Allows you to donate affiliate fees to charity?! Bullshit. Should read: Forces businesses to donate part of their profit margin to charity and browsarity.
You have an agreement with a shop owner, that you can buy stuff from him wholesale at a discount.
You then hang around in the shop (Maybe in disguise) waiting for customers who are about to buy stuff.
Instead of letting them get on and buy stuff, you accost them, and suggest they let you act as a middle man, and you'll buy it wholesale from the shop keeper, and donate the difference to charity, after you take your cut.
Sounds shady doesn't it. And the shopkeeper is being forced to do it until he finds out about the scam.
Well you can color me skeptical. This is the way I see something like this coming into being:
1. Someone thinks of the clever idea of overwriting non-affiliate urls with an affiliate url of their account.
2. In realizing that no one would ever install this, they think "how can I convince people to add this to their browser and take a cut of the profit?"
3. Charity!
I hope I am way wrong.
And man, the news in here is really becoming a TechCrunch aggregator.
What makes your comment like a TechCrunch comment (and this one even more so) is that instead of giving the startup the benefit of the doubt, you do the same thing in the other direction.
And that's particularly easy to do with a newly launched startup, since the right way to launch most things is to launch very early-- way before what you've built is formidable enough to stand up to determined criticism.
Why don't you try giving the founders the benefit of the doubt instead? I can assure you they'd give a project of yours the same.
I think the comments are just in proportion to how much the idea sucks.
I've said this before (You told me off for moaning about twitvid.io), but I doubt people want to hear the feedback "Yes that's nice dear, lovely" from HN. They want the real opinions of people.
We don't know the founders, so we can't asses them, we can only assess the idea. And this idea is a fundamentally bad one. Hopefully they change it soon enough.
There's a difference between the "benefit of the doubt" and cheerleading.
A lost of these critical comments could be phrased more politely (like "how do you plan to get away with this"), but they're all fundamentally reflective of what a middling idea this is in general, and what a terrible idea this is for anything couched as a 'startup'.
No one is being forced to do anything. If Amazon or Ebay doesn't like the service they can disable the account, change TOS etc.