I’d like to hear an example of a chicken/egg social app that did not fake content at the beginning.
If you can’t think of one, or there’s few examples, then there’s also the ethical consideration to your stakeholders (eg investors). Is it ethical to forego a legal opportunity to grow your user base? Do you have an obligation to your investors to do all you can to build a successful product?
My personal ethics revolve around the question of “am I hurting anyone?” I really can’t imagine how posting fake content to your own forum is hurting anyone. By I can see how neglecting to take steps to grow your user base could hurt people (yourself included, if the business fails).
Would you rather that Reddit had never faked content? More likely than not, if they hadn’t done that, Reddit would not exist today. So isn’t that a net positive from an ethical perspective?
The weakness in the teaching of ethics, and in particular the lack of discourse in ethics amongst business in this nation is utterly frustrating. That you can do something (within the law) or that no moral outrage would occur is itself not a measure of ethical action.
Not dealing harm is itself a rather weak ethical stance. Ethics doesn't test whether you do no harm, it tests whether you maximized the good -- and not the good for you or your investors, but rather the good across all of society.
If anyone holds you to an obligation that entails that you take an unethical action then such a license itself become immediately void. We can see this historically expressed by St. Augustine in the 3rd century and more recently by Martin Luther King Jr. (an unjust law is no law).
Hence, the law itself is not a measure of ethical act. That you _can_ do something is not itself a justification of ethical action. Only that you _should_ do something is itself a measure of ethics. In which case you must provide proof that you _should_ misrepresent yourself and your content. Returning to Kant. If you cannot universalize the action -- that is to say, if you cannot show that to create fake content is always a good act (and with all the rufus about "Fake news," I think we certainly cannot show that fake content has been universally good).
Jumping into the question of net good we skip from deontology to utilitarianism. Yet, utilitarianism recognizes that net good is not a measure of money, or pleasure but can be an abstract measurement. Success of the business is only a local consideration, you must expand the ethical question to all of society. That which is good for you or your investors is not itself a net good for society (nor from a deontological perspective a good unto itself).
Was the success of Reddit a net positive for society? Had there been no Reddit would our net quality of life have been improved as a whole society. In this, I would say Reddit was not a net positive for society. It consolidated a distributed system of smaller social forums across the internet into a single hegemonic gated community and consolidating social power into a smaller sum of hands. And I would argue that consolidation of power into smaller groups (whether hard or soft power and in this case we are discussing the soft power of cultural norms) is itself unethical.
It's so clear that the person you're responding to does not even understand what "ethical" means. This is usually the point where I give up on hn threads.
If you can’t think of one, or there’s few examples, then there’s also the ethical consideration to your stakeholders (eg investors). Is it ethical to forego a legal opportunity to grow your user base? Do you have an obligation to your investors to do all you can to build a successful product?
My personal ethics revolve around the question of “am I hurting anyone?” I really can’t imagine how posting fake content to your own forum is hurting anyone. By I can see how neglecting to take steps to grow your user base could hurt people (yourself included, if the business fails).
Would you rather that Reddit had never faked content? More likely than not, if they hadn’t done that, Reddit would not exist today. So isn’t that a net positive from an ethical perspective?