These recent posts, this one included, are about making money through shady tactics (there is a reason they have to create adsense accounts every two weeks).
It's more an attack on the general sense here on HN that people are spending lots of time and money building things they have no idea how to monetize.
Absolutely, the best way to create value for investors is to create value for customers by selling them something they want.
In the affiliate's case, the customers are the merchants that pay for leads or sales, NOT the end users of the product, and there is nothing shady about that relationship.
As an affiliate, I always create compliant and legitimate landing pages and ads. Ultimately, it is the merchant's responsibility to adequately disclose billing and allow for easy and timely cancellation. I try to work with compliant merchants, but their billing practices are beyond my control.
I agree that lots of affiliate stuff is valuable, I wrote a site a couple years ago that makes it money through affiliate ads and provides value to both the vendor and customers. But reading what he was doing, stuff like re-bill, seems really shady and while it might technically provide value to the vendors it is at the huge cost to the customers who are being tricked.
The goal of business is to make money. The people you should be most concerned about building value for are your shareholders.