You tried to get away with it under the radar, succeeded for four months and someone found you out.
The fact that it took four months is a testament to how well you did what you could to hide it.
If you really want to be transparent you do these things in advance, and you make that a big part of your mission statement.
Four months is not an experiment, an experiment is something you do for a week or two, maybe a month.
Links should point to their destinations, any trickery under water to redirect links to something else than what the browser says it will do is well across the line of what's ok and what is definitely not. If you did that on your own content it would be bad, to do it on other peoples content is even worse.
Maybe YC should add a 'business ethics 101' as applied to the web with their investment package ?
Or do they encourage this sort of thing ?
Why not simply shut it off by default and allow your content producers to enable it, that way you take the sting out of it.
First off, let's turn down the rhetoric just a bit. You can like or dislike this feature without believing it goes "well across the line" of ethical behavior. We're talking about blog posts here, not scientific research or human life or politics or anything where a serious discussion of the ethics involved might be warranted.
Posterous isn't stealing money from anyone, and to the end user they aren't changing a single aspect of the user experience. They are altering the links of content creators slightly. Now, let's discuss that.
These links aren't being redirected to anywhere but the original destination. Adding an unobtrusive query parameter is absolutely not the same thing as pointing everyone to another website. I respect the opinion that it shouldn't be done, but I don't agree.
There are two arguments in play, the first is that altering links at all is fundamentally wrong. I can't refute that because it seems to be purely opinion driven. I can only say that I disagree, and that to me, things which have no detectable impact on the end user are not fundamentally wrong.
The other argument, and the one I find particularly silly, is this notion that Posterous shouldn't be privately profitting off other people's content. This is, in fact, how the entire economy of the ad driven web works. Users create content, site owners make money. See Google ads. What Posterous is doing is exactly the same thing, except it's better because I don't have to actually look at ads and I can still support the site.
Should Posterous have told people? Yeah. Should they offer an option to turn it off? Probably. But these are relatively minor complaints about an otherwise harmless feature.
It's not about whether or not it is harmless or not. It's simply a sneaky way of going about an otherwise perfectly ok business.
There would have been absolutely no harm in informing the users if they were not afraid that it would turn people away from posterous, but the way this now comes in to the open and the apology fall way short of what I'd come to expect of them. I'm not a user but I've done my bit to promote posterous and I feel that my trust that those people are in 'good hands' is misplaced.
Altering links is not fundamentally wrong, if you inform your user about it.
Profiting of other peoples content is fine too, if you are aboveboard about that being the deal.
Doing any of this without putting it loud and clear in your terms of service is definitely not ok.
And to make it seem like this was 'just an experiment' is stretching credulity to the breaking point and well beyond, that simply insults the intelligence of the users and the people here. The only reason it was four months is because that's how long it took for someone to figure it out.
Or they could have made an announcement. I have seen a lot of reviews and articles clearly mentioning that the link they are posting is an affiliate link and I don't find anything wrong with that. Because they are explicitly saying that it is an affiliate link and it is the choice of a visitor then.
There is nothing wrong with affiliate links, _as long as_ the visitor is aware of it.
I don't think the visitors are the people that matter, but the creators of the content, other than that I agree, if they mentioned it explicitly and not clouded in legalese ('we can modify your content', which most people would interpret to mean we can edit your content in case it is offensive or in case it violates the tos).
The fact that it took four months is a testament to how well you did what you could to hide it.
If you really want to be transparent you do these things in advance, and you make that a big part of your mission statement.
Four months is not an experiment, an experiment is something you do for a week or two, maybe a month.
Links should point to their destinations, any trickery under water to redirect links to something else than what the browser says it will do is well across the line of what's ok and what is definitely not. If you did that on your own content it would be bad, to do it on other peoples content is even worse.
Maybe YC should add a 'business ethics 101' as applied to the web with their investment package ?
Or do they encourage this sort of thing ?
Why not simply shut it off by default and allow your content producers to enable it, that way you take the sting out of it.