[spolsky]

I consider Jason a friend (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-56/), a very smart guy, and a great entrepreneur, although I have a different philosophy than he does on how to build a Q&A site.

[tptacek]

So then, do you think that Mahalo has a bum rap? Because the rep they have here is pretty close to "Google spammer".

[spolsky]

I do the best I can not to comment on competitors, although I can't always live up to my ideal.

There are a lot of companies built on the business model of making low-cost, low-quality pages for long-tail Google search results, either algorithmically or with low-paid humans. There's clearly an arbitrage opportunity there, providing some kind of semi-crappy web page on a topic so narrow that there isn't anything on the web yet, but low quality content doesn't interest me at all.

[gnaritas]

> low-cost, low-quality pages for long-tail Google search results

It's called spamming. Mahalo is spam, Jason is a spammer; friend or not that's simply what he does.