[corporalagumbo]

Jeez, did you have to write all that? Anyway, although I think you are focusing on the weakest part of Greenspan's argument - the point where he comes closest to bitterness - I was wondering if you'd like to invest $20,000 in my new venture. I'd like to sell crack heroin to junkies in Detroit. I'm sure as a fellow champion of guilt-free founder consciences, you will support my endeavour as I give gangbangers the chance to flock to this exciting new industry and do something they scarcely thought possible - to help give people a diversion from life's burdens and problems.

And don't worry, I'll do it with plenty of integrity, drive, boldness, and energy. Just like Zynga : )

[tptacek]

Ok, Corporal A. Gumbo: Write it better.

Do it and I'll donate $1000 that I promise I was not going to donate anyways to Partners In Health.

There's an idea common to forums that I don't frequent that I recently learned of called an "ideological Turing test". The idea is to take a group of people divided along a controversy, and to get each side to anonymously write a coherent argument that capture's the other side's perspective. Then everyone tries to tell, "which is the real argument, and which is the cunning fake?".

In that spirit: if you think you understand what 'grellas is trying to say so well, go ahead and take a whack at saying it better, and demonstrate that you actually grok his perspective.

[corporalagumbo]

Okay, here you are:

People should stop trying to make entrepreneurs feel guilty for not living up to their personal ethical standards. One of the advantages of our free society is that people can choose to work on weighty issues or fluffy diversions. As long as you abide by the law, you should not be criticised for the style of business you decide to pursue. If a lot of people can make money from social networking then that is definitionally a good thing (i.e. a good thing is a thing which makes some people money.)

[grellas]

Here is my shortened version:

"What I choose to call 'Founder's Guilt Complex' is a false sense of guilt imposed on founders who are told that the only worthwhile venture is one aimed at shaking up the world - I say, relax and use your talents to build the business you want. Keep it legal and do aspire to more in life than that. But forget about the censors. Like the Puritans of old, they would put you in a straightjacket for no good reason. And for this reason too, though there may be bad actors, there is not a thing wrong with social networking as a worthwhile business endeavor."

Does this short version achieve the same goals as the original? Yes and no. Context matters a lot in writing (see, e.g., my thoughts on legal writing: http://grellas.com/articles.html). The original here is flawed in that it is in the nature of a first draft (which is the case with all my posts at HN) and could be streamlined. But when one seeks to advance an idea that is bound to meet resistance among readers who are not used to hearing it, it is important to develop it and not simply state a summary of it. If this is misplaced for the forum (my posts do seem to generate a lot of meta-discussion about "walls of text"), then that is one thing. But there is no doubt that a merely summary version of such an argument will not have the same impact as one that is illustrated and developed.

By the way, I am not thin-skinned. I have appreciated your comments in this thread as well as those of others who have taken me to task on this or that point. We can disagree and still appreciate each other.

[larrys]

"it is important to develop it and not simply state a summary of it."

One suggestion I do have to help with readability (and with someone deciding whether they want to read the entire comment) is to place a summary (longer than a sentence) at the beginning of what you are writing if it is long and detailed.

I've found that this practice is helpful not only when writing to customers, but when writing to "important people" who most likely aren't going to want to take the time to read an entire detailed CYA type email with my opinion on something they have asked me about. That way if they want, they can dig further. And if anything happens it's on them if they did not read the fine print and only followed the summary to make a decision.

[tptacek]

I think that when you condense your original comment, you lose a lot of it simply due to politeness. A point that you can make softly and persuasively, for instance by allusion to the social value of reading Latin, would necessarily read a bit more cuttingly if sharpened down to its essence.

[david927]

Well done. Now let's see if tptacek puts his money where his mouth is. :-)

And for fairness sake I'll try to summarize your argument, Gumbo:

Endeavors that either add relatively nothing or have negative consequences, such as negative productivity, simply for pure financial gain, are not noble endeavors.

To paraphrase Gérard de Nerval, our industry is a hovel and a place of ill-repute. I'm ashamed that God should see me here.

How many great engineers are working on sites that allow people to share pictures of their cats? How many of our most talented minds don't even know who Ivan Sutherland is? How many are trying to tackle hard problems, and how many are trying to get rich putting what we know in a new dress? It's a rhetorical question but answer it to yourself anyway, because it's so sad.

[tptacek]

As you can see, not only did you miss his point, you injected two points that he didn't make. It is also very hard to rationalize how your version is "better" than his; in particular, it does an extremely poor job of making its point. "As long as you abide by the law, you should not be criticized"? Approximately 0% of all HN readers agree with that, including George Grellas, who has written persuasively on HN against things like patent trolls.

PIH is a great charity. A great, great charity. Do you want to try again? I think if you ask around, you'll find at least a few people on HN who will tell you that I am not completely full of shit about this. But you have to actually do the thing I challenged you to do.

[larrys]

"Do you want to try again".

You said:

"Write it better.

Do it and I'll donate $1000"

Perhaps you could state the specifics of who is the judge, or the definition of "better".

Quickest way of course would be to have PG be the judge but I'm guessing that's not your idea.

[tptacek]

All I want is a good faith attempt. I don't want a judge. I just don't want to feel like a chump for not spelling out in detail exactly what the terms are.

If you want to be the judge (I know you didn't ask) --- there you go. Poof! You're the judge. If he makes a real good faith attempt at articulating the points Grellas tried to make and you judge it as such, I'm good for the money. :)

[corporalagumbo]

Okay sure, I'll try again. I see what you're saying - I thought you meant a quick distillation of the key argument, but you were asking for a restatement in an equally convincing, albeit clearer, voice.

"What right does Greenspan have to condemn Facebook on the grounds of social value? Just because Greenspan finds Facebook distasteful, does that mean Mark Zuckerberg and those who work at Facebook are wrong to do so, or wrong to find pleasure and satisfaction in their work - or that those who use and enjoy the site and its services are fools? Facebook breaks no laws, and the terms of our society clearly stipulate that, provided we recognise the law, we are free to choose what we value and the paths we follow. We all have our own definitions of value, and clearly many people find Facebook both useful and a source of pleasure in their lives. Who is Greenspan to say that they are wrong?

Indeed, what right do sideline critics in general have to spurn the work of entrepreneurs simply because they "fail" to meet their personal defintion of social value? I propose a label for such efforts to enforce one's own moral standards through guilt: Founder's Guilt Complex. I think this is hokum. Sure, some entrepreneurs may choose to tackle the "big" problems - poverty and disease, for instance (and bravo for them) - but there is plenty of space in our society for ostensibly less "high-minded" ventures. I am all for noble endeavour, but I believe the boundaries of what we consider worthwhile are and must be wider. After all, much that is good has come from unexpected sources.

Life is complex, and we all have our own ideas about value. You may think that something I enjoy (such as reading Latin) is frivolous, and vice versa, but our mutual opinions do not negate the fact of our mutual pleasure. So, unless there is active harm, please leave your judgement and criticism at the door."

[kamaal]

>>If a lot of people can make money from social networking then that is definitionally a good thing

A lot of people make money selling drugs too.

Demand, doesn't automatically make the item in demand good.

[tatsuke95]

>"A lot of people make money selling drugs too."

And a lot of people enjoy taking drugs, but face the same problem of other people pushing their personal morals and ethics on them.

If I want to smoke pot and design shitty Facebook games, leave me to it.

[kamaal]

Well you didn't get the point of his argument at all. The point really isn't against 'Pursuit of happiness'. It really is a very general term. And let me tell you criminals are pursuing their happiness too.

The point is photo sharing, status sharing, killing pigs with birds turned out to be made such a valuable thing that people felt it worth investing billions into it. That's fair too, because you are diverting investments towards where the demand is. But the core of the problem was that the 'actual innovations' got the short end of the stick.

When I look at Elon Musk, I see a person with a mission. As much as it may sound unpractical at times, the person worked on things that have solved genuine problems. Problems like making payments online easy, building electric cars, building cheap vehicles for luggage delivery into space. When I see Bill Gates, I see somebody who radically changed the desktop industry. Who is now investing time and energy fighting diseases, hunger an poverty around the world. All these great men, built business that genuinely changed things around us. Though I use Facebook, I feel no such respect for Zuckerberg. I am jealous of his money. But if I have to be that rich someday, I want to be doing work for a better cause.

I understand that games and stuff like that have their own value. But when they are glorified so much to make genuine work utter useless, unrewarding activity. Things begin to look bad.

[intended]

We have the freedom to build what we see fit - without the need to to justify the act by saying it improves humanity.

If it doesn't improve humanity like a cure for cancer, but ends up creating happiness in the lives of its users, is that wrong?

I tried to get the spirit of the words. How did I do?

Quibbles: I thought several issues were conflated in the original post by grellas, so honestly I don't think I could possibly do justice to all the unstated assumptions.

[doktrin]

The challenge was not directed at me, but I'll take a brief stab at it :

"It is morally acceptable for some of the brighter minds of a generation to invest their time, effort and energy into developing social products - including but not limited to Facebook. These are fully legitimate free market business ventures, and we need to stop collectively pontificating about what may or may not constitute a socially worthy business goal."

This is, I believe, a more concise summary of the parent's perspective. It meets a different need, and I don't view it as being "better" per se.

[YuriNiyazov]

Sorry, I am being dense: and, given the two possible results of the Turing test (population correctly/incorrectly guesses which is real/fake for each side), what are the implications for the argument, if any?

[cuergas]

One implication is that people making arguments do not necessarily have to believe in them. And that anyone with adequate rhetorical skills can make any argument, even one that is not consistent with what they truly believe.

Example: Readers might believe some rambling gibberish about there being no need for any startup founder to have a conscience, and they might attribute it to the poster's own beliefs (it's ok not to have a conscience), when truthfully the poster might believe otherwise (he does not really believe in screwing people over, to the point of having no friends or a lifelong reputation as a con artist) and might just be advancing an idea that would benefit his business: the more social networking startups and the more money flowing into them, the better for those who take a cut.

The other implication is that you have to first understand a position in order to argue it effectively. The claim here is that one commenter does not actually comprehend the other commenter's position. And an easy way to show this is to ask each commenter to argue for the other's position, instead of against it.

[lifeisstillgood]

In a free society, he is free to write as much as he likes and you are free to neither read nor reply to it.

The base of his argument is offending a persons preferences is not sufficient to self censor ones own actions - and I agree.

I also agree where he said any legal start up is fine and free of guilt - but don't worry I would be behind any start up or government initiative that gave away heroin to Junkies. The so called British System worked very well for many years, until the Puritan guilt pressure ended it in spite of empirical evidence that harm reduction did in fact reduce harm

so convert your start up to social entrpreneur status, and go make something to be proud of

the only reason to feel guilty is to have talent to create and not do so.

[freshhawk]

"I also agree where he said any legal start up is fine and free of guilt"

Really? The law, for very good reason, lags behind societal developments and shifts in social norms. Conflating "legal" with "ethical" shows a pretty profound misunderstanding of the two concepts.

[lifeisstillgood]

This is I think the crux of the problem. Most of us live in the large intersection of legal and ethical.

Some exist, like Greenpeace perhaps, in the ethical if not always legal. i suggest the British System sits there too.

But we argue here not over what is legal but what is ethical. Many things are agreed upon worldwide as unethical, rape murder etc. But a whole raft of other issues are ethical preferences - selling mortgages to high risk payers with two year low rates. It's legal. It may be ethical. Do you agree?

Btw I used legal there as the usual, large intersection meaning, as I think most of us do in daily lives

[moocow01]

"I also agree where he said any legal start up is fine and free of guilt - but don't worry I would be behind any start up or government initiative that gave away heroin to Junkies"

And if the government does make it legal to give away heroin? While that is seemingly improbable I think it can get dangerous to assume that laws are representative of ethics or humane behavior.

[lifeisstillgood]

Err - the British system was a compromise where it wa legal for doctors to prescribe herion to patients under their care - ie junkies, so they stopped petty crime to feed their habit and started getting some strucutres back in their lives

so I was in favour of that system, and think it ethical to look to harm reduction as opposed to all out prohibition. Which I think means we agree - but maybe not. I am not too sure

[corporalagumbo]

As I argue in my other reply, legal and ethical boundaries on the internet are still poorly if at all defined.

[zingahgud]

That is the understatement of the century.

[dmansen]

Yes, I'm sure that's exactly what he meant. Ugh.

[corporalagumbo]

I think the point that his rousing hand-waving passes conveniently (and at great length) over is that the internet is a novel medium and legal ideas about what is and is not ethical business practice are very poorly defined if they are defined at all.

For instance at what point can we argue that the rights of Facebook users and the "stickyness" of the service should limit the autonomy of Facebook as an independent company?

E.g. perhaps at some point, if Facebook becomes nigh-on-ineradicable from the fabric of our lives, should we nationalise (globalise) it? The argument would be that it's not just "another service" and it's too important to leave in the hands of private individuals interested primarily in profit, and thus the rihts of its many users outweigh the prerogatives of its "owners".

[lifeisstillgood]

I am a big proponant of nationalising the services that should be - see the total farce over UK rail networks for example.

I strongly suspect most countries will put in place some forms of regulation or nationalisation over IP connectivity to the house - but once connected the very DNA of the Internet means that such monopolies are as trivially bypassable as any service provider has ever been.

Myspace is probably the best counter example to this threat there can be. And it also cost Rupert Murdoch 1/2 billion so there was a silver lining.

[Apocryphon]

Given the current popularity of certain cable serial dramas, your proposal has excellent mindshare.

[mattmanser]

Careful, you'll bring the HN grellas lovers down on you. While I always despair at his inability to say something succinctly, he generally always makes an excellent point.

Facebook provides an excellent service to most people in the world and it does so at a level that your $20,000 cannot buy. While we as a more discerning social customer may see it as extremely low value, the production values are actually extremely high. I always think of my national rag the Sun in these instances, it's utter trash, but they really worked hard on making it extremely good trash.

Alas for the article, to be honest the whole thing reads of bitterness, not unjustified if we are looking at 'justice'. But Zuck is a complete $&!t, and an extremely lucky one at that, but in business that's just the way it works. Moaning about it is futile. The only way to end up playing at that level is probably ending up being a complete $&!t as well. There are few big founders who haven't done very dodgy things in their time.

[corporalagumbo]

I just don't understand why HN readers are so eager to paint Greenspan as a whiner and Zuckerberg as a rightful victor, as if that's the only thing worth saying about this whole commotion. It seems like a very dim view of human potential to me - winning is all that counts, if being a shit means you win, good on ya, and anyone that challenges that is just a whiner.

After all, Greenspan doesn't say that M -shouldn't- have been successful - he does not argue with moral absolutes (or maybe he does and I need to re-read the piece). He argues that eventually that sort of shitty behaviour will catch up with you, no matter what, even if you are the CEO of Facebook. Like I've said in other comments, it sounds like a warning.

Plus shouldn't HN readers be interested in more than just raw victory? If you view the modern tech world as a zero-sum arena, I feel bad for you son. Modern tech is about collaboration, synergy, and finding an approach that authentically makes sense for you in relation to what others are doing. This bloodthirsty power stuff is just a juvenile phase.

(NB: not to take away from all of that Zuck has clearly accomplished at Facebook; its had a huge and rightful impact on the world and our lives.)

[res0nat0r]

We are eager because I think the only things I have ever heard from Greenspan on this site are posts which are still whining about how he got screwed out of lots of fame and fortune in Facebook, or how everyone else is spamming and breaking the law over at AirBnB.

Want me to not paint him as a whiner? How about a Show HN post of a cool new tech company he just started that actually will be useful. Failing that all I hear is someone who is mad he too doesn't have a billion in the bank.

[corporalagumbo]

Again, I just don't think this issue is as simple as you portray it. There is a place for critics and criticism in society, a society with them is healthier I think than a situation (as you seem to, forgive me if I misread you, be promoting) where the only thing worthwhile is creating a startup, and if you have not or are not actively creating a startup and achieving the current consensus definition of success, then your opinion is worthless.

Perhaps Greenspan is, as you say, just a whiner. But he does seem to have a lot of experience in tech, have come up with a lot of different ventures, and, very importantly, he was there in the early days of Facebook, he saw Mark and experienced Mark's behaviour first-hand way back in 2004. Say what you will, I think that experience is important. Facebook is a massive force in current history, and Mark by-and-large defines Facebook's culture. So yeah, I think this stuff matters. Are you saying that we should discount Greenspan's opinions automatically, because what, he's too bitter, or has complained too much already, or hasn't created something nice and shiny and new recently?

[res0nat0r]

> Are you saying that we should discount Greenspan's opinions automatically, because what, he's too bitter, or has complained too much already, or hasn't created something nice and shiny and new recently?

Yes. Rehashing the same sob story about how he isn't a part of Facebook and isn't a billionaire is old news. Another round of complaining how evil Mark is is not going to make Mark or the public feel sad for him and slip him a cool billion.

Get over it and move on.

[18pfsmt]

Given this sentiment, I'm not sure why you even bothered to click on this thread and engage in the comments.

I hadn't ever heard this story before, and only faintly knew Greenspan's name, so I thought it was a somewhat interesting story. It's seems like he should definitely move on at this point.

[tptacek]

What an embarrassing pair of comments.

[seiji]

Careful, you'll bring the HN grellas lovers down on you.

grellas is the most selfless and erudite among us. Attempting to argue, rebut, or piddlepaddle one of his comments reflects more on the commenter than on the point they are trying to make.

The only proper response to a grellas comment is "Thank you."

[GFischer]

While grellas is indeed learned and I do appreciate his sharing with us, I disagree that trying to argue or rebut his arguments necessarily has to be wrong.

Were I to disagree with one of grellas' comments, I would actually go something like "Thank you for posting. However (rebuttal) ... :) "

Also, lawyers / advocates are much better trained than us to write arguments :) , it's their job ! but that doesn't necessarily make them automatically right.

That said, I do tend to side with grellas' point of view.

[dumb_dumb]

I think seiji was joking. It is sarcasm.

[corporalagumbo]

Also, just to make sure I'm understanding you: are you saying that there is a group of people on HN who will vigorously downvote me or anyone else simply for satirically rebutting a laughably verbose comment from a popular user?

Hmm, and I thought I was finished with primary school.

[lotharbot]

There are people on HN who will vigorously downvote you for unnecessary disparaging comments like "Jeez, did you have to write all that?", "laughably verbose" [0], or "I thought I was finished with primary school."

While those lines may not technically violate the letter of the guidelines [1], they violate the spirit of the section that says "please reply to the argument instead of calling names". Note that the next part of the guidelines gives an example of how one can and should remove an extraneous cheap shot from their argument.

Your comment history shows you are capable of producing a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than in the last few comments. Please hold yourself to a higher standard. Satirical rebuttals can be a joy to read when done right.

[0] because grellas has established himself as someone who makes lengthy, meaningful contributions, "tl;dr" type complaints will be considerably less well received than they might be in response to a genuinely too-long post from one with a less valuable contribution history. Particularly yours, because it was phrased so... thoughtlessly.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[corporalagumbo]

You're right. I just read that first Matroshka sentence ("There needs to be a label placed on the idea of feeling the need to bow to the wishes of critics who try to limit the idea of valid entrepreneurship to activities deemed "beneficial to society."") and I couldn't help myself. I did "grok" his argument but I rushed and left some of my assumptions implicit. So yes, I could have set out my rebuttal more cogently.

[Tomis02]

I have a crystal ball... I.. I see the future. You are... banned :)

[freshhawk]

We did finish with primary school. But these days the internet brings it to us. Ah, the future is grand!

[homosaur]

I want to invest in your startup. Sounds like a great opportunity, definitely profits from day one.

[saalweachter]

Due diligence, man!

Before investing in his crack heroin distribution scheme, you should get documentation detailing his supply chain, his on-hand inventory, his distribution intents, and so forth. Written documentation, pictures if possible, with names and addresses for all of his business associates.