
Slide Caught Posting Fake Positive Reviews For Their Own App - marrone
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/03/slide-caught-posting-fake-positive-reviews-for-their-own-app/
======
Alex3917
Headline is misleading. There's no problem posting reviews of your own
products, as long as you identify yourself as being affiliated with the
company. Posting ratings, on the other hand, is always unethical since they
forcibly affect the average rating.

~~~
dcurtis
Well, the reviews were "Fake" because they were not genuinely written by
anyone.

Although most of the Slide people I've met are religiously fanatical about
their products, so maybe they were genuine, but posted with fake names.

~~~
dbreunig
Agreed. I've asked several ad people why I would want to work with them and
they all say, "well, we're number 1." This answer is ALWAYS offered and never
goes deeper.

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raghus
Shocking!

btw, you should really check out submissions and comments by raghus here on
news.yc - he's really insightful.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=raghus>

------
attack
Reviews for startups have always been extremely artificial. In an ideal world,
users would be very vocal about what they like and don't like. Surprise,
they're usually NOT!

Techcrunch in particular is a traditional publicity channel that gets most of
its information through heavily biased sources such as press releases,
friends, etc. instead of directly from the users. This is why I find it
hilarious that techcrunch should be the ones to call them out on producing
biased information.

Then again, Arrington has been working to discover sites as a user through hn
for example, so he may be doing a small part to correct this wrong.

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zkinion
I see nothing wrong with this. You'd be surprised at some of the stuff
startups have to do to get out there and get initial traction, not limited to
spam and "faking it till you make it".

The only thing that surprises me is that they were putting up fake reviews so
late into the game. The benefits weren't that great at that point, and the
risks at least mediocre. It just looks like laziness, if anything. Maybe they
wanted to artificially stimulate some growth prior to that new funding round
and possibly trying to get acquired, and fake reviews are just one of many
methods used at once.

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marrone
here is another related link:

Web 2.0 And Why You Shouldn't Fake Reviews
[http://www.anyarticle.net/Article/Web-2-0-And-Why-You-
Should...](http://www.anyarticle.net/Article/Web-2-0-And-Why-You-Shouldn-t-
Fake-Reviews/97539)

------
mixmax
Great guerilla marketing - unless you get caught of course.

~~~
Shooter
1\. You usually DO get caught.

2\. There are ALWAYS more effective things for you to to do than forging
positive customer feedback...

~~~
mixmax
I actually think that more often than not you don't get caught.

~~~
Hexstream
I think it's "undecidable" because we'll never know how many do it but don't
get caught.

The only thing I can say is I _hope_ most get caught. But they're just wasting
their time _trying_ to fake value while they could be creating more value for
themselves and others.

~~~
socmoth
go try it, a statistically significant number of times, and tell us if you
ever got caught.

~~~
Hexstream
That would only indicate my own skill or lack thereof at it (btw I think I'd
be hopelessly clueless at doing it). You couldn't meaningfully generalize to
the whole population.

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agentbleu
!Not a good sign at all, this undermines the product regardless of anyones
actual opinion. I personally don't think slide is anything special, a simple
flash widget. The likes of which I have seen better examples made by single
independent coders in there bedrooms with no fanfare whatsoever, is this
really the best idea Paypal X could come up with?

>>>>>It just goes to show that great ideas ARE worth a lot more than great
execution!

