I guess there's a subtlety at work here that's difficult for the most vocal people on HN to grasp, going by the overall tone in the comments here. There's a difference between someone who's spent years of their professional life, largely ostracized by a tech community that should've supported them more, who suddenly gets a massive influx of users and initially assumes it's an attack and, when they discover it's not, take a hacker-ish approach to playing with the situation before sitting down and devoting 20 hours a day for days on end attempting to make the service work for those users even though they're clearly unwilling to pay very much for it ... and other actual assholes that this site has regularly worshipped, people who have built entire businesses out of exploiting users and employees alike.

I suppose that if any of us are lucky, we'll be successful enough one day to be burned at the stake on HN by a bunch of folks who can't tell the difference between "did one or a couple of things badly" and "is a bad person".

How is he a prick? What harm has he caused to anyone?

You mean besides lying to them and making them do things for some reward and then not giving the reward and laughing about it?

Whoa there. Calm down buddy. Before you bust out the pitchforks, he just asked them to post tweets. The cost to them is zero in money, and virtually zero in time.

Couple that with the fact that he was providing them with a free service and I only see a morally net positive contribution from him.

> The cost to them is zero in money, and virtually zero in time.

Ah yes, just like spam.

> Couple that with the fact that he was providing them with a free service

He wasn't. He was just giving them an error message after they Tweeted what he wanted.

> He wasn't. He was just giving them an error message after they Tweeted what he wanted.

Did you read the entire post? His service is available to India right now. Their tweets helped make that possible. It’s strange to me that you hate someone who provides a valuable service to people.

Did you read the entire post?

> 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".

> It’s strange to me that you hate someone who provides a valuable service to people.

I don't care enough about him to hate him. I just said I think he's an asshole.

Something is off if you think he’s an asshole and his users in India don’t.

And how do you know they don’t?

On average it’s likely they don’t given they are using his product.

Pretty sure he gave them the reward? Can you not use browserling from India now?

> 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".

> Then I got curious. Would these users tweet anything that I asked them? So I decided to troll my competitors a little bit, and asked users to tweet a popular meme Taiwan number one to them.

Then he seems to shift to actually trying to tell them when the service is available instead of pretending it will be if they send a tweet:

> Then instead of just tweeting and trolling, I asked users to start following Browserling on Facebook so I could reconnect with them and let them know when the software was up and running again.

And then finally he built something where they could sign up and it admitted they were building up server capacity to handle it. Then he moved to a lottery which it sounds like legitimately paid out, and he started to do legitimate monetisation of a not-entirely-firewall-blocked service.

He says he didn't at the time, in the post.

I read it differently. It sounded to me like he was trying to keep momentum up while he figured out a way to serve people. Maybe I misread it?