[aerosmile]

I would be a lot more inclined to believe anything they said in this article if they didn't show such blatant bias for sensationalist reporting.

> 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.

[inopinatus]

If you put that on your CV, I’ll probably put your CV in the garbage. It’s one of the major red flags.

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.

[sugarwater]

It's worth mentioning the the CEO Austen had a post on here (now deleted) proclaiming to have creating a bot army via stealing people's pictures on Instagram.

I would qualify that as "underhanded"

[wheelie_boy]

Link to the post: https://web.archive.org/web/20190703224616/https://news.ycom...

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

[reducesuffering]

Dang, is this a normal feature? Since when are users able to retroactively change the profile that made the comment? This looks like covering up a YC founder's past comment, but the archive still exists. According to snapshots it was modified over 2 years later.

[dang]

We take care of privacy requests for HN users every day. 99% (maybe 99.9% – I haven't counted) of those users aren't YC founders. There's no special treatment.

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.

[reducesuffering]

Appreciate the clarification that it's not YC-founder specific and a further read of your comments and newsfaq on this makes it clear the tradeoff between privacy and maintaining HN thread history, and I think the right choice has been made. Thanks

[hluska]

This is a really kind answer. You’re a good person and we’re all lucky to have you.

[kelnos]

The usual best way to get in touch with dang (or another mod) is to email [e-mail]. Likely to get a better answer via email, or perhaps he'll comment here if you call attention to it that way.

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.

[wheelie_boy]

This is not a feature available to mere mortals. Your assumption seems likely.

[dang]

The full range of everything we do is available to anyone who asks. You have to email [e-mail], as the FAQ explains (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but there's no restriction on whom we help, or how. We help people who have abused this site for years and then ask us (sometimes exceedingly impolitely!) to clean up what they did, and we treat them the same way as we treat anyone; I may grit my teeth while doing it, but that's all. Why? Because it's best for the community in the long run if we treat everyone the same way, and because—as I tell users who email—we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN.

[wheelie_boy]

Good to hear, I'm very happy to be corrected on this. Thanks!

[kevingadd]

Even more than that, one of the administrators previously told me via email that HN is not able to rename accounts (presumably they use account names instead of numeric IDs as a key somewhere). So the only explanation for the displayed author on that post having changed is that they switched the author of the post, the original author's account could not have been renamed.

[dang]

Either that email was many years ago or something got confused, because we rename accounts for users all the time.

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 [e-mail] and we'll be happy to help!

[stevesearer]

The account creation date for user _pecl is also the same date the comment was made so maybe it is possible to make a new user, change their creation date, and also change the attribution of specific comments to that user?

[kelnos]

The incredibly gross thing is that all but two replies are encouraging of that kind of behavior. The two that are negative and call out the dishonesty are downvoted.

[dragonwriter]

a user, it might be noted, for whom that is the only comment.

[eachro]

Note that the author of this piece was the founder of Coderpad, not some industry entrenched journalist. After watching his interview with Jason Calacanis(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hUT8VZNvm8), where they discuss the content of his piece, I'm more inclined to believe what Woo wrote.

[akanet]

Listen, I wrote underappreciated first and then had the parenthetical second for a reason. You read the entire piece and this is the bit you reacted to? Jesus Christ. The entire piece is completely factual. Name even one bit of the piece not based entirely in fact, I dare you.

[kelnos]

To me "growth hacking" has for a long time been associated with sketchy, underhanded practices and dark patterns.

[plorkyeran]

> So anyone who put the term "growth hacking" on their resume will now get publicly discredited as being underhanded?

Yes? "Growth hacking" has always been basically a euphemism for saying that you're willing to do unethical things for growth.

[dang]

The term has always made me wince but that is not a fair description.

[plorkyeran]

I think it is an entirely fair description of the overwhelming majority of the times I see it used. I suppose the person using the term does not always think the thing they are describing is unethical and so do not intend it as a euphemism.

[aerosmile]

What's missing in your description is the timeline. Note that the term was first introduced by Sean Ellis in 2010, and according to Google Trends it peaked in usage in 2014. At some point (2014?), it became a buzzword and suddenly every marketer started using it. So in 2021, when someone puts "Growth Hacker" on their resume, you draw a very different mental picture than you did in 2010. Is it fair to put the 2010-people into the same bucket as the 2021-people? I have no idea when and why Austen was using this term. But calling him underhanded for that reason alone comes across as biased.

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?).

[rideontime]

Would love to see this acknowledged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343

[dang]

This is a bad way to get in touch with us; it's unreliable. If there's something important that needs responding to, you should email [e-mail], as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[marvindanig]

> So anyone who put the term "growth hacking" on their resume will now get publicly discredited as being underhanded?

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.

[TameAntelope]

I dunno if "underhanded" is the right word, but it feels like "growth hacking" is something one does only when the higher-than-usual moral cost is worth it.