It's like when you see people on YouTube who make horrendous clickbait, yet get millions of views. It's easy to laugh and dismiss them, but financially they're probably rolling in it...

Are they the smart ones for exploiting the largest, most lucrative audience (young children who are more likely to watch more of the video before clicking off) and cashing in? Or are they legitimately not self-aware?

Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." In my experience, when people have a strong financial interest in not being self aware, they will generally not be self aware. I can never decide whether that's legitimate or not.

It's a bummer that our society is structured with financial incentives that are so poorly aligned with interesting goals.

Look at how people treat the statement, "I work at Facebook", for example. It has changed a lot over the last decade. It used to be hot and positive. But I had a friend start just recently. They're doing something worthwhile and entirely unrelated to the many things terrible about Facebook. But they still felt obliged to apologize for it.

I'd like to see more of that pressure applied to people who are making money by making the world worse.

Yup. 100% agreed. And I want to remind everyone here that putting such pressure is a perfectly legitimate thing to do in market economy. Companies respond to market signals, so if a moral value is not made into a signal - i.e. made to impact sales - it won't get considered.

One or two happen to be in some field that trigger my bullshit alert and I think it’s somewhat sketchy what they do. For example, stuff around network marketing for dietary supplements.

I mean, who am I to judge?

But as to who you are, I'd say you have several things that give you grounds to have an opinion. One is that you're a human being and want to see other humans treated well. Two, you're part of a variety of communities, and you have an interest in seeing those communities be healthy. Three, you're a successful entrepreneur, so you have real expertise in what makes for a good business. And surely there are more.

In your shoes I'd definitely look for opportunities to influence people like that. It can be as simple as the look that passes across your face when they tell you what they do. If they ask for advice, you can point them to something healthier. You could give a talk on what makes for good, sustainable businesses. And with people where you are already an influencer (e.g., friends, family) you can definitely help keep them from getting into work like that.

> You could give a talk on what makes for good, sustainable businesses.

I will do! And I'll try to find words that sound encouraging to them. After all, most of them probably just want more freedom for themselves and the sketchy business ideas probably look like the simplest way to get there.

Good luck with it! Feel free to drop me a line and let me know how it goes.

I worked for a SEO company for about a year making SaaS tools to help "analyze keywords", "supply backlinks", "generate content" and other woo woo magic. Waking up and walking to work was fun for only the first month :/

Most of the users made crappy copy-paste websites and did whatever they could to get a better rank on search engines.

I'm glad he got there in the article. But yes... He's not only doing what I would consider a net harm, but he's aware of it. And all that's before he added the referal scheme to it.

His take away at the end is good, don't do it for money (which is easy to say when you're making money), share with people as soon as you can, and be proud of what you're doing. How he got that last one after the realization he's making things worse - I don't know. Do as a say not as I do I suppose? I agree, he doesn't hate this app at all, he's just figured out a way to market it.

a single level referral system is not a MLM

Amusing typo

That said, I do think app generators in general are a fun and cool idea. It's his target market more than anything else that makes it a spam machine.