to the average user.

The spammy part: They toss LinkedIn ads on your emails to other people after you hit send.

Well, in fairness, so can Google (assuming Gmail), etc. etc.

The ads bit is a bit shit though.

If by ads you mean the signature (that is 90% your photo, name, and occupation), then you can turn this off. It's completely optional.

"It's one of the most basic rules of growing a company that pursuing short-term gains (1-2 years) with dodgy maneuvers"

They're just copying the people in the financial industry. And the people involved made very nice sums of money, so their intelligence was successfully used to their own personal benefit.

Maybe the stock runup has made it such that they think they're just squeezing the last few drops out of this before they fully cash out.

This is pure speculation of course, but I gather this scenario is a risk with any company that has a lot of hype and such employee exit paths.

Good point, it's probably that no one is there anymore who cares about the long-term mission of Linkedin. Reid Hoffman is rich now anyway why would he care.

The reason for that is probably also though that Linkedin is not a passion product. It's not that their employees/founders are super passionate about connecting employees to employers, they are passionate about it making money. It's a bit understandable though, it's not easy to have a really strong passion for Linkedin or its mission.

While I don't disagree in principal I'd wager to say that LinkedIn wouldn't have seen the success they have without using these tactics.

So who is this "main growth hacker"?

Sidebar: What the heck does "main growth hacker" even supposed to mean? It blows my mind when people start coming up with new names for what they do. "Senior sanitation engineer" etc.

For some reason, a few people at HN seem to have a hard-on for criticizing LinkedIn. I never hear the same criticism of Facebook or Twitter here, even though their privacy policies are just as bad, or worse in many cases, and they also send bulk email.

I get spammed by all the social networks I've joined, and even by a few that I didn't join. I get mail from every newspaper or magazine I've ever subscribed to, and many that I never have. Condemning one business for doing this while praising another is just hypocrisy.

> I never hear the same criticism of Facebook [...] here

Facebook is regularly criticised, often fiercely, for their invasive privacy policies.

As are Google and Apple (albeit not always for privacy). I think the only oft-mentioned companies I've seen that consistently get better-than-neutral sentiment are Tesla and SpaceX, although there are probably others I'm forgetting.

And that's because Musk is the closest we can get to a tech "rock-star" (ignoring the Blizzard guys who are actual rock-stars and play in a sweet metal band).

I never hear the same criticism of Facebook or Twitter here, even though their privacy policies are just as bad, or worse in many cases, and they also send bulk email.

Intercepting email and inserting content is quantitatively different from sending bulk email. I think this programme is being criticised because it intercepts people's mail and inserts content - that's very different from receiving mail and leads to insecurity on several levels (they see your mail, sharing passwords, getting used to inserted content which can then be imitated for phishing).

Also people do criticise FB and Twitter here too, but the objection is not spamming.

"They see your mail." Ooh, scary. Email is effectively a postcard. It gets sent in cleartext all over the internet. If you think that email is even slightly private, you are misinformed. I don't see why I should trust LinkedIn any more or less with my emails than Google, Yahoo!, or any of the other companies that run regular old SMTP servers which process and store (possibly forever) tons of my email.

"sharing passwords" isn't a problem with this scheme because it doesn't use your password. It creates a separate IMAP account and links it to your regular account via OAuth.

"I think this programme is being criticised because it intercepts people's mail and inserts content" -- really? A sample comment is "they are spammers." Nothing there about man-in-the-middle, nothing there about email interception. I don't think most of the people bashing LinkedIn here even understand how Rapportive/Intro works.

The particular CSS exploit shown here seems like one that can and will be fixed. Obviously, there are other ways to do phishing via email, including just sending an email that looks like someone else's mail (remember: postcard). A lot of mail services are starting to filter spammy or fake-looking mail, so that may help.