[lzell]

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.

[pg]

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.

[ErrantX]

I think this idea just generally hasn't gone down as well with the community shrug

for the following reasons:

some of us run companies and see how this pushes the boundaries of abusing the affiliate system by taking a profit margin

were cynical enough to not take the donating to charity bit as salve for the first gripe

I'm not sure it's a lack of givng the benefit of the doubt as disquiet at the ethics of the idea.

[axod]

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.

[blasdel]

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'.

[axod]

How do we know how many url minifiers are doing just this? Maybe bit.ly isn't such a crazy idea after all. ;)