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Comment by mVChr | Hacker News Reader

One purpose of getting users to sign up 5 friends for a free account is to get more people using the service. One purpose of allowing the scammers to get away with it is to be able to write a blog post about their novel approach that will in turn get more people using the service. I'm not saying that's the prime motive, but it seems like the goal is met either way.

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My knee-jerk response was equally cynical. Something about saying, "Look at this 'good thing' I'm about to do!"... Why not do the thing and see what happens first before making an announcement? It's good clickbait either way; just then the article would have some substance and not be so cliche feel-goody. Am I a bad person for thinking this??

Also: anyone who has freelanced knows that those clients who are most reluctant to pay are the worst people to work with, right?

So why do we assume that everyone trying to cheat his system is Tiny Tim? lol

Maybe it's not good to reward them for trying to cheat? Maybe this enables entitled people to keep on feeling entitled to everything for free? Just saying. I get a little bothered when this sort of thing is met with no criticism at all. Like, he's giving something away for free? He is better than us! If only we all were so noble! lol

It doesn't seem right to demonize them for coming up with a novel solution for their problem and then telling the community about it. As long as the solution IS novel, and is sufficiently interesting, it doesn't matter what the motive was for creating the solution so long as we want to hear about it.

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