SEO Company CEO Contracts Murderers to Kill Competition, Client Exposes All • Hacker News Board

Re: SEO Company CEO Contracts Murderers to Kill Competition, Client Exposes All

#51

Post by SomeStupidPoint » Tue, Sep 26, 2017, 8:48 PM UTC

zafka wrote: post #47

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only about 8k people who are 1 in 1k crazy and 1 in 1k capable, assuming independent traits. If you restrict that to even 1 in 20 violent, then you're talking 400 people world wide. Factor out kids, elderly, etc and you're talking 200 really scary motherfuckers. Figure 75% are employed by governments, and you're talking 50 rogue badasses -- which seems vaguely in line with the number of really dangerous terro…

Can you explain how you came up with these numbers? Intuitively I have always thought they were low, due to the small incidence of terrorist attacks, but I am curious to where you come up with your base numbers.

I made them up.

But they're reasonable bounds -- the number of terrorists are very low, we know this for a fact. So we should suspect that the contributing traits are relatively rare. And if we want to talk about people who really scare us, then it should be people who are real outliers.

An NFL player is a one in a few hundred thousand, and an NFL star is around one in a million. So if we're looking for the Tom Brady of terrorists, it would make sense that we don't want a fraction substantially higher than the number of Tom Brady's in football players.

So I cut off a segment of the population that would have the traits required and estimated how large it was -- 99.9th percentile capable, 99.9th percentile crazy, 95th percentile violent. (Intuitively -- if the smartest and craziest kid in your high school were the same kid (1 in 1000 each trait), then you picked the most violent in 20 of those kids.)

This turns out to be ~400 people, which seems ballpark right. I'd certainly expect the answer to be in the 120-1,200 person range.

As long as your estimates aren't too far off and you aren't systemically wrong (eg, always rounding down), estimating is usually a reasonably accurate method to get a feel for the scale of something.

Re: SEO Company CEO Contracts Murderers to Kill Competition, Client Exposes All

#52

Post by danmaz74 » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 7:17 AM UTC

strathmeyer wrote: post #40

danmaz74 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why didn't you report these facts to the authorities? Fear of wasting time, or of retaliation, or something else?

Not everyone is rich.

I was talking about reporting a criminal case, not suing. With criminal cases it's the State which pays for everything, I think?

Re: SEO Company CEO Contracts Murderers to Kill Competition, Client Exposes All

#53

Post by wanda » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 7:40 AM UTC

mitchdoogle wrote: post #46

wanda wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that search-engine optimisation itself is a farce, perpetuated by confidence tricksters—some “SEO experts” do not know that they are conning people, charging people for useless reports, yesterday’s advice and for services that clients could just as easily handle themselves. Obviously no offence should be intended towards victims of SEO cons, but the fact is that it’s a con, and that’s probably wh…

When I think of SEO, I think of doing a lot of the work you just described. Performance optimization, responsiveness, and especially content are things that SEOs advise on or even do the work directly. You even mention SEO activities of value such as reaching out to trustworthy sites for promotion, or using webmaster tools. These are the exact things that SEOs do - either you've had a bad experience or you're just mi…

    "anyone can do anything if they have 
    the time to learn and the desire to do it."

Sorry, but that argument doesn't work for SEO in my opinion. It's no big investment of time to learn about SEO, it would take most people a couple of days tops. I've just outlined a fair chunk of it above, as you pointed out. If I can summarise what SEO people do in a paragraph, how does that justify their cost? It's not like they charge $20 a month.

Hell, all the information required (these days) is provided freely by Google itself. You can literally download an app which teaches you how to market your business on the web. You say you need the desire to learn SEO. Well, I think any CEO would find a desire to flip through Google Primer and some web pages about mobile-friendliness and content-quality if I told them it would save them thousands of dollars a month.

    "either you've had a bad experience
    or you're just misinformed."

While I appreciate your condescending tone, I must sadly reveal that I am not "misinformed" about SEO experts and agencies — I speak from experience after having worked alongside some of these magic consultants at a couple of companies where I was a front-end developer.

I have sat in on meetings with "SEO experts" and "PPC specialists" with the exact purpose of calling them out on their bullshit, which I did on several occasions, because they were charging the company thousands/tens of thousands to do something that an intern could do, after perhaps a day or two's worth of training, and for less money. And an intern is a much better investment in the long term.

Sure, there are some honest SEO guys out there, but my point is that the honest SEO guys are not worth paying to do what your business should have or should be doing already — a good website and producing marketing ammunition, respectively.

SEO is something that should be an automated service by now.

Re: SEO Company CEO Contracts Murderers to Kill Competition, Client Exposes All

#54

Post by CodeWriter23 » Wed, Sep 27, 2017, 9:06 AM UTC

danmaz74 wrote: post #52

strathmeyer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone is rich.

I was talking about reporting a criminal case, not suing. With criminal cases it's the State which pays for everything, I think?

In my experience, having had two former employees of my mom’s shop and a strong arm robber arrested, it came down to me handing the police work to the detectives. The other complaints we filed, just to name one, another employee stealing inventory from mom’s shop in Manhattan and selling it to a vintage shop in Brooklyn went nowhere because we didn’t have surveillance in the store showing she stole it despite there being surveillance in the other shop showing she sold it. Or the time I caught a kid red handed with my bike, and the cops wouldn’t do anything because I didn’t have a bill of sale despite my ability to describe the bike and it’s serial number. They gave me the kid’s address and said if I demanded my bike back and he gave it to me, I could keep it. The kid was running a bicycle chop shop in his garage.

So yeah, if you want the cops to close a case, you need to help them and that costs money. Unless you get lucky and everything is obvious and the case closes itself. Or in case of a murder. They tend to actually put resources into solving murders. Or anything where they can reasonably seize loot. But property theft or damage doesn’t really register.