Really surprised by all the comments here. This seems like a solid business decision by LinkedIn, riding the line of what a user is willing to accept and balancing it well with the potential rewards.
Look at every famous company and you'll find tactics that you don't agree with, and sometimes downright illegal (Path).
If you're not willing to do desperate things, to do what is necessary for user acquisition, good luck trying to build a successful business, because pure blind luck is exactly what you'll need.
Stuff like this is what really separates successful businesses from the failures. It was never about some grand vision, or some belief in connecting the world. It was about figuring out how to acquire users, retain them, and monetize.
Really surprised by all the comments here. This seems like a solid business decision by LinkedIn, riding the line of what a user is willing to accept
The comments indicate that the typical HN class of user considers the line to be crossed. Does a service like linkedin really want to upset the HN segment of their user base? Up to them, naturally.
If you're not willing to do desperate things
Yeah, and when linkedin sells all our info because they're "desperate", the only people who will be surprised are fools.
Personally, I feel that if they're resorting to "desperate" measures to succeed, then they don't have a solid business model.
The typical class of HN user is constantly chomping at the bit for something to get outraged about. The number of teapot tempests I have seen here is positively insane. People will get angry and start demanding executives' heads based on nothing more than vague hearsay and a misunderstanding of the law.
I'm sure the broken clock of HN opinion gets it right pretty frequently, but I wouldn't say it has strong predictive power for whether something bad actually occurred.
>Look at every famous company and you'll find tactics that you don't agree with
Most people here recognize that growth hacking is necessary for a startup to grow. The users complain only when the tactics employed do not result in a better experience for them. This was not the case when AirBnB, YouTube, etc executed their growth hacking tactics.
AirBnB: Their growth hacking tactic of posting to Craigslist resulted in a better experience for their existing users.
YouTube: Their subtle permission to upload and watch copyrighted videos resulted in a better experience for their existing users.
LinkedIn though, seems to be misleading their existing users. That is why you see plenty of these comments. So, it is not a case of "nerds being nerds" (paraphrased) as someone commented elsewhere in this thread.
"Most people here recognize that growth hacking is necessary for a startup to grow. The users complain only when the tactics employed do not result in a better experience for them."
If you're not willing to do desperate things, to do what is necessary for user acquisition, good luck trying to build a successful business, because pure blind luck is exactly what you'll need.
Really? There are plenty of companies who don't do "desperate things", and they are successful. At the end of the day, if a company must cross a moral threshold to do business, they should not do business at all. Businesses should not commit ethical violations in the society they operate in.
We operate on the basis of responsiveness, openness, honesty and trust with our members, business partners, employees and stockholders.
I won't quote other parts of it as it would simply hammer home the point - don't openly commit to things like this if your business practices do another.
It's still an ugly, user-unfriendly tactic that potentially causes embarrassment. It's not evil, but nether is it attractive.
Ethically, it is comparable to food that tries to pass itself off as healthy, while treading the line on sugar and salt content, in order to appeal to unwitting customers. It may sell more, but it also deserves a bad reputation.
Each such optimization for the purpose of revenue has a social cost down the line. There is nothing hypocritical about attempting to lay that social cost on the vendor.
Can we simultaneously vilify LinkedIn and other companies that use (some would say morally questionable) growth hacking techniques and appreciate that they're still hungry, doing things that a desperate startup would do?
I find the innovator's dilemma happens when you aren't hungry, or paranoid, or willing to cannibalize your existing product or users.
Posit: There is no other dedicated professional social network that has scaled (>1M users) beyond one vertical/cohort (which excludes networks like HN, Spiceworks, Behance, etc.) except for LinkedIn.
How do you think they got there?
You may not like how the sausage is made, but I had a bacon-wrapped hot dog last night and it was delicious.
I'm not willing to accept shady moves just because you are startup. For one, there is no reason to think you will suddenly develop ethics once you become big company.
Second, I have been mislead the same way in both cases.
I've tried to explain this line of logic previously on HN and my experience is that the majority of the people here live in their own world. Much like people who enjoy reality TV, just more technically savvy.
They babble about how FB decreases audience reach or how they hide their ad targeting instead of realizing the massive opportunity that is presented to the people who are willing to put the work.
They besmirch google for giving rapgenius preferential treatment instead of taking notes and using the precedent.
They revile linkedin for marketing tactics that serve them very well.
In short, the crowd here is mostly nerds with a misunderstood nobility sense, refusing the see the world they are living in for what it is.
Alternative in short - people here are workers, not businessmen.
They babble about how FB decreases audience reach or how they hide their ad targeting instead of realizing the massive opportunity that is presented to the people who are willing to put the work.
You criticize that response like it's a bad thing.
They besmirch google for giving rapgenius preferential treatment instead of taking notes and using the precedent.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
They revile linkedin for marketing tactics that serve them very well.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
In short, the crowd here is mostly nerds with a misunderstood nobility sense, refusing the see the world they are living in for what it is.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Alternative in short - people here are workers, not businessmen/marketers.
You say that like it's a bad thing... oh hold on. You're wrong.
Fair enough... I do think it is a bad thing... for me.
Not everyone is me though, not everyone has the same goals and line of thinking like me. And neither should everyone think like me. I was just pointing out to the "parent" why his resistence is futile.
Well, it's the 'don't be evil' thing. It seems to me that it's perfectly possible to not be evil - until you go from being a nimble startup to a billion dollar business with serious shareholders to impress, rather than a couple of VCs who more or less expect you to fail.
The bigger you get, the closer your girth gets to the legal line. Then - as happened with large parts of the financial system - you have to cross the line just to compete.
'Don't be evil' falls away a long time before that.
So, despite our little contretemps over Paris Hilton, I think I'm with you on this one; it's naive to expect an NYSE listed company with a market cap of $23bn not to screw every last drop of leverage out of its data, whatever the ethics of the matter.
That's because people usually put "morality" over "success of a business, even mine", and that's the world I want to live in. Your world has slaves (they're good business, after all).
No people put morality over "success of other". Most of the time when talking about something convenient, or you own business, people manage to bend their own morality with "rationalisation" or "carefully avoiding looking at the fact".
Ultimately you can also generalize this. Specifically, there is a tug of war between the company and its users. By and large, the company interests may be served by exploiting as much user data as possible. The user usually sees this a bad. They want the company to be useful but without having to give up and privacy (or other negatives.) The user perspective only impacts the companies interests when enough negatives accumulate to create a negative reputation that stifles growth, but almost all users, ceteris paribus, would prefer the company to be less invasive. So these outrage-fests directed at LinkedIn, Facebook, Path, etc. serve to push back against companies and create the demarcation line between acceptable and unacceptable tactics.
Bullshit. Nerds might grudgingly admire LinkedIn for their clever use of dark patterns. Your average business person gets suckered into the dark pattern and then wonders how they've accidentally pissed off their ex, sales prospect's CEO or rival's legal counsel by trying to "connect" with them. And they're not really any more impressed by growth generated through more-or-less inadvertent signups than they were by Enron's accounting practices.
It's not like ad-targeting, which normal people generally don't care about too much unless the retargeting gets really creepy.
The people who built it. The "employee" demographic trickled in later, though it now seems to dominate.
blumkvist's businessman/worker point is something worth keeping in mind when you see people behaving badly here. Back when this was a small group of entrepreneurs, it was all about building each other up and helping. Now that it's mostly people with no skin in the game, it's more about tearing ideas down.
(Note that in both cases, it's an attempt to pull people towards your own camp.)
All I see here is a couple of people arguing that playing dirty should be compatible with being prestigious, and to that end suggesting that pushing ethical boundaries is literally synonymous with success. And since 'we' subscribe to a certain lifestyle, 'we' need a different morality from the nearest norm. Well, playing dirty is already prestigious in a lot of circles. What more do you want?
Look at every famous company and you'll find tactics that you don't agree with, and sometimes downright illegal (Path).
If you're not willing to do desperate things, to do what is necessary for user acquisition, good luck trying to build a successful business, because pure blind luck is exactly what you'll need.
Stuff like this is what really separates successful businesses from the failures. It was never about some grand vision, or some belief in connecting the world. It was about figuring out how to acquire users, retain them, and monetize.