Zynga To Remove All In Game Offers | Hacker News Reader

Zynga To Remove All In Game Offers

techcrunch.com

57 pointsphyscab16 comments

So much for Michael Arrington's assertions being "shit, doubleshit and bullshit"...

I know a lot of people have something against MA, but he does good things like this on occasion which, imho, make up for a lot of the perceived douchebaggery the rest of the time.

I agree. For what's its worth, he's an ardent supporter of user rights and you need someone with a loud voice on occasion. It's also quite difficult to inflict change on an industry that seemed entrenched in its practices. Kudos to him for taking the initiative and getting results.

Ugh - guys please don't be fooled by this. The guy has no journalistic integrity whatsoever. Remember the last.fm fiasco?

http://www.itworld.com/business/63085/lastfm-tech-crunch-and...

He's a very opportunistic person. Ranting against popular business practices produces great publicity. So does posting a very damaging but completely unverified rumor. Arrington has done both, which is why he is hardly the Robin Hood of web2.0.

Yes, occasionally Arrington's flamebaits produce some good. But overall TechCrunch is a mediocre and irresponsible "publication". I think it's a tragedy that the network effect has resulted in a clown running the most important blog about web start-ups. Imagine if the WSJ or NYT was run like TC.

Imagine...

http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/11/why-mainstream-media-is-dyi...

I dont like Arrington much myself; especially after the Last.fm debacle.

On the other hand had the last.fm story been true the fall out could have been as "big" as this.

In that case he made a serious and unacceptable mistake in reporting very dodgy "information received". But he reported it for the right reasons and deserves some respect for that (IMO).

He called scams bad (a very controversial stance!), let some scumbags brag about how they got rich off scams (I'm sure they all gave the money back), and has run off some 15 posts on the topic with links back from time & newsweek.

What part of that was difficult or laudable? When he starts suffering personally or professionally to do the right thing there will be something to congratulate him for.

It’s laudable because even though scams are obviously bad from our perspective, they were lucrative that nobody significant in the startup world had made them officially evil.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter who you are if you can make things better.

This whole affair makes Zynga look much more shaky as a potential IPO offering, although I have in general been impressed with Pincus' response too the whole thing. Perhaps the strong response was to retain the IPO momentum.

I for one am still not convinced about the explanation Pincus gave for how the ads came back for everyone other than Mikey boy.

I don't think they would selectively remove ads from critics' pages. That would be monumentally stupid. fyi: not to be nit-picky ;) but Matt Handal, President of DoubleDing gave that explanation. Zynga is an investor in DoubleDing so maybe that is about the same as Pincus giving the explanation- who knows?

I don't get it. Zynga controls the ad content as they are free to chose with which offer provider they work and which they don't. Sounds like a lame excuse.

It's probably a PR perspective on a bad situation. They could control who gets in and who doesn't, and they may not filter who gets in currently (e.g. if you pay your bills, your offer is displayed). The problem may simply be that offers are inherently hard to make profitable. If they're very profitable, they are probably very scammy.

Well, you choose the offer provider, who then chooses the offers. Unless you're going to have someone watching the offers 24x7 there's never going to be any fool proof quality guarantee. I would think at Zynga's scale though such a guard would be worth the expense.

Well, they choose the offer provider, who then chooses the offers. Unless you're going to have someone watching the offers 24x7 there's never going to be any fool proof quality guarantee. I would think at Zynga's scale though such a guard would be worth the expense.

Yeah, but they knew that their offer provider has chosen scammy offers before.

These people are typical of the ethicless parasites that infest everything creative smart people make.

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