Along with: various flavours of monetization specialist; pimps; politicians; used car sales; basically all the same category of exploitation-oriented narcissists that will poison your brand and your culture, create nothing themselves, and ultimately destroy more intrinsic value than they vampire from others.
I’ve been around this industry for decades. Joe MacMillan is an archetype, not a parody character.
I would qualify that as "underhanded"
It's also weird that the post is still up, but the username was changed from austenallred to another user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13502774
If you look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, there's an explanation there about how we usually don't delete entire account histories, but we do other things to help, and invite people to email us if they have concerns. There are tradeoffs between individual needs for privacy, fairness to the other commenters who participated in a thread, the community's interest in preserving its archive, and so on. We care about all of that and do our best to help whoever asks; as I tell people who write in, we just try to do it with more precise tools than wholesale deletion, and have built up a bag of tricks for that over the years. Obviously that doesn't extend to the Internet Archive or whatever other caches of HN posts are out there; users understand that.
When it comes to this sort of issue on HN, it's important for people to understand that there are no good answers—it's all tradeoffs. Because the pendulum has swung towards privacy concerns in recent years, we regularly get flamed for not deleting entire account histories. But we still get flamed from the classic internet perspective (nothing should be censored, etc.) too.
If something like this really happened, this is pretty disturbing. The _pecl account that now owns that comment was created on the same day the comment was posted, has 1 karma, and has not posted anything else.
Edit: just emailed hn@; hopefully someone there will follow up on this.
In fact, when we developed that feature, I replied to everyone who had emailed over the years asking for it, asking if they still wanted it. If you weren't on that list, your email must have been many years ago.
Edit: oops - I see I neglected the important thing. If you still want your account to be renamed, please email [email protected] and we'll be happy to help!
[1] https://twitter.com/calebhicks/status/1093885962059272193
[2] https://medium.com/user-acquisition-for-hackers/exploiting-t...
Yes? "Growth hacking" has always been basically a euphemism for saying that you're willing to do unethical things for growth.
Btw, "growth hacker" is not the only term whose perception changed throughout its lifetime. Here's a fun one: PHP. Actually, many other technologies suffer the same fate (Java, Rails, etc). Sort of related: NoSQL.
Prediction for a future liability term: AI (what are the chances that in 2030 people will feel about it the same way they feel about it today?).
That is good thing! These 'growth hacks' people should be viewed in the same light as a 'SEO tricks' people. Both damage the quality of results and bring bad faith actors to the top.
> His previous work was mostly concerned with “growth hacking,” which is Silicon Valley jargon for finding underappreciated (or, less charitably, underhanded) ways of marketing something.
So anyone who put the term "growth hacking" on their resume will now get publicly discredited as being underhanded? If they tried just a little harder to stick to the facts, all of the other research they have done in their reporting would carry a bit more weight.