I don’t think that’s the same at all. The submarine article is about helping journalists with stories. This article is about lying to journalists and everyone else by creating a fictitious person, all for their company’s financial benefit. And ironically they tout their intent to “provide transparency”. Too bad they didn’t make him a combat vet, then they could have been prosecuted.[1] Makes me think of a quote I once heard, “Integrity is what we tell other people to have.”
which harkens back to when AirBnB spammed Craiglist users (violating Craigslist ToS and users' stated contact preferences) with fake inquiries about rental properties.
>The submarine article is about helping journalists with stories
>I don’t think that’s the same at all.
The parallel I see is that in both cases, you're introducing things into the news cycle for your own benefit. In the Submarine article, PG even talks about how shaky statistics were made more credible by insertion into publications (like a PR-driven version of this xkcd[0]).
The difference between submarine tactics and what happened here was that the data was outright false instead of merely cherry-picked or optimistic. However, a journalist who is doing their job will catch both: they will not allow information to be presented as having a higher confidence than it actually does, whether that means promoting a number from "made up" to "reported somewhere," or promoting a number from "reported somewhere," to "credibly sourced."
So, the similarity that I see in both cases is the willingness of journalists to serve private interests by reporting error bars as less wide as they actually are; so long as they do not mis-report the mean values being focused on.
The same? No. Similar? Yes, they both involve exploiting the same bug in the system.
> The parallel I see is that in both cases, you're introducing things into the news cycle for your own benefit.
That's just PR.
I'm tired of PG's submarine essay. Although he's got a cute hook with the concept of "the submarine," what he describes in the article is just bog standard PR. But somehow HN folks (most of whom have no direct experience with PR themselves) have come to believe, based on PG's essay, that anything involving placing a story with a reporter is some special thing called a submarine.
Anyway, yes, this fake person is an example of PR, but the reason it's worth writing about is that it's a great example of truly shitty PR. Reporters live to find out The Truth, and they hate to get lied to or fooled. Anyone who put Drew Cloud in their stories is going to be pissed off at LendEDU for a long time. Pissing off reporters and editors is generally considered to be a bad PR strategy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Valor_Act_of_2013