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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

In the author's defence, it sounds like these users were creating an existential threat to his service by using it in unintended ways. It's kind of expensive for the author to run virtual machines for all these people. Though the author tries to add a positive spin to this, I'm sure that the story is more complicated.

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I completely fail to understand how that's a defense. Whether you're an asshole or not is exactly defined by your reaction to similar situations. The author talked down to people who wanted to use his service and treated them like toys even after he found out they didn't mean him harm.

This post left me with nothing but bad impressions for the author and for Browserling. At some point I wonder whether a middle school bully was writing the post.

I understand that it's corporate etiquette to be a smiling doormat when faced with free riders abusing your services, to politely apologise for not being able to take the pain, but it doesn't mean you're an asshole if you don't act that way.

The vast majority of these users were looking for a shady freebie at his expense, gleefully ripping him off and doing so en masse in a way that would destroy his livelihood. They were being more than cheeky and he has a right to treat them the same way. If it were me I'd have had my fun too.

> but it doesn't mean you're an asshole if you don't act that way.

No, if you lie to people and tell them you'll give them service in exchange for something, they do the something and then you don't give them service, you are definitely an asshole.

I'm not a fan of the false dichotomy of "you're either a doormat or you go full-blast lying and making fun of your users". He could just have said "If you want to use the service, please pay for it per day" and that would have been that.

> The vast majority of these users were looking for a shady freebie at his expense, gleefully ripping him off

Wanting to access WhatsApp is shady? Then I'm shady all the damn day. Also, how were they ripping him off? They were using the service he provided on the terms he provided it, even jumping through pointless hoops of "Tweet/Follow/spam competitors".

We decry all those shitty "tweet to jump the queue" tactics, but this guy doing it and laughing at his users makes it okay?

> And they did! All these users started following Browserling and tweeting about it. But they still couldn't use Browserling or Whatsapp, it was just a new message in place of "fatal error".

If you don't think this is asshole behaviour, we're never going to agree.

Have you told your sales people that they are assholes for telling your future customers about services that do not quite exist or do not quite work?

Have you told that to your CEO?

If our salespeople or CEO say "here, sign up and invite three friends to get our service" and then say "Haha psych! You can't actually get our service, sucker", then yes, I will tell them they're assholes.

Unfortunately I haven't had that chance, as the people I work with already know to not be assholes.

Are you telling me your sales person does not say "XYZ feature works" when it does not quite work as it was spec'ed? Please. Let's live in a real world.

Do you understand the difference between "tweet to access" and then purposely banning access and having a buggy feature? He told them they could use the service when they couldn't. The service wasn't buggy, he actively banned them, told them he would unban them if they did X, and then kept them banned.

If you still think that's okay, there's a fundamental disagreement here we'll never reconcile.

It is exactly the same as selling a product with a known broken or non-existent feature. But hey, it is HN - selective ethics is an art form.

In the end he did provide access. So what matters is what he had really thought of it all when he asked them to tweet.

If that was "okay, there is a demand, I can't monetize it but can still convert it into something useful while I think how this can be a successful business" is one thing. Telling users to fund/tweet/support/whatever while the problem is being tackled feels perfectly fair to me.

If that was "muahaha see my army of puppets tweeting" it's another thing, of course.

It's not really a defense, but maybe an explanation.

When people spend a lot of time looking at stats, sometimes they become disconnected from the reality behind them.

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