[horsawlarway]

I find this fairly repugnant.

In the same way that dumpster diving also gets you free food - but you are essentially a parasite, living on the waste of others. At least with the dumpster diving, the relationship is clear.

He generates literally nothing of value here - everything is stolen from others.

I truly hope we end up with the same social aversions to things like this that we do for other taboo social activities.

[ElevenLathe]

Dumpster diving is positive in that it reduces waste of real resources. If I dumpster-dive a meal then as a species we're better off on net than if I'd bought the same thing.

This is the opposite, in that we are as a species probably less well off, but its not really any more destructive than other forms of astroturfing (marketers and robots pretending to be real people).

[mariodiana]

I ultimately decided to scrape directly from other Instagram feeds […]

I stopped reading, right there.

[oh_sigh]

Dumpster divers are commensals, not parasites.

[panda888888]

I agree that it's scummy, but I don't think he creates "nothing of value." How is this any different from influencers promoting and following brands manually? He's created a curated feed of NYC pictures that thousands of people follow and like. There is value in that, and the restaurants offering him free meals proves it. I wish he had posted about his follow-ups with the restaurants (does he actually tag them & promote their business?) If yes, he's fine and is upholding what he agreed to do.

[HWR_14]

> I don't think he creates "nothing of value." How is this any different from influencers promoting and following brands manually?

I agree that he's no different than other "influencers". I would just contend that they also create nothing of value.