This came up via the HN story on "$80k/month App Store Scam"[0]. If the person is intelligent enough to get past the App store approval process and everything

This came up via the HN story on "$80k/month App Store Scam"[0]. If the person is intelligent enough to get past the App store approval process and everything that's required to build and publish an app, it counters the slavish-copying hypothesis. Instead, 1. It acts as a sieve that filters in gullible persons. Someone like yourself wouldn't give it a second thought and move on. The $99/week subscription is only seen once the gullible person has downloaded the app and passed the gullibility-filter. Interestingly HN's own terse commenting interface, lack of humour and strict voting policies serve to filter in only on-topic discussions and ends up setting a very different tone from say, r/programming. The sieve effect is very noticeable in the tone, the crowd and the commentary itself between the two communities. 2. Letting only gullible people in is not enough. This strategy also keeps the smart/adversarial users far at bay. If an intelligible user were to somehow get in the door, that wouldn't bode well for the $99/week subscription scam -- things would escalate. It would jeopardise the entire scam and that's just what happened with the medium.com post. The guy notices the $99/week subscription within the app requiring only a fingerprint scan to activate. His blog post will get the app shut down. It will provoke QA improvements within Apple and it will rally the community at large to highlight further problematic apps. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14526156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14526156