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I went to a meetup that they hosted once, and it was pretty obvious that they were up to something, but they did have a really cool office.
I visited Limewire's offices, once. Three story office in Tribeca, with giant kitchens that were bigger than my apartment, game rooms, the works. It seems to me that the more ambiguous your business strategy is, the more you have to show off to convince others that it isn't.
If you work at Facebook or Google you're benefiting directly from the similarly shady practices they used to grow on their way to being "pillars of tech" today.
Do you remember when at LEAST 20% of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga? Like less than 5 years ago? Many speculated it was considerably higher, but Facebook never provided a full accounting (1).
Or do you remember when Facebook literally had an "affiliate marketing panel" that they worked with at the C-suite level packed with guys selling weight loss affiliate slop? Almost impossible to find reference of it now, was well known in many circles and you can still see references of it here and there. (2)
Or maybe when Google was caught colluding with a notorious gangster when he turned state's evidence to demonstrate to the DOJ how quickly Google was willing to skirt around laws to sell illegally imported drugs? They were fined $500,000,000.00. Google was. (3)
50onRed is clearly engaged in scumb-bag advertising practices, but at least they keep good company.
(1) http://allthingsd.com/20120423/zynga-accounted-for-15-percen...
(2) http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/11/16/dennis-yu-rise-and-fall-... & http://www.jimcockrum.com/blog/2011/10/19/the-biggest-dog-in... & http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a...
(3) https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-million-g... & https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/
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indeed! But the question is ... can tax evasion be considered an ethical violation? :)
Possibly. However tax evasion and avoidance are often confused, for a public company not avoiding taxes would most certainly be an ethical violation.
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Yea, good point. We live in an age when a whole set of duplicitous practices are now just referred to as "growth hacking"
Ugh, the number of dark patterns trying to cost me money just to purchase a damned ticket on Ticketbastards today. Seriously by not clicking the right boxes I could have agreed to pay an extra $42 in add-ons/services for a $15 ticket that had its own $6 in fees added.
Reminds me a bit of an experience I had at an event around 2000 or so. Most of the folks there were heavily academic, but at lunch I found myself sitting with one of the organizers who was clearly cut from different cloth, so I asked what he did the rest of the year. After a couple of rounds of vague responses about how he helped companies use email to get in touch with potential customers, it finally dawned on me th…
Pro Tip: The "what questions can we answer about $COMPANY" section at the end of an engineering interview should be used to ask about the business model and revenue/monetization, not just the tech stack
Maybe I just forget what it's like to be a beginner, but how on earth do you work on Ad Injection software and not realize that you're working on Ad Injection?!
Right out of school I worked at a company that builds deep packet inspection hardware and it seems like a dream job: good pay, smart people, interesting problems, reasonable schedule. Too bad about the product though.
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Ugh, the number of dark patterns trying to cost me money just to purchase a damned ticket on Ticketbastards today. Seriously by not clicking the right boxes I could have agreed to pay an extra $42 in add-ons/services for a $15 ticket that had its own $6 in fees added.
For Ticketmaster? That's odd, I deal with them quite a bit, and while they've definitely got a racket going on, usually they aren't opting you in for extra stuff (because you'll juts call to complain to their support and get it changed). I have seen them accidentally auto-select certain additions before, but that was a non-standard option on that event, and it was definitely a mistake.
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There's no case afaik, because they disclose everything in the original agreement when you install their software. Unethical, sure, but there's little the law can do to prevent people from agreeing to such things. Maybe a requirement for certain disclosures to be made more prominent (like for cigarettes)?
> there's little the law can do to prevent people from agreeing to such things. True, iff the customer was adequately informed about the offer in a way most people will understand. Contracts are not supposed to be a "gotcha" with extra terms buried in the fine print. If the installer only featured the "bait" and mentioned the adware behind a dark pattern UI or deep in the text of the contract, a judge could (and shou…
There's a difference between voiding a contract that no longer obligates people, and voiding a contract to make actions taken under it illegal. I'm not sure there's good precedent for the latter.
>There isn't a contract between the adware scammers and e.g. Target or Wikipedia.
They're not touching Wikipedia, they're running on the user's computer and manipulating their local served page of Wikipedia. I don't see why anyone else would have a case.
Pro Tip: The "what questions can we answer about $COMPANY" section at the end of an engineering interview should be used to ask about the business model and revenue/monetization, not just the tech stack
Given the choice, a company with a sane business model has less chances to go under (== not going through interviews again in 6 months), and it should also give an idea of how much and in which way the comapny has any chance to grow.