I would be surprised to find any successful company that had no shenanigans in their origin story.
My history included a startup that shipped empty boxes to meet numbers, scraped thousands of emails from more popular websites to sell as their own traffic, even one that forged stock certificates to secure funding. (The FBI ended that one)
Please don’t normalize this. Just because it has many famous examples does not mean it should ever become socially acceptable. Fuck every company that has done this.
Woah, never knew this. Do you have any reference? I cannot find anything about it.
And it's not just in tech. New restaurants hire actors as customers to make the restaurant appear busy and popular. Publishing companies and authors buy their own books to make it appear popular and climb the best sellers list. Clubs give out free tickets. Studios buy seats or entire theaters to make it seems like their movies are selling out. The older you get, the naive idealized world of business recedes as the stark "fake it til you make it" world emerges. Everyone fakes it. But not everyone makes it. Taken to extreme, we get elizabeth holmes and theranos.
As a side note, I created an alternative Reddit API[1] and Reddit didn't like that so much they banned my 13 year old Reddit account.
[0] "you may not... license, sell, transfer, assign, distribute, host, or otherwise commercially exploit the Services or Content" https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-...
I imagine the number of such requests would be small.
Make a system for claiming your old Reddit account. I'm guessing if you try to use OAuth, Reddit will just ban you. So you need to get creative, probably make an extension that grabs the users sessionid from their cookies or something (or let people copypaste it in if they are technical enough).
Fun to imagine but unfortunately probably won't happen.
There was a strong 2019 precedent in favour of allowing this kind of scraping of public content (from LinkedIn in that case): https://www.techdirt.com/2019/09/10/big-news-appeals-court-s...
"I broke Reddit's TOS deliberately and repeatedly and they banned me!" is another way to put it. But it doesn't sound as good and because of the current zeitgeist people will tend to side with you anyway. Perfect timing for you :)
Load up those liabilities.
Except now, of course, one can build MUCH more interesting tools for pre-seeding communities. Should be fun!
Now, I would have less of a problem with this, if all the founders and CEOs would openly admit, "this is how business works", "we do what we must", or "we don't call someone a business shark for being nice and friendly to the fish". But they don't. Instead, they go on stage or order press releases and creation of blog posts and other content, talking about changing the world for the better, about excellence, moral virtues, diversity, inclusion, responsibility, sustainability.
It's all bullshit. Why should I believe they mean it, when they have a long history of lying to or bullshitting people, dating all the way to the first days of their companies, and they're 100% fine with it?
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[0] - At least in the group of companies that would be discussed on HN and similar places.
The Udacity web development course was my introduction to coding. It blew my mind. He was a good teacher.
No one wants to hang around a 'dead' site, but post enough activity, post enough 'controversial' comments and people will want to join in, and then suddenly you have an actual ecosystem of real people driving traffic.
I guess every big-boy internet entity is losing a layer of shine in 2023.
With AI, it would be far easier to bootstrap a plausible-looking site full of “active users”, and unscrupulous startups might do that.
It is why we built this, which at least is the most ethical approach we could come up with, as a service for any community to encourage discussion on ghost-town topics, while clearly disclosing its bots:
In about the broader debate about generative AI, this seems to be one of the least harmful (it has responsible disclosures) and most helpful (https://xkcd.com/810/) approaches
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35779455
PS: feel free to use it if you own a Discourse forum, we would love to hear feedback
