In short: spam (AirBnb), cheat (fake Reddit users), and/or gamify your process to addict your users like a casino would (Foursquare). This is usually seen as unethical, but if you make a lot of money then it's all right in the end.
I'm going to take these examples whenever someone asks "what's wrong with marketing? "
I find none of this unethical and actually pretty typical web marketing stuff - tame even. Not exactly sure who was harmed and in the end the consumer really wanted what was offered.
The Airbnb one is definitely on the unethical side of the line. I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't do the same thing to grow my business though. I don't think anyone really got hurt by it.
The others are mostly fine. Especially Quora. I don't know how anyone could have a problem with the founders... using the site properly themselves?
I mean, social media preys on people's insecurities and need for validation and is allowed for anyone over 13.
Pay to win mobile games are designed to be addictive and upsell you to continue playing.
At least in a casino you have a chance of winning money.
The most terrifying thing is that with tech, the data harvesting is immediate and far reaching - people's entire jobs in UX are basically to make games more engaging (aka addictive).
Currently the addictiveness of tech is evolving faster than human wisdom and regulation can keep up so while hyperbolic, there is some sense to the doomsaying.
I don't think he's saying that its as deadly as tobacco. Rather, I think his point is that the magnitude of its nefarious effects will surprise the general populace.
I have a feeling the AirBnB story runs afoul of anti-spam laws. Perhaps even some sort of fraud, as they used an array of fake names with the intent to deceive as to the source of the emails.
It seems incredibly ugly if you haven't seen it before.
A lot of things are like that. The formation of nation states. A lot of relationships. Sausages. That's all I can think of off the top of my head, but you get the picture, but a lot of things seem pretty wrong if you just explain how they actually get made.
Sometimes there's just a certain amount of unavoidable unpleasantness to how some things happen.
That's a pattern many dating sites used to do. They crawled competitors' sites and uploaded pics taken from profiles, preferably of good looking women. It's downhill from there.
I can't name names but it used to be a known practice a few years ago (say 5+). It might still be although the dating space has changed dramatically since the prevalence of social media platforms.
None of that is spamming or cheating... and how is gamification a problem at all, especially in user acquisition (vs retention)?
What exactly were these companies supposed to do then? Sit around until people found them on their own? This really just comes off as pretentious complaining rather than any serious criticism.
My summary is usually that it is a zero-sum game, even a negative-sum game but it works for the winner.
It is prisoner's dilemma at its finest: we would be fine if no one did it but if a single players start to use marketing techniques, they get an immense advantage.
We need marketing deescalation policies similar to disarmament commissions. But I am not holding my breath, I doubt I will see that within my lifetime.
The purpose of the initial seeding was to create the appearance of users, and also to encourage the type of content the founders wanted to see themselves. I'd be delighted to hear how you would have accomplished this.
...so? You can also create multiple accounts today and post whatever you want. What exactly is wrong with their process when the users themselves decided there was enough value to stay?
I'm not sure I understand the Foursquare argument. Is gamifying unethical? They aren't really making users "gamble" so the casino analogy doesn't really work for me.
> I'm going to take these examples whenever someone asks "what's wrong with marketing? "
Doesn't this reflect more on society? I personally don't find the above examples to be evil, but it's interesting that these are the tactics needed to win in this world.
I think that while these tactics are grey area for sure (specially in the case of Airbnb), I firmly believe that this would fall in the, for lack of a better word, "hustle" category. I would guess that most of the companies listed here tried multiple tactics, and these are the ones that worked. From my own experience as an entrepreneur, you just have to keep experimenting with various channels until one sticks, without getting too bogged down with the wider implications.
something else interesting is that these companies all have zero or minimal product costs, so these egregious growth spurts aren't really anything but signups.
No retail company can really utilize the same techniques. Imagine a hardware company or physical product company that got a 75,0000 customers over night. The only thing happening the next day would be customer support emailing order cancellation notices.
I don't know why this strikes me as relevant at the moment but it does.
There's nothing about fake users in the Reddit start-up story that equates to cheating (cheating what or whom exactly?).
Cheating requires that there's a framework of defined fairness in place such that you're violating it.
No such framework exists in the context in question (eg: other human users were not promised there were no fake users). Your premise is wrong accordingly.
You might as well claim that when someone at an old-school software conference showed off their product in person, it was cheating (after all, they hadn't even purchased the product and they weren't an organic user). Or that to demonstrate a product on QVC is cheating, because the people doing the demonstrating aren't likely real customers and didn't come to discover the product in a strictly organic manner.
If you have to create fake users to demonstrate how an entire system works to the first real users, the last thing that qualifies as is cheating. As in the QVC example, showing off how a product works through simulation, is among the most important things you can do with a new product or service.
If Reddit used inflated figures anywhere when convincing advertisers to use their platform (especially in growth rates), then they "cheated"--or more precisely, lied.
I've always found it amusing how shocked/surprised people are about the Reddit fake users strategy. It's like, the best way you can tell people had no experience with internet forums or community management before the days of social media.
What Reddit did here is basically what about 70%* of internet forums did to get their initial users. Made up a bunch of fake user accounts and posted under them for however long it took until actual people started using the site. Heck, some people did this on an almost industrial scale with stuff like Yahoo Answers feeds and what not.
That's because people don't use a community that isn't active for much the same reason they don't tend to eat in a restaurant that's deserted; they take the lack of activity as a sign of low quality. So if you want to get a community site active, you'll need to resort to 'questionable' things.
* I say this because there are other means of getting forums active, like doing post exchanges with people on admin/forum promotion sites or signing up to services which give you points for posting on other websites in the network and then do likewise for people who use your own site. But to some degree, almost all forums and community sites get big due to 'enticed' users that aren't posting there purely for the love of the topic/community.
The best forums I've been a part of/moderated were forums that originally served for customer support for a product/company, and naturally became a hang out spot for people with interests in common.
I've been part of several dozen such forums over the years, from hundreds to tens of thousands of users. None of them had capital dedicated to community building. I've also seen many people try to follow the model you outlined (faking users) and none of them were successful.
Obviously that approach seems to work in some cases (if you have cash to burn?), but I'm glad that I've seen only more genuine undertakings succeed. Seems more like the kind of internet I want to be a part of.
Yeah, it's likely different for a support forum/forum that used to be a support forum. In that case, the popularity of your product or service can create a community without needing to do anything special on the forum side of things.
But what I said about fake users definitely applies a lot more if your forum is the entire website and the community is the only goal there. Your average gaming/film/tv/music/sports/whatever forum lives or dies based on how many people appear to post/visit every day.
Also, it doesn't take any cash to have fake users/activity. Just a lot of free time to spend posting away under pseudonyms. If you don't have that time, you can always do things like literally edit the forum stats (there are plugins for that[1]), 'buy' services from certain websites to post for you[2] or if you're really morally questionable, set up a script that takes random people's accounts and makes them appear to be online[3].
Really, community management is a lot like SEO. You've got everything from people who don't do anything in the slightest bit 'shady' to build activity and just kind of hope they can market the forum on their own to those who do things 100 times less 'ethical' than having fake user accounts.
Square wasn't the first by any means, and in fact Square's first card readers were unencrypted (cc data sent plain over the audio jack) while most of the industry had moved on to encrypted readers.
What they did was make it cheap, reliable, and iPhone styled. Many of the swiper sources cost upwards of $40/unit and were prone to failure, not to mention black bulky and ugly.
Source: I made an early MVP for a potential Square competitor.
At the start, all Square did on the hardware side was slightly repackage an existing generic swiper. Our MVP swiper was equally small. It was the overall easy onboarding (free decent software, no cost swiper) and marketing that really did it. There were several competing companies who just didn't play the growth game.
I don't know what lines exactly you can draw through all of these. Maybe..., how you get users at first may not be what you will be doing later on.
Some of these are treacherous, if you keep in mind that there are various hindsight biases inevitable in a list like this. Forum sockpuppeting is a little dishonest, but it doesn't give me the creeps. On a dating sites it would. More sensitive feelings involved. Acquisition methods can get "addictive" if they are not surpassed by other user acquisition methods, so there's a danger of becoming a spammy, creepy company. This is where hindsight biases probably blind us to all the AirBnBs that got stuck spamming craigslist rather than using it as a stepping stone.
The stories I like best here are Tinder, Groupon and the other "start local" strategies. FB did this to an extent too. It's hard to answer the chicken-egg riddle generally, but if we're asking about an individual chicken the answer is obviously "egg."
Unscalable local stuff lets startups compete on a seperate playing field because "doesn't scale" often means no one else is doing it. It also lends well to meeting users and starting simple. It also helps for thinking up startup ideas. If the question becomes "how to get 70 people in one area using this thing&" problems become more tractable, and ideas flow better.
About the video making part, can someone provide some resources on making videos (company, websites, software etc)? Looking at kickstarter, I find many of their video share a common "theme". I wonder if there are company/online service that dedicated in making video for kickstart campaigns?
A lot of people here in the comments section are saying that the things these companies did to launch were unethical. I disagree. It just goes to show you the lengths one must go to successfully launch a new product/service out into a vacuum. To create something new and original from nothing, you may have to go to extreme lengths.
I'm going to take these examples whenever someone asks "what's wrong with marketing? "