Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I was curious to see how you'd react to this, since Spiegel's success has been such a thorn in your side.

I don't care about him, personally. He's boring. I care about frat boys being funded at the expense of people with actual ideas. I care about a generation of technologists that has been sold out because a bunch of smooth-operator, manipulative invaders have come in and outcompeted true technologists for funding and coverage, and the VCs have let it happen. If they were worth their millions per year, they simply wouldn't. If they could actually spot talent sufficiently well to justify their obscene salaries, they wouldn't be funding frat boys. I react strongly because this nonsense is very bad for the world.

If Evan Spiegel wasn't part of something that's setting technology back by decades, I wouldn't give a rat's ass about him or his billions either way.

So let's see, you opened with conspiracy theory nutjob

No, you misunderstand. Obviously, he didn't intend for the Sony hack to happen. My contention is that, after the hack happened, he got quickly to work on figuring out how to use it best to bolster his reputation.

An effective sociopath doesn't expect to control the world, because that's impossible, but only to exploit events as they come for maximal personal benefit. Clearly, Spiegel had nothing to do with the Sony hack. I'm arguing that his PR apparatus engaged shortly afterward.

Given that Snapchat Beliebers (employees?) have come out of the woodwork to downvote me into oblivion, it's not that far fetched. His PR team (which may include the whole company) clearly managed to find my posts on a Wednesday afternoon. This means that they respond quickly to events large and small... and what I say on Hacker News is clearly less newsworthy than the Sony hack.

And you probably spent as more time writing your comment than Spiegel did writing his email.

I see what you're trying to say, and it doesn't work. Emails to investors, because your employees' livelihoods depend on them, deserve more time than Hacker News posts. Writing them quickly, when not well, isn't something to be bragged about. Granted, he's probably going for neoteny to some extent, and I'm sure he uses uptalk when interacting with investors, but even still... he should learn to communicate clearly and professionally.

No, you misunderstand. Obviously, he didn't intend for the Sony hack to happen. My contention is that, after the hack happened, he got quickly to work on figuring out how to use it best to bolster his reputation.

I agree with the above poster (I too was interested to see your thoughts), but this is really weak. Between believing that 1.) Evan Spiegal is a sociopath who drafted not only a grammatically correct email from Mitch Lasky but also a grammatically incorrect email from himself in a fake convo, and took advantage of his connection with the Sony CEO to "leak" this report vs. 2.) This was just business as usual and the result of an already very public Sony hack, I'd choose the one that didn't take me 90+ words to explain.

I'm going to call Occam's Razor here. Other than that the rest of your post has little to do with the content of the email. If Einstein had presented the theory general relativity to me, I'd be rightly less concerned with the fact he could use a semicolon.

> Between believing that 1.) Evan Spiegal is a sociopath who drafted not only a grammatically correct email from Mitch Lasky but also a grammatically incorrect email from himself in a fake convo, and took advantage of his connection with the Sony CEO to "leak" this report vs. 2.) This was just business as usual and the result of an already very public Sony hack, I'd choose the one that didn't take me 90+ words to explain.

No horse in this race, but I assume parent is actually implying a third possibility, where the email exchange is real but cherry-picked by parties friendly to Spiegel.

No horse in this race, but I assume parent is actually implying a third possibility, where the email exchange is real but cherry-picked by parties friendly to Spiegel.

Right. Or, it's "real" insofar as it actually happened. His stated interest in building a quality business and being careful with "OPM" is obviously not genuine, but the conversation actually happened and, at the time, he would not have known that the Sony leak would happen in the future. He didn't write that particular email with the intention of it being leaked.

After the leak, Spiegel needed to lend credibility to the idea that he's not some careless frat boy and he (or, just as likely, his PR team) decided to focus attention on a particular email. Since the email itself was poorly crafted, an influential third party was paid off (bought social proof) to say that it was "very impressive" for his age.

>> So let's see, you opened with conspiracy theory nutjob

> Given that Snapchat Beliebers (employees?) have come out of the woodwork to downvote me into oblivion, it's not that far fetched.

You're not helping dodge the "conspiracy theory nutjob" case, here..

So, first of all, let me say that I once wrote a system to spot fake reviews, so I know the statistical signature. You get a lot more out of the timing than the content (especially if it's just up- or down-votes). Fake reviews or votes tend to come in "bursts" over a couple of hours. For example, if a comment that is rapidly getting upvotes suddenly ends up at -4 (or lower) and multiple unrelated posts are getting downvoted at the same time ("stalker downvoting") that's a sign of it.

These are most likely "meat-puppets" rather than sock-puppets. The difference is that sock-puppets are one person making multiple accounts (which I'm sure Hacker News defends against) and meat puppets are when it's separate people (e.g. a whole office). Many startups engage in meat puppetry (e.g. "everyone in the office, vote on this story") around articles that pertain to them.

One notable example is on Glassdoor pertaining to the company Knewton. First of all, negative reviews of Knewton get killed pretty quickly because they get user-flagged (presumably, by Knewton people) into oblivion. But you can see statistical evidence of meat-puppetry in the dates of reviews. A company that had previous been getting about 1 review every 80 days suddenly gets 6 (!) five-star reviews, with no nuance and nothing negative to say, within 96 hours (Feb. 7-11, 2014). The odds of that happening by chance are about 80 billion to 1 against. Before Knewton aggressively policed Glassdoor, the average review was lower (around 2.5-3.0 if I recall correctly). Now it's 4.4, due to this work. It doesn't take much for a company like Knewton to completely break Glassdoor if it's willing to sink that low.

When you learn the signals you can spot this stuff pretty easily. Just the fact of something being downvoted doesn't necessarily tell you anything (it could just be a shitty comment). It's when you see sudden trend changes, and spill-over effects to other comments, and when the topic pertains to a specific company, that there's likely a PR effort going on. Of course, these are all statistical inferences with non-zero error probabilities attached, and I have no way of proving (nor do I really care, because it's not worth my attention) whether the "downvote squad" came from Snapchat or from some other cluster of fanboys.

I've had a lot of comments get downvoted and, 99% of the time, the downvotes are genuine and come from disinterested users without an agenda (they just don't like the comment and, to be fair, some of my HN comments are better than others). When a comment that is quickly getting upvotes suddenly dives, and a bunch of your related comments dive as well, and when there's an obvious motive because the comment pertains to one company or founder, it's likely that the votes are correlated... but not that interesting, because (a) it can't really be proven, and (b) downvotes on a message board don't really matter. Truth be told, this statistical wonkery is probably only interesting to me.

For what is worth, I downvoted your first comment, and I'm not an employee of SnapChat - in fact, I don't even know what SnapChat is exactly. The reason why I downvoted you is already explained by the commenters who responded to you.

I suspect other people were interested in your reaction to this article, and like me, they thought it was pretty poor and downvoted you - nothing to do with Snapchat employees.

Apart from that, if you think Evan Spiegel cherry picked an email nicely written that leaked from the Sony hack, nobody or nothing would prevent you to look for all emails from him that leaked and cherry pick the ones that make him look like an asshole; in fact it would do more to prove your point and while being more time efficient than constantly monitoring the karma of the comment to find evidence of a fake review - which I doubt, since the comment hasn't been flag-killed - and write super long replies like you just did.

Since you've made an issue of this: I downvoted your comments on this thread. I don't like Snapchat and find its CEO kind of skeezy. But there are worse things you can be than kind of skeezy.

For what it's worth. Fake accounts cannot down vote. I don't even have the ability to down vote. You need karma for that. People down-voted you because your comments are off the mark. It's absurd to think you're blaming anyone but yourself for that.

because you're asking: I downvoted your org comment after you claimed the sony hack was a pr stunt, or seemed to be saying that anyway, after that I stopped voting bec it the whole thing seemed to have devolved into a pissing contest.

You know what else makes a comment dive rapidly in votes? A bad comment on a popular thread that's spiking in traffic.

It's amazing to me that you're so single-minded about how no one other than a snapchat employee could possibly disagree with your comment. This bleeds through your original comment as well: "How could someone possibly find value in anything this frat boy has to say? BI must have been paid to post this". Reasonable people out here in the real world realize that, however much we disagree with a given person, not everyone who disagrees with us is a puppet of said person.

I can't downvote you, but I would if I could. Not because I work for Snapchat, or because Spiegel needs defending. I'd downvote you because because your comments here are petty and baseless, and sound a little delusional.

I care about frat boys being funded at the expense of people with actual ideas. I care about a generation of technologists that has been sold out because a bunch of smooth-operator, manipulative invaders have come in and outcompeted true technologists for funding and coverage, and the VCs have let it happen. If they were worth their millions per year, they simply wouldn't. If they could actually spot talent sufficiently well to justify their obscene salaries, they wouldn't be funding frat boys. I react strongly because this nonsense is very bad for the world.

As much as I wanted to believe in this vision, I've realized that the sole purpose of a so called Venture Capital Company is to provide an investment upon which they expect a large return. This usually entails all manner of searching and sifting (YC, etc.) to find the best potential status signallers, which can then be presented to Wall St banks who put on the finishing PR touches before a big IPO for the ignorant masses.

We are both technologists at heart Michael. That's why we have to leave SV behind. A long time ago, during Shockley and Wozniak's era, it was about science and technology. That has changed, and it will won't return for a long time.

Today, progress in science and technology is in the dilapidated workshops, the ignored academic labs, and the rare R&D corner of a dying company. It's not in SV.

I've always taken an evolutionary perspective to life, but it wasn't until I spent a few years in the "workforce" that I truly understood man's depravity. Your writing was therapy for me, but also a resounding validation of my evolutionary perspective on humanity's behavior.

It is the rare individual that manages to understand his biological impulses and how deeply they affect his behavior, and attempts to transcend it. The vicious lifelong status hierarchy battles, the ruthless mate seeking, the negative sum destructive competition. It's the law of the land.

You and I, and others like us, will forever be outcasts. I consider myself a curious traveler, put into the body of a primate so that I may truly empathize with their struggle. But I can never be one of them, because I see the futility of it all. I see that the only purpose of our species is to transcend our limits through deeper understanding of our universe, and to build more powerful tools and technologies which serve us in achieving this end.

Alas, it was not meant to be Michael. See us for what we are, and let go of the hatred for our collective failures. Instead, live life in the footsteps of those great travellers who came before us [1]. Take heart, for we are not alone [2].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tijxMHhuwGQ

2. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/

As much as I wanted to believe in this vision, I've realized that the sole purpose of a so called Venture Capital Company is to provide an investment upon which they expect a large return.

I don't believe that to be at odds with what we want to see. I think that the VCs would see better profits if they went back to Real Technology. As an asset class, VC has been underperforming for more than a decade, and the funding of Spiegels and Duplans is the reason why.

The problem is that some of the investors care more about becoming celebrities and "virality" than the laborious process of building real technology companies and getting rich slowly.

Venture capital isn't more broken or evil than any other industry. What happens in any organization or ecosystem is that, over time, the influential players end up being the ones who are good at playing the politics, not the ones who are good at their jobs or ethically sound. The ones who get to the top are those who value nothing other than personal advancement, because caring about anything else would slow down their political ascent.

In the case of VC, there are a lot of good investors, even now. I wouldn't be surprised if the good ones outnumber the bad ones. The problem is that the ones who become most influential are the ones who seek risk for its own sake, focus on "virality" rather than lasting value creation, and engage in collusion that hurts the ecosystem immensely (and that would be illegal on any public equity market).

> The problem is that some of the investors care more about becoming celebrities and "virality" than the laborious process of building real technology companies and getting rich slowly.

Investors care about making a return on their investment, plain and simple, so they invest in companies that resemble other successful companies. Silicon Valley investors saw the success of Facebook and Twitter and they want to replicate that success.

Not only that, but social network companies look like good investments because they're relatively inexpensive to build, and signs of their eventual success or failure show up at an extremely early stage.

The problem isn't that VCs are evil or stupid or fame-hungry or conspiratorial. The "problem" is that social media companies still look like good investments. You could accuse VCs of being uninspired and unoriginal, trying to repeat their last big success over and over, but that's how it works. And as long as college kids are building the social media apps that get initial traction with other college kids, they're going to get funded.

Complaining won't do anything. As long as social media looks like a good investment (i.e., until it deflates or until something better comes along), VCs will continue to milk it. Once it becomes a bad investment, they'll all go chasing the ball to wherever its headed next.

I agree, it's unfortunate that the money isn't being funneled into something more innovative or meaningful. Rap music annotations and disappearing photos and a website that helps you rent out your spare bedroom are being heralded as some of our greatest tech success stories. Frankly, that's pathetic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com