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Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

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Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#181

Post by Silhouette »

jacquesm wrote: post #167
Silhouette wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suppose posterous would charge 5$/month for their blog hosting, and still would add the affiliate links, what would it change in your opinion? It is fundamentally different in law as soon as there is consideration in both directions, because then you have the basis of a contract. However, if users aren't paying for the service (or otherwise giving some significant benefit to the service provider) then there is unli…

> IANAL etc., but this is elementary contract law. It's perfectly legal to have a contract where no money changes hands at all. The important part is that there is some kind of agreement between two parties (or more) that is defined in a formal way. Money definitely need not change hands. A 'one way contract' gives consideration to only one party, and in the case of posterous that is definitely not the case, after al…

A contract fundamentally requires consideration in both directions, as well as the agreement element. This need not be money. Obviously it can also be something else of value, or the only contract possible would be a direct swap of funds, which isn't very useful.

This is the case in every jurisdiction in the modern world. I don't care what Wikipedia says: if it disagrees with this, literally ten seconds with any qualified lawyer will tell you that it is wrong.

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#182

Post by Silhouette »

jacquesm wrote: post #136
codyrobbins wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using their service completely free, so I don't think you are really entitled to any say on the matter. If you were paying for it you might have some reasonable expectation that they leave your content intact, but you're not. It's like complaining about high taxes and then turning around and complaining that the government isn't sending everyone's children to college for free. You can't have it both ways. I th…

I really don't like the downvotes just because you express an unpopular opinion, instead let me try to show you what is not good here. A free service does not mean there is no understanding between the parties, it simply means the price is '0'. Even if you paid or got paid, there would still be an unwritten set of expectations underlying your usage of the service, and these should be clearly expressed in the terms of…

> By your logic google can turn around next month and suddenly charge you for your gmail account, after all, you don't really have any say on the matter. Or they might decide to decrease the size of your mailbox to 10 MB.

Yes, they can. At least, they can impose a charge and immediately discontinue providing the service to you if you don't wish to pay that charge.

Pretending otherwise just perpetuates the entitlement culture I mentioned earlier, and results in lots of upset people who somehow thought a free service owed them something. At it happens, Google is probably a relatively safe bet for the foreseeable future, but certainly other services have just folded overnight or dramatically changed their terms, and people have lost whatever data/content they had stored there.

If you have valuable data that you want to keep safely or present reliably, host it yourself, or get a company with a transparent business model and enforceable terms to host it for you.

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#183

Post by jacquesm »

Silhouette wrote: post #181
jacquesm wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IANAL etc., but this is elementary contract law. It's perfectly legal to have a contract where no money changes hands at all. The important part is that there is some kind of agreement between two parties (or more) that is defined in a formal way. Money definitely need not change hands. A 'one way contract' gives consideration to only one party, and in the case of posterous that is definitely not the case, after al…

A contract fundamentally requires consideration in both directions, as well as the agreement element. This need not be money. Obviously it can also be something else of value, or the only contract possible would be a direct swap of funds, which isn't very useful. This is the case in every jurisdiction in the modern world. I don't care what Wikipedia says: if it disagrees with this, literally ten seconds with any qual…

Value does not need to be something material. In the case of posterous the user gets a space to host their content, the posterous people get the 'eyeballs'.

So, consideration in both directions is present, the terms of service seal the conditions under which the agreement operates.

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#184

Post by Silhouette »

jacquesm wrote: post #183
Silhouette wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A contract fundamentally requires consideration in both directions, as well as the agreement element. This need not be money. Obviously it can also be something else of value, or the only contract possible would be a direct swap of funds, which isn't very useful. This is the case in every jurisdiction in the modern world. I don't care what Wikipedia says: if it disagrees with this, literally ten seconds with any qual…

Value does not need to be something material. In the case of posterous the user gets a space to host their content, the posterous people get the 'eyeballs'. So, consideration in both directions is present, the terms of service seal the conditions under which the agreement operates.

I suspect you would have a hard time arguing that an unknown number of hypothetical page viewings by third parties represented significant consideration for the service, unless they were clearly able to monetize those viewings... which kind of brings us back to where we came in.

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#185

Post by jacquesm »

codyrobbins wrote: post #180
jacquesm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about the moral angle. If you position your service as one thing, change it after the fact to become another you are shooting yourself in the foot, even if you are 'completely free to do so', not communicating with your users about such course changes is simply dumb. It costs nothing and will help you tremendously in the long run. If you pretend that you did 'an experiment' whereas to everybody but the m…

I wasn't going to say anything further on this thread, but I just checked out your site: http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/6032/wwcom.png I'm sorry dude, but Posterous found a way to finance their site without plastering their homepage with ads for 'AdultFriendFinder'. The fact that I don't have women's crotches shoved in my face when I go to a Posterous blog means they're one step ahead of you. The fact that you co…

Hilarious.

I've been 100% up front about having advertising on that site as a means of making it profitable, the interesting bit here is that I enabled those ads specifically in order to produce some data, the 9 years between 2001 and the posting listed below it has been ad free.

See this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1108677

It has been a lot of work and it will be a lot more work still before it is finished.

You're pretty quick to judge here just because of adult friend finder, ww.com has always had an adult component which we've tried very hard to eradicate, but since that seems to be impossible it is an excellent place to see how much money you can make with that kind of advertising.

Or would you rather have I tested that on reocities.com or so?

Posterous is doing fine without resorting to silly tricks, and they've done just that. It's a pity because they are one of the best sites in that segment today and they stand to lose a lot if they do stuff like this and not learn their lessons from it.

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#186

Post by Tichy »

codyrobbins wrote: post #171
Tichy wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I probably wouldn't move in with the aunt to begin with. But suppose I would, I think in most of such cases there is some mutual benefit. Perhaps in exchange for moving in, you are expected to have tea with the lonely aunt at least twice a week, and to tend to her garden (without that having been agreed upon beforehand). In any case, it is just not nice to promise something, make other people invest in you…

When did Posterous promise that they would never add affiliate links to your blog posts? Or that they would tell you about it if they did?

They promise to be a clean blog engine. Also there are some common assumptions with human interactions. However, further discussion is futile. If there are people who don't mind, I don't blame them for using Posterous.

Apparently this is a matter of taste.

Re: Posterous silently changes all external links to affiliate links

#187

Post by avar »

avar wrote: post #137

As of March 4, 2010 posterous has no way in their interface to delete your account. If you want it deleted you should mail vince@posterous.com or help@posterous.com and ask for it to be deleted. I've just done so. Citation: http://inbtwnrthedoors.posterous.com/3604263

Update: Just got my account removed.
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