Without investors expecting a 10x return in a couple years, risky growth hacking tactics to sustain exponential growth aren't necessary.

What they were doing is no different than what thousands of other websites do to game Google. Except that instead of paying for links with money they were paying for them with traffic from tweets.

I don't really understand why buying links is suddenly called "growth hacking" when a startup does it.

Seems like anything that is "hustling" is called "growth hacking" now a days. We applaud startups that make it to the big leagues and idolize how much they hustle and break the rules and then when someone does break the rules, everyone jumps in to tell them how bad they are.

What the investors want or do is their responsibility; what funded companies do is their own and expectations of VCs are no excuse for such practices. They're not "necessary" by any means unless the company has a business model centered on spamming.

This unfairly ignores the influence investors can have on the company. Investors have a timeline for getting a return on money, known as investment horizon. Sometimes their bets don't work out, and sometimes the horizon is a bit too aggressive for the company. But when the investors normally have board seats and possibly other vectors of influence, you can't ignore how an investor's investment horizon influences strategic business decisions.

Without venture capital RapGenius "growth hacking" tactics would never attract as much scrutiny.

If RapGenius were not a company going out of the way to promote their "VC pedigree" (even if this is what happened indirectly, because that's what the people / press / bloggers wanted to talk about), they would be a lot more likely to fly under the radar.

Even if someone were to write the same kind of post about their "growth hacking" that started the whole "scandal", it would be less likely to make the top of HN and attract a close look from Matt Cutts...

They were trying to have it both ways - generate huge publicity and do something that does not go well with increased scrutiny. Live by PR, die by PR.