I was part of a startup years ago that did many of those things and much more. I still won't go into the details of what it was that my cofounder did, but it made a big difference.

It was a social networking site, before social networking sites really existed (circa 2000). I remember when the site consisted of me, him, his mom and our kindest friends. Got maybe a few hundred unique visitors per day, at best.

Then he did X and suddenly traffic spiked. It was a thousand uniques a day. Then tens of thousands. Then it got picked up by google. He did even more questionable things and traffic increased even more. Next thing we knew, it had 200,000+ registered users and was making $50k/month.

None of those things he did ever came back to haunt us. The site itself was kind of sketch (much more myspace than facebook), so that might have helped. I wouldn't do any of the things he did for any legitimate startup that I found. At the same time, it seemed like it worked. Once you have "critical mass" then the entire situation changes.

Just an anecdote to answer your question. Obviously YMMV.

That sounds interesting, but without the interesting part it's much less so.

Fine. In broad terms, he leveraged the file sharing networks of the time. He put the name of our site on files that were shared very often and we had our college friends seed them on various services. It seemed crazy at first, but there is a big difference between no one seeing your name and thousands of people seeing your name. In retrospect, it was a brilliant move.

My point was that critical mass and viral growth are powerful concepts, and some times all it takes is one little push to get things moving.

This isn't unethical. This is a brilliant marketing tactic. (Putting the name in there, not the actual sharing, which I guess is unethical depending on what you're sharing.)

i would consider soliciting someone else go share files (probably illegally) with the explicit purpose of advertising your website to be marginal at best.

more details without exact details?

Maybe it was a purple monkey?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBUDDY

We had a buy/sell site aimed at university students. At the same time, 2 other sites cropped up. So we posted links to items from one site on the other. Those two sites got in a pretty nasty fight ("We didn't do it" "Yeah right you ^&^&") Meanwhile we just continued growing as usual.

Tricking your competitors into fighting and mistrusting one another? You don't think that's unethical?

How did I get downvoted for this? All it would have taken for either of the companies not to fight is for them to show a little bit of humanity or professionalism.

I am NOT saying that it was ethical to attempt to trick them into fighting -- that would be a false dichotomy on the part of the reader. To me it IS unethical to attempt to trick people into fighting.

I am saying that even with attempts to trick, the people still had the power to choose to fight or not. The person who "tricked" them is NOT responsible for the other people's choice to fight. He did not take away their power to choose and he cannot take it away. To me, to give that person power over their choices is also morally unacceptable.

lol you and me both my friend, I dropped a lot of karma on this convo... I actually WAS saying it's not unethical any more than bluffing in poker is unethical. but I guess people can downmod as they see fit

That's a pretty measly definition of ethics. Under your definition, murder is ethical so long as you don't lie about it.

Call me an elitist asshole, but I find your tone infuriating.

Clean it up. Learn some respect.

it should have been totally obvious that my original statement was related to business strategy, not homicide.

I'm well aware that I have a looser sense of ethics than average, but ethics is a cultural construct that can be debated on its own merits.

Not abusing trust, not breaking promises and not being violent are the core tenets of my ethical/moral beliefs - the violence one is just not relevant to business discussions. I've often discussed this with people who have stricter codes that are adhered to less stringently.

your comment verges on ad hominem. If somebody wants to twist my words to make their point, yeah they'll get a little sarcasm in return.

how are you not abusing the site owner's trust by basically spamming/trolling their site?

OP was not a mod or a personal friend or an employee, just another random person submitting stuff from the internet, so there was no special trust relationship to be abused.

Greg posted a nice compilation of shady tactics used during the startup period of major internet companies at http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/ruthless-enough-for-star...

A quick summary:

Facebook: Spammed Harvard Students

BitTorrent: Free Porn as Initial Bait

MySpace: Spammed >100M on Launch Date

It appears as if (slightly) shady techniques can give you the advantage you need to succeed.

BitTorrent's wasn't unethical or shady (unless you think all adult content is shady). They'd licensed the content - which was, IIRC, an kind of free teaser ad for 'LightSpeed' porn - which I remember as being an odd name for a porn site. Caused a huge fuss on Slashdot.

The version I heard was that they got it off Usenet, where it had been posted by the supplier.

Sounded like a sensible way to seed the service, really.

According to "Stealing MySpace" the guys that made MySpace were about as shady as they come: spyware, porn, spam, and snake oil about sums it up.

Comparatively, spamming Harvard seems pretty innocent.

And let us not forget the more innocent days of 1996, when putting ads on free email was considered borderline shady: http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/18/ps-i-love-you-get-your-free...

It may not be so much innocence as different cost considerations.

In 1996 bandwidth was at far more of a premium than it is now, so even the modest demands of Google AdSense would have had a much greater cost to the user.

And certainly Hotmail remains slow, though not so much for lack of bandwidth anymore.

The interesting bit here is that that tactic did come back to haunt myspace, but in a different way than you'd expect. The guys that built youtube used the same tactic but by bitting myspace users to come and use youtube.

Don't get caught up in a scam mentality. Instead think of ethical pivots on things that would otherwise be shady. For example, Google 'scrapes' the entire web, but no one would consider that unethical, its a search engine. On the other hand, if they just spammed/exposed all your personal email contacts (google buzz) that is highly likely to be perceived as unethical. At the end of the day, be clever rather than be scammer.

Fun thought experiment: Suppose the web didn't have any search engines, but somehow grew to its current size. Now suppose someone proposes starting one up. Exactly how large is the resulting firestorm?

I'm tempted to say that your hypothetical is either impossible, or it's already happened.

On the "impossible" side -- search engines, or search directories, pre-date the web. A lot of people downloaded their first web client from a Gopher link or by looking it up on Archie. HTML itself was kind of about providing an index for other files -- "index.html", get it?

However, on the "already happened" front, in 1997 Ticketmaster sued Microsoft just for linking to content on its website. And ever since automated search engines have been around, people have been suing them -- for replicating portions of their content without explicit permission, for instance.

Two possible outcomes:

1. Newspapers would be really upset about the leeching of their bandwidth and would cry around that this is "copyright infringement". Also the RIAA and other such organisations would show that you could search for torrents on them and would try to shut them down.

2. Newspapers and others would see the use of such a thing and would let them do their thing.

I think it would be number one.

I wouldn't call anything he did unethical, but check out this interview with Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo guy) about his previous startup: http://mixergy.com/gabriel-weinberg-duck-duck-go-interview/

With all of the respect I already had for him, his candor in this interview gave me even more respect for him.

Spamming comes up a ton in my interviews. Most recently, the founder of Match.com said that's how he got his site's first users.

- putting up an order page when your site wasn't ready - promising unrealistic delivery dates

Wait, these are unethical? I thought they were standard and common sales tactics. Seems like many companies are doing that.

(disclaimer: I don't sell anything).

Similar to promising potential customers that your product is doing things it doesn't actually do and hoping you can add the extra features before anyone finds out.

I view those as distasteful, but I've yet to see any company/salesperson who doesn't do it. I'm sure this looks different once you are in sales and everyone is doing it, but from my seat over at operations it sure looks dishonest. I hate it when vendors use these tactics on me - so how can I do this to anyone else?

  and hoping you can add the extra features

Well, there's a difference between 'hoping' and I'm sure we can get this done. As an example: our product is evolving with the needs of our customers and as such we often promise things that don't exist yet. That doesn't mean we don't have every intention of delivering on our promise.

I guess the question is - does the customer know they don't exist yet but you have every intention of delivering?

its unethical to promise something that you know for a fact you can't deliver. so, its unethical to allow someone to pay for a product that you don't have yet and similar.

Scott Kliger, the founder of free411.com defrauded a company I used to work with and our investors of $50K by agreeing to develop some technology for us and then trying to pass off open source code as the deliverable. Meanwhile, he used the funds to build free411.

Libel suit in .. 3 .. 2 .. 1 ..

I don't think he'd dispute it. He gave the money back eventually, but after he'd developed his product and obtained investor funding for it. Unfortunately our project lost a fair bit of traction and our investors lost confidence.

I contacted a company to buy Sex Offender data. I called twice and then sent 3 emails. After a month of no replies I wrote a program that screen scraped their site.

Remember, they can't copyright facts, no matter how much sweat of the brow it took to compile those facts. Recall Feist v Rural, wherein someone made another phone book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications_v._Rural_Tel...

In US this is true, in UK it isn't.

A great case is the UK Post Code system (which is much more specific than the US zip code system here - no more than 15 letter-boxes share a unique post code in UK).

A number of people have created Post Code to lat/long conversion tables. They're all facts but because they have been worked out they are copyrightable. To stop copying the providers introduce slight variances in the data to track duplication and usually jump on top of it.

I don't believe that would fly here in the USA

So... buy a copy of all of then and throw away the diffs? :D

buying them all would defeat the purpose

An even more unusual UK example would be the "copyright" claimed over the football fixture lists you'll find on any popular sport site - they're supposed to pay a large licensing fee to a company called Football Dataco even if they source the data independently.

Depends on the country - but yes for the US you're OK.

Is screen scraping really unethical? I mean, you've sent me a bunch of text... whatever I do with it is my business.

The scraping is generally not illegal, though it may violate ToSes. It's just that people who scrape generally republish, which may or may not be illegal.

"Ethics" in cases like this are so subjective that it's almost useless debating them.

it is to some people...a) you are breaking the ToS b) you are stealing their content to resell/republish it as your own

What if I never read or even open the ToS and proceed directly to screen scraping your site?

Afaik there is no law that mandates you must read/agree to the ToS before loading a website. In fact, what if the ToS states 'If you visit this site, you must pay us 1000 dollars', are you now liable? Despite the fact that just to read the ToS you had to visit said site.

My point is that only a court will decide what happens, and just because something is in the ToS doesn't mean it gives you carte blanch to do whatever you please.

Sure, ToS are crap - they're not contracts and any 'extra rights' the site gets are indeed not worth the electrons they're printed on. But copywritten content is protected by good-old actual law.

Somebody grab Jason Calacanis for a meaningful soundbite :)

Actually, I'm very ethical. People around me tell me I take it to absurd level sometimes.

It's funny how public perception of this can be driven by folks who have never met you or done business with you. You would be hard pressed to find anyone in business, an investor, a partner, etc. that would ever say anything to the contrary. Thus the reason I'm able to raise money, partner, sell companies, etc. over and over again despite the fact that i get negative comments/blog posts from haters.

There is reality, and there are comment threads. :-)

Every search engine is a screen scraper. Google has been making $$$ off of re-published content since day zero.

No.

a.) Google follows robot.txt. You can disallow Google to index your website. Most of the websites, OTOH, want Google to index websites.

b.) Google does not republish the content. All the traffic is directed to the content owner, ie the other websites.

So you are saying that each search result page are handwritten by Google editors?

Of course they are not, they are simply re-published snippets of the websites along and Google surrounds the results with ads.

While it's a symbiotic relationship that most websites want - sharing their content for placement in Google's webpages - it's not necessarily universal and ROBOTS.TXT is hardly a "contract" covering your data's usage.

to the owners of the content, it's similar to scanning a book at a library then reselling it without their permission

Resist metaphors for this sort of thing. Resist them strongly. There are no physical analogues for the internet that are close enough to matter. When I scan a book page, the author and publisher are so untroubled they don't even know, indeed, they can't know. When I look at a web page, they have to actually serve it to me, costing them some amount of money. Money you can only call trivial when you aren't scraping pages by the thousands. This is enough to render your metaphor irrelevant by virtue of significant, both in the sense of "sizable" and in the sense of "relevant", difference.

There's no physical analogue to scraping a database-driven site. The question of exactly how legal it is probably won't be settled until that fact penetrates the legal system; until then it depends on what metaphor you sell to a given judge.

but you left out the part of my metaphor that included selling the scanned book later on. That is where the issue can be become public. That is where you're affecting the livelihood of said authors/publishers.

I'm really playing devil's advocate here, I do very large amounts of scraping online for various projects and do not bat an eye lash at what I'm doing. If it's online, it's there for the taking. If you don't want me to scrape it, hide it.

That doesn't save it, though. You misinterpret me as doing precisely what I'm advocating against; I'm not making an argument by metaphor. I'm simply observing yours doesn't work. It only has to not work in one way for it to be invalid. That doesn't make your conclusion wrong, it just makes your argument invalid.

In fact I agree with you that it is broadly speaking incumbent upon someone who does not want to be scraped to have at least some protections technically enforced, however feebly, and you should not go out of your way to violate such protections however feeble they may be. But I come to that conclusion thinking about the monetary issues and bandwidth issues and ethical issues directly, not by making a bad analogy to people leaving doors open or locks on gates in the middle of the field or houses constructed out of glass.

no, despite the rhetoric you employed here, you're still skirting my rebuttal and lacking any real point other than to show off how many words you can use to describe absolutely nothing.

My point is that someone works to create something that is freely available to peruse (website content = book at library), and anyone who comes in and copies and sells that content will make said author upset.

For ThatHigh.com, I searched textsfromlastnight for stories containing the phrase "marijuana" etc. Worked like a charm.

Then what? Posted comments pointing to ThatHigh.com I'm guessing. Did you just put the link or did you say something like "Sounds like something from thathigh.com"? Did they eventually get removed as spam?

nah, nothing like that. i just used it as a seed for content. there were very few, honestly. but it was a good start.

This is probably a weighted thread since many people are connected to their startups through their usernames and wouldn't want to post.

For me, the answer is no except for "promising unrealistic delivery dates". For me this wasn't about lying but partly about just being unrealistic with myself and also about setting certain goals publicly to hold myself accountable. I don't think this is in the same boat as the other unethical items mentioned, but of course I may just think that because that's the only one I did...

yeah that's why I said that they should use a throwaway account if they are worried.

What exactly do you gain from this "poll"? If you want blackhat, go to PPC and adware peddling forums. Otherwise this thread does nothing but validate creepy behavior on HN.

the point is to show that most companies have done shady shit in the early days and that's one of the main reasons why they managed to survive long enough to turn legit

Most companies? the secret to every great fortune is not a 'forgotten crime', de Balzac's opinion notwithstanding.

If we're looking for a justification for a company's under-performance, the solution is not to look for excuses, the solution is to reflect honestly and question our existing ideas and approaches. Otherwise we're no different than couch-potatoes dismissing all athletes as "dopers", while drawn ourselves in a self-righteous bag of Doritos and a liter of coke.

And lest you think I am being a hypocrite and taking the moral high-ground in an appeal to cheap applause and upvotes; let me say that I am all in favor of any ruthless business tactic that furthers your market dominance. Undercut the competition, corner them, etc. But get there, first, through quality and great service. Not by shutting down their mail servers. Go through their garbage, but don't phish their accounts. Point out their shortcomings to the public, but don't lawyer up and sue them out of existence or appeal to xenophobia or use a government crutch to ban them from the market. etc.

There is a difference between war and genocide; neither is excusable, but one of them appeals to my own warped sense of chivalry and machismo, while the other fills me with disgust.

Of course, all of this is just my opinion, and is entitled neither to a response nor agreement.

it doesn't have to be a great fortune.

the reason most successful companies resorted to unethical things early on, is because they had no resources to play "fair". Once you are actually making money you can afford to take the high road.

yes hacking mail servers is going too far, but scraping and spamming ends up being a necessity.

PG: "A lot of startups have some kind of secret about the subterfuges they had to resort to in the early days..."

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

I saw a lot of sites spam the bejeezus out of delicious when they got their starts; folks who claim to be reputable now.

It's hard to stay more ethical than your competition - tactics that would never occur to you become pretty tempting when you see them successfully used against your own company.

That said, for every startup that did something a little shady to succeed, there's got to be another that went off the rails because it spent too much time focused on and fighting with its competition. Ninety-nine percent of my own 'competitor-focused' activity could've been much better spent on my own business.

I wouldn't consider most of the actions listed "unethical" per-se, some actions like; "creating a ton of pages with keywords to get long tail google traffic" are legitimate, while "buying an email list to spam people" can be downright illegal.

people have different levels of what they consider unethical.

as far as keyword stuffing...google considers that blackhat so you can get banned when they find you

We sent unsolicited emails to as many addresses as we could (manually) find online over a week or two. We're in a B2B niche so it wasn't hard to find directories online. Never used any bulk email tool, just copied and pasted.

This was 6ish years ago. I wasn't aware of spam laws at the time. I wouldn't recommend it but it worked.

A startup I worked for did all of this and more - I left because some of their tactics were getting far too shady for me. Scraping business listings to populate your DB to make your ad network look like it was being used wasn't so unethical as some of their spamming adventures.

most of top ones without the bottom 5.

The nub of the matter is this, IMO it's OK to do what you have to do to gain momentum even if that would be classified as technically spam or what have you, as long as you do it with style. This means sending relevant content to people who want it but just don't know it yet, NOT sending people stuff they may never want and what you do send has to be 100% pure quality.

90% wouldn't agree with this but IMO it depends on where you're coming from and what the odds are against you. Just do it well and make sure that the end result is a positive for your potential clients.

Great list, and couldn't come at a better time for my startup.

Taking the "Liar's Poker" approach eh? Cautionary tale >> guidebook

This sounds like a todo list for a non-technical co-founder.

No, but I lied about it just now. (This is a convoluted bit of self-referential logic and a joke.)

Seriously -- a demo where I was logged into a server and monkeypatching the DB locks because they were broken for the piece of the site the marketing/sales guys wanted to show.

I would be very surprised if any of these things will help you at all. None of them provide things that people really want. More importantly, attempting them distracts you from figuring out how to find out and make what your customers really want.

For example, you can try to spam to your heart's content, but people have this thing called a back button. Even if you can get a few people to bite, they'll most likely ignore you once they figure out that there's nothing there.

You can try to say "235 users online" when there aren't any, but that won't actually give users the experience they want. It might fool them for a little while, but that won't matter anyway if there's no reason for them to stay.

I disagree. These methods help exposure, and a fraction of those users will actually want what you have.

That's why spamming works.

the point with the "235 users online" would be to get the user to signup...then once they are signed up and in your database, you can a) tout that you have X users...which will get your coverage + more users b) can eventually email them back telling them that the site was massively improved.

Is it just me, or does anyone else want to be able to answer "no" to this question without having to even think about it?

I can't think of anything, so either I haven't done anything unethical, or I did a damn good job of convinving myself it was ethical.

That's the best thing about ethics, if you convinced yourself it was ethical then it was ethical for you. For someone else maybe, maybe not. Everyone gets their own, entirely personally prioritized set :)

I think that's defined as egoism; ethics tend to be concerned with the theoretical value of morality.

I see what you're saying and I don't pretend to be an expert (or even very knowledgeable in general) on the subject.

All I meant was that ethics are a very personal thing and what's 'right' to one person may not (and, if you ask me, should not necessarily) be right to another.

Ethical egoism says that you should do what is in your self interest, and that doing so makes you ethical... Rather than that I'm trying to ask: What is 'good' or 'bad'? Different cultures, races, sexes and individuals have (at least) slightly varying opinions on what is right and wrong.

I rather called 'unethical' in loosely startup term as 'creative exploratory of abundance wealth of opportunity'

Richard Branson admitted to doing something unethical and illegal in his early days - he was caught by the authorities and he has said that it was a real big lesson for him. I think sometimes the path to 'easy money' can be tempting

"promising unrealistic delivery dates" seems like something few of us could plausibly claim not to have done. Perhaps the question should be "promise dates you know for sure you cannot deliver on".

I wonder what the ethics of 'flattering spam' are a la the comments on this blog post http://www.cynotwhynot.com/blog/post/MSBuild-missing-Microso...

On one hand its spam, but on the other the author can pretend it was a nice comment from an online handbag store owner.

I won't talk about me, but I've seen some friends doing shady things. Let's just say I had to convince a friend of mine (for his startup) that DDoSing his competitor at peak times wasn't a wise idea... Another guy I knew (not really a friend) was using xrumer (a tool to spam forums for SEO purposes) directly on his website...

A super early startup I worked for years ago got a really amazing deal on our first two servers. We paid like some minimal price for some PC hardware that was essentially out of the back of a van.

I work at a company that did some "email campaigns" and many worse things in the beginning. And it helped a lot - getting as many sales from a smallish 10M country in Europe as from half of the US

One, and I didn't know it was wrong at the time. So no!

I really hate how Facebook works the spam/address book angle. It is very unethical. I don't trust facebook in the slightest.

You sound like you might have done all these things, half of these wouldn't even occur to me?

these are all really common amongst the affiliate marketers. and it is just the tip of the iceberg. affiliate marketing is filled with some seriously sleazy people who do far worse.

I believe the tactics used by affiliate marketers to gain money in the short term, is having a negative effect on consumer confidence in web transactions in the long term.

someone I know paid Philippine girls to reply to messages on his fledgeling dating site.

I used to crash our main competitor's email & login server at 6.01pm when free dial-up calls started at 6pm. They ran on NT and if you opened tcp/ip port 0, the kernel crashed. Happy times.

Didn't any part of you refuse to do this at a more visceral level? How could you sleep at night knowing you're cheating to get ahead? Does it even matter if you 'win'?

I can understand gaming Google and public opinion, but directly vandalizing someone's property and hindering their business is unconscionable.

I really want to understand the justification for this. And I say this as someone whose moral system is flexible enough to accept bank robbery (but not purse-snatching.)

mahmud, so you can accept that someone steals a lot of money from a lot of people (bank shareholders) by killing or threatening to kill civilians on the way, but mere electronic vandalism is out of bounds? That's some amazing flexibility. Unless by bank robbery you mean "only" electronic fraud?

No, not "acceptance" in the that sense, it's more of an "understanding". I get it when someone does something audacious like that; and I think the glorification of banditry is well entrenched in our culture. Countless Hollywood films, Bonnie and Clyde, the wild west, Robin Hood, etc.

While I consider crashing your competitor's servers like purse snatching; hurting the weak. It's pathetic, passive-aggressive shit that doesn't require neither boldness nor skill. I hate incompetent, gutless crooks in a very "if you're gonna do something, do it big" sort of way.

I can't justify it at all. I wouldn't do it now. Funny how people are sticking up for me. It did say "anything unethical" and unethical it was, criminal in fact. I didn't do it for long, tbh it was more for the lulz.

it was more for lulz... funny thing.. when I google about lulz, first result tells me "The term lulz was coined by Jameth, and is the only good reason to do anything, from trolling to rape."

I don't see how crashing a Windows box is any worse than robbing Goldman Sachs. (In both cases innocent people suffer, but the target is pretty reviled.)

I say this as someone who likes to claim he's chaotic good, but really is pretty much lawful good.

So because the competitor used Windows, konad's actions were justified?

If that is the case, that's a very weak justification.

If a person's morality is flexible enough to permit bank robbery, then a very weak justification is probably adequate.

Robin Hood ethics don't necessarily justify this type of vandalism and unless you're living under a tyranical monarch (or some equivalent), Robin Hood ethics are questionable to begin with.

For all you know, his competitors were trying to do the same thing to him, but his company had better security.

Suddenly the company with superior security is winning; is that bad? Especially considering this company ran email & auth servers.

Wow, I am really offended by that, I think mostly your "happy times" statement. I guess it's because I am assuming that your competitor was a startup and not some big corporation. Were they?

It was happy times. Just like all the other fuck-you-up shit I've done over the years. They were a small startup yes. And we used to see and talk to them at the local business events. Come on, it's not that bad. I could have done it every 15 minutes or owned them, was really just for lulz. Didn't do it for long.

Yeah, maybe I did read a bit too much into it :-)

looks like someone has a bit of an Affiliate Marketing background :)

only a little, make about 1-3K/mo from it.

well, then as a user of this site as well as presumably affiliate forums, you know that this site isn't too keen on the methods you listed compared to other sites where it's considered essential TO DO those things in order to succeed, no questions asked.

It really all depends on how far you're willing to push the boundaries

with affiliate marketing I stuck to white hat methods, which is why I wasn't making a lot.