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I'm amazed how positive reaction this article gets on HN. This guy is an asshole! It starts with author calling his users "fools" for not randomizing useragent

I'm amazed how positive reaction this article gets on HN. This guy is an asshole! It starts with author calling his users "fools" for not randomizing useragent (while he himself is a fool for not using useragent correct way - to know what hardware/software accesses his service). Then he goes super happy "hah, great, let them crash competitor websites". Then he realize "This is the biggest opportunity ever!". He tries to sell his service for small amount of $1 per day for using free WhatsApp. "I had no idea how much money Indian users spent on online services." Quick google search reveals that daily wage labour gets 2-3 $/day. What he does next? He sends his users to promote his website at social media. Follow and tweet about my service and I will allow you to use my service - he promises, except it is not a payment method - it's a lie. But free advertisment is not enough for this guy. It's "his biggest opportunity ever"! He sends his army to "troll my competitors". "That was super hilarious. I was literally rolling on the floor laughing." "users would tweet, follow, like, and do anything I tell them to get access to Browserling" except he didn't let them access Browserling. They are just numbers for him, a viral mob that will do whatever their god tell them to do. And as a god, he doesn't care about his promises. Well, he could, but it's too much work and there are more interesting things to do for him. His final solution - more lies and unethical behaviors. "Increase your chances in lottery by promoting my service" - chance does not change Depending on your luck, the same amount of money will give you day, week or month of a service. This guy is an asshole, his behaviour is unethical and wrong. I can't believe it gets positive feedback here.

2pointsomone 9y ago
Agreed, he is an asshole and this is an unethical way to monetize
- l4yao 9y ago
  What about his monetization is unethical? Where is the moral conflict?
- Pharaoh2 9y ago
  What is he supposed to do? His initial reaction when he thought he was under attack was fine and the second reaction was immature and lacked empathy but he was likely facing an unexpected problem that he couldn't figure out how to handle but very soon got on the right track. Those servers and bandwidth aren't free. Bandwidth to tier three countries is actually more expensive. Advertising revenue is basically non-existent for tier three countries, conversion rates and LTV is super low, ltv for the group of user that are using his service for whatsapp will be in the range of 1-5 Rs, ~(1-8 cents). He will eventually have to block these countries again if he can't figure out a way to indirectly monetize these users. Or he will run out of money and the servers go down. The best thing for these users would be if he can figure out a way to make it sustainable, and that means to monetize these users.
ainiriand 9y ago
I was thinking exactly the same thing! He is ripping them off and abusing the users.
l4yao 9y ago
"It starts with author calling his users "fools" for not randomizing useragent" He thought he was getting DDOS'd at first, and his attackers were using one useragent. In which case, they would have been fools. "Then he realize "This is the biggest opportunity ever!"." It __is__ a great opportunity! For the HN audience, a large influx of users is considered a great opportunity. "They are just numbers for him, a viral mob that will do whatever their god tell them to do." There seems to be a lot of negativity around this. I thought it was hilarious. Would there still be outrage if the users were American instead of Indian? "His final solution - more lies and unethical behaviors" I would hardly call it lies or unethical. 1. he isn't obligated to do anything 2. he ultimately delivered a usable product with a paid option to the service. Sounds like any other freemium app or in-app-purchase
- lucideer 9y ago
  > Would there still be outrage if the users were American instead of Indian? This is exactly the point. There would only be outrage if the users were American. There would not be a positive response here.
- intended 9y ago
  Let’s try another more illustrative question - what would the reaction be if he were an Indian in India doing that to Indians or doing it to Americans. There would definitely be outrage. As other people have said, he comes across as lacking humanity. Especially as the people using Jio phones would be the kind of people who are not rich or well off. In fairness to the person, he could just be clueless and doesn’t really think of the people trying to use his service as people. Hmm. That makes him sound worse. I know a friend who thinks like that, And Is not a bad person.... I don’t know - this guy comes across as if he doesn’t realize that he is manipulating people less informed and weaker than him like someone orchestrating ants into following sugar.
  - soziawa 9y ago
    > As other people have said, he comes across as lacking humanity. Especially as the people using Jio phones would be the kind of people who are not rich or well off. But that doesn't make his server costs go away. And they must own at least another phone otherwise they wouldn't be able to use WhatsApp Web. So they are probably not as poor as you think.
jondubois 9y ago
In the author's defence, it sounds like these users were creating an existential threat to his service by using it in unintended ways. It's kind of expensive for the author to run virtual machines for all these people. Though the author tries to add a positive spin to this, I'm sure that the story is more complicated.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I completely fail to understand how that's a defense. Whether you're an asshole or not is exactly defined by your reaction to similar situations. The author talked down to people who wanted to use his service and treated them like toys even after he found out they didn't mean him harm. This post left me with nothing but bad impressions for the author and for Browserling. At some point I wonder whether a middle school bully was writing the post.
  - davidsong 9y ago
    I understand that it's corporate etiquette to be a smiling doormat when faced with free riders abusing your services, to politely apologise for not being able to take the pain, but it doesn't mean you're an asshole if you don't act that way. The vast majority of these users were looking for a shady freebie at his expense, gleefully ripping him off and doing so en masse in a way that would destroy his livelihood. They were being more than cheeky and he has a right to treat them the same way. If it were me I'd have had my fun too.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      > but it doesn't mean you're an asshole if you don't act that way. No, if you lie to people and tell them you'll give them service in exchange for something, they do the something and then you don't give them service, you are definitely an asshole. I'm not a fan of the false dichotomy of "you're either a doormat or you go full-blast lying and making fun of your users". He could just have said "If you want to use the service, please pay for it per day" and that would have been that. > The vast majority of these users were looking for a shady freebie at his expense, gleefully ripping him off Wanting to access WhatsApp is shady? Then I'm shady all the damn day. Also, how were they ripping him off? They were using the service he provided on the terms he provided it, even jumping through pointless hoops of "Tweet/Follow/spam competitors". We decry all those shitty "tweet to jump the queue" tactics, but this guy doing it and laughing at his users makes it okay? > And they did! All these users started following Browserling and tweeting about it. But they still couldn't use Browserling or Whatsapp, it was just a new message in place of "fatal error". If you don't think this is asshole behaviour, we're never going to agree.
Keverw 9y ago
I know this guy. He's not an asshole. But I do think this could of used more research and slightly less trolling. However I think it's pretty funny in a way. Overnight you think your site is being hacked, to be suprised it got popular! So I can see why it would need to be monetized as it was really meant just for web developers. And since web developers are a smaller market than everyone in a entire country trying to use it to use a chat app, it had to scale to cope with the overnight unexpended demand.
joelhaasnoot 9y ago
Honestly, Whatsapp will just find a way to block him. At that point he's got paying customers that won't have service. Let's see how he handles that...
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  Why would Whatsapp block him. On the contrary, he is providing Whatsapp access to all these Indian users of $20 of Jio phones. I believe it is Jio that is blocking access to Whatsapp (maybe Jio wants their customers to use Jio's own messaging app).
  - as1mov 9y ago
    The phone mentioned in the article is a $20 feature phone that runs a fork of FirefoxOS. It's not Jio that's blocking the app, just that it's not available on the platform.
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      From what I can tell, all that Browserling is doing is allowing you to browse as if you were on another browser, and the Indian users are simply wanting to access the Whatsapp web app (https://web.whatsapp.com/ https://web.whatsapp.com/). That must mean that Jio is somehow preventing its users from fully using that webapp. Doesn't matter that there isn't a native Whatsapp app in FirefoxOS.
      - orf 9y ago
        Perhaps Whatsapp web doesn't support the browser on the phone, rather than some conspiracy to block it?
        em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        That's probably it. Still my second point that he is actually helping out Whatsapp stands.
richrichardsson 9y ago
> His final solution Not sure if intentional, but funny either way :)
rqs 9y ago
I Ctrl-F'ed the whole article, the word "fool" only appeared within the sentence: "I throught these attackers were fools". So I think > It starts with author calling his users "fools" for not randomizing useragent Was not very true, given the author previously said: > I thought it was a DDOS attack. I noticed everyone had this weird user agent that said it was a JIO phone. _I throught these attackers were fools_.
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
"unethical and wrong" is subjective. The most successful companies like Facebook and Google have been similarly called "unethical and wrong" for their practices. But alternatively it could be argued that their net utility on humanity is positive. So a lot depends on the definitions of "unethical" and "wrong", and that is a deeper philosophical question.
- rootlocus 9y ago
  > it could be argued that their net utility on humanity is positive It could also be argued that their net utility to humanity is negative: see the issues with social media and echo chambers.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    The pro and con sides could both be argued. That just goes to my original point that "ethical" and "wrong" are subjective determinations here.
godzillabrennus 9y ago
I’ve known this guy for years and he’s far from an asshole. He’s spent years on this business and finally had a break. Its unfortunate he chose to phrase things the way he did but this is a one man band with a hacker as CEO who does PR about as well as an average PR person does full stack development.
- thesmallestcat 9y ago
  Anyone know what happened to the cofounder's involvement? Last mention I found was from 2014, it seems that substack is in Hawaii now doing his own thing.
  - linkmotif 9y ago
    Yeah who owns this nowadays? I can’t imagine the author of this was substack. Though I don’t know the guy...
- rootlocus 9y ago
  > I’ve known this guy for years and he’s far from an asshole. Probably not to his friends. But rofling at masses of indians tweeting on command (fooled into thinking tweeting will unlock a service) is a "dick move".
- ainiriand 9y ago
  I take your word for that, but it is not an excuse to disconnect users/numbers/visits from real human beings. So you see that people in India are using a 20$ phone to use whatsapp with your app and the only thing that comes to your mind is how can you rip them off with a daily subscription that wasn't there before? And a crooked lottery?!?! You need to have a very small amount of empathy to do that.
  - thesmallestcat 9y ago
    A feeble attempt at offsetting the cost of massive server load is not trying to "rip them off."
  - 9y ago
amasad 9y ago
I think some of the things done here are in poor taste but I think overall he's coming out net positive impact on the world. Providing a good service for poor people in India and the Cameroon to communicate.
bsaul 9y ago
Is it really the interesting thing you see in that article ? The moral aspect of it ? Nobody got hurt, nobody got ripped off, the service was provided for free to people that needed it, until he found a proper price. And it will probably give ideas to people on HN to build services for this new market, and get Silicon Valley hipsters interested in cheap phone market. I'm not in SV, but at least that's the effect it had on me. I'm getting more and more allergic to moral hypersensitivity everywhere. The air is becoming unbreathable.
hendi_ 9y ago
^ this. I discovered Browserling just yesterday looking for a replacement for BrowserStack. I planned to hand over my credit card today but saw this blog post on the commute to the office. Thanks, but no. I'll continue looking and make sure to not make business with this guy.
- abhirag 9y ago
  Kindly also read this article before deciding -- [http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-cameroon/ http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-cameroon/]. I know the current article seems a bit tone-deaf but judging him on that alone wouldn't be fair.
  - hendi_ 9y ago
    Thank you. You're right of course, juding him by one article alone isn't fair.
christophilus 9y ago
I think you misread some of it. The bit about trolling / rolling on the floor was definitely in bad taste and indicates either a lack of empathy, or just poor judgement. In the end, though, I think he's done something decent-- providing a way for poor people in India to access a service that they are normally unable to afford. That's a good thing.
masto 9y ago
I think the word is sociopath. He's not necessarily malicious, he just doesn't seem to empathize with other people, they're just autonomous NPCs to him.
pentafon 9y ago
I've worked together with the author of this post. He's the kindest and most helpful person I know. He's a bit of a prankster but definitely not an asshole. See his next post about Cameroon (http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-cameroon/ http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-cameroon/) or donating portion of his revenue to open-source developers (http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-supports-open-source/ http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-supports-open-sourc...).
exadeci 9y ago
There are hundreds of companies letting you using their services for "free" because they resell your informations. He did a silly test to have some fun that didn't force the users. I'm happy for once to read an article that is not heavily edited by marketing to please the sensitive readers but instead gives us the raw reactions of the guy.

2pointsomone 9y ago

Agreed, he is an asshole and this is an unethical way to monetize

l4yao 9y ago
What about his monetization is unethical? Where is the moral conflict?
Pharaoh2 9y ago
What is he supposed to do? His initial reaction when he thought he was under attack was fine and the second reaction was immature and lacked empathy but he was likely facing an unexpected problem that he couldn't figure out how to handle but very soon got on the right track. Those servers and bandwidth aren't free. Bandwidth to tier three countries is actually more expensive. Advertising revenue is basically non-existent for tier three countries, conversion rates and LTV is super low, ltv for the group of user that are using his service for whatsapp will be in the range of 1-5 Rs, ~(1-8 cents). He will eventually have to block these countries again if he can't figure out a way to indirectly monetize these users. Or he will run out of money and the servers go down. The best thing for these users would be if he can figure out a way to make it sustainable, and that means to monetize these users.

ainiriand 9y ago

I was thinking exactly the same thing! He is ripping them off and abusing the users.

l4yao 9y ago

"It starts with author calling his users "fools" for not randomizing useragent" He thought he was getting DDOS'd at first, and his attackers were using one useragent. In which case, they would have been fools. "Then he realize "This is the biggest opportunity ever!"." It __is__ a great opportunity! For the HN audience, a large influx of users is considered a great opportunity. "They are just numbers for him, a viral mob that will do whatever their god tell them to do." There seems to be a lot of negativity around this. I thought it was hilarious. Would there still be outrage if the users were American instead of Indian? "His final solution - more lies and unethical behaviors" I would hardly call it lies or unethical. 1. he isn't obligated to do anything 2. he ultimately delivered a usable product with a paid option to the service. Sounds like any other freemium app or in-app-purchase

lucideer 9y ago
> Would there still be outrage if the users were American instead of Indian? This is exactly the point. There would only be outrage if the users were American. There would not be a positive response here.
intended 9y ago
Let’s try another more illustrative question - what would the reaction be if he were an Indian in India doing that to Indians or doing it to Americans. There would definitely be outrage. As other people have said, he comes across as lacking humanity. Especially as the people using Jio phones would be the kind of people who are not rich or well off. In fairness to the person, he could just be clueless and doesn’t really think of the people trying to use his service as people. Hmm. That makes him sound worse. I know a friend who thinks like that, And Is not a bad person.... I don’t know - this guy comes across as if he doesn’t realize that he is manipulating people less informed and weaker than him like someone orchestrating ants into following sugar.
- soziawa 9y ago
  > As other people have said, he comes across as lacking humanity. Especially as the people using Jio phones would be the kind of people who are not rich or well off. But that doesn't make his server costs go away. And they must own at least another phone otherwise they wouldn't be able to use WhatsApp Web. So they are probably not as poor as you think.

jondubois 9y ago

In the author's defence, it sounds like these users were creating an existential threat to his service by using it in unintended ways. It's kind of expensive for the author to run virtual machines for all these people. Though the author tries to add a positive spin to this, I'm sure that the story is more complicated.

StavrosK 9y ago
I completely fail to understand how that's a defense. Whether you're an asshole or not is exactly defined by your reaction to similar situations. The author talked down to people who wanted to use his service and treated them like toys even after he found out they didn't mean him harm. This post left me with nothing but bad impressions for the author and for Browserling. At some point I wonder whether a middle school bully was writing the post.
- davidsong 9y ago
  I understand that it's corporate etiquette to be a smiling doormat when faced with free riders abusing your services, to politely apologise for not being able to take the pain, but it doesn't mean you're an asshole if you don't act that way. The vast majority of these users were looking for a shady freebie at his expense, gleefully ripping him off and doing so en masse in a way that would destroy his livelihood. They were being more than cheeky and he has a right to treat them the same way. If it were me I'd have had my fun too.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    > but it doesn't mean you're an asshole if you don't act that way. No, if you lie to people and tell them you'll give them service in exchange for something, they do the something and then you don't give them service, you are definitely an asshole. I'm not a fan of the false dichotomy of "you're either a doormat or you go full-blast lying and making fun of your users". He could just have said "If you want to use the service, please pay for it per day" and that would have been that. > The vast majority of these users were looking for a shady freebie at his expense, gleefully ripping him off Wanting to access WhatsApp is shady? Then I'm shady all the damn day. Also, how were they ripping him off? They were using the service he provided on the terms he provided it, even jumping through pointless hoops of "Tweet/Follow/spam competitors". We decry all those shitty "tweet to jump the queue" tactics, but this guy doing it and laughing at his users makes it okay? > And they did! All these users started following Browserling and tweeting about it. But they still couldn't use Browserling or Whatsapp, it was just a new message in place of "fatal error". If you don't think this is asshole behaviour, we're never going to agree.

Keverw 9y ago

I know this guy. He's not an asshole. But I do think this could of used more research and slightly less trolling. However I think it's pretty funny in a way. Overnight you think your site is being hacked, to be suprised it got popular! So I can see why it would need to be monetized as it was really meant just for web developers. And since web developers are a smaller market than everyone in a entire country trying to use it to use a chat app, it had to scale to cope with the overnight unexpended demand.

joelhaasnoot 9y ago

Honestly, Whatsapp will just find a way to block him. At that point he's got paying customers that won't have service. Let's see how he handles that...

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
Why would Whatsapp block him. On the contrary, he is providing Whatsapp access to all these Indian users of $20 of Jio phones. I believe it is Jio that is blocking access to Whatsapp (maybe Jio wants their customers to use Jio's own messaging app).
- as1mov 9y ago
  The phone mentioned in the article is a $20 feature phone that runs a fork of FirefoxOS. It's not Jio that's blocking the app, just that it's not available on the platform.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    From what I can tell, all that Browserling is doing is allowing you to browse as if you were on another browser, and the Indian users are simply wanting to access the Whatsapp web app (https://web.whatsapp.com/ https://web.whatsapp.com/). That must mean that Jio is somehow preventing its users from fully using that webapp. Doesn't matter that there isn't a native Whatsapp app in FirefoxOS.
    - orf 9y ago
      Perhaps Whatsapp web doesn't support the browser on the phone, rather than some conspiracy to block it?
      - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        That's probably it. Still my second point that he is actually helping out Whatsapp stands.

richrichardsson 9y ago

> His final solution Not sure if intentional, but funny either way :)

rqs 9y ago

I Ctrl-F'ed the whole article, the word "fool" only appeared within the sentence: "I throught these attackers were fools". So I think > It starts with author calling his users "fools" for not randomizing useragent Was not very true, given the author previously said: > I thought it was a DDOS attack. I noticed everyone had this weird user agent that said it was a JIO phone. _I throught these attackers were fools_.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

"unethical and wrong" is subjective. The most successful companies like Facebook and Google have been similarly called "unethical and wrong" for their practices. But alternatively it could be argued that their net utility on humanity is positive. So a lot depends on the definitions of "unethical" and "wrong", and that is a deeper philosophical question.

rootlocus 9y ago
> it could be argued that their net utility on humanity is positive It could also be argued that their net utility to humanity is negative: see the issues with social media and echo chambers.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  The pro and con sides could both be argued. That just goes to my original point that "ethical" and "wrong" are subjective determinations here.

godzillabrennus 9y ago

I’ve known this guy for years and he’s far from an asshole. He’s spent years on this business and finally had a break. Its unfortunate he chose to phrase things the way he did but this is a one man band with a hacker as CEO who does PR about as well as an average PR person does full stack development.

thesmallestcat 9y ago
Anyone know what happened to the cofounder's involvement? Last mention I found was from 2014, it seems that substack is in Hawaii now doing his own thing.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  Yeah who owns this nowadays? I can’t imagine the author of this was substack. Though I don’t know the guy...
rootlocus 9y ago
> I’ve known this guy for years and he’s far from an asshole. Probably not to his friends. But rofling at masses of indians tweeting on command (fooled into thinking tweeting will unlock a service) is a "dick move".
ainiriand 9y ago
I take your word for that, but it is not an excuse to disconnect users/numbers/visits from real human beings. So you see that people in India are using a 20$ phone to use whatsapp with your app and the only thing that comes to your mind is how can you rip them off with a daily subscription that wasn't there before? And a crooked lottery?!?! You need to have a very small amount of empathy to do that.
- thesmallestcat 9y ago
  A feeble attempt at offsetting the cost of massive server load is not trying to "rip them off."
- 9y ago

amasad 9y ago

I think some of the things done here are in poor taste but I think overall he's coming out net positive impact on the world. Providing a good service for poor people in India and the Cameroon to communicate.

bsaul 9y ago

Is it really the interesting thing you see in that article ? The moral aspect of it ? Nobody got hurt, nobody got ripped off, the service was provided for free to people that needed it, until he found a proper price. And it will probably give ideas to people on HN to build services for this new market, and get Silicon Valley hipsters interested in cheap phone market. I'm not in SV, but at least that's the effect it had on me. I'm getting more and more allergic to moral hypersensitivity everywhere. The air is becoming unbreathable.

hendi_ 9y ago

^ this. I discovered Browserling just yesterday looking for a replacement for BrowserStack. I planned to hand over my credit card today but saw this blog post on the commute to the office. Thanks, but no. I'll continue looking and make sure to not make business with this guy.

abhirag 9y ago
Kindly also read this article before deciding -- [http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-cameroon/ http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-cameroon/]. I know the current article seems a bit tone-deaf but judging him on that alone wouldn't be fair.
- hendi_ 9y ago
  Thank you. You're right of course, juding him by one article alone isn't fair.

christophilus 9y ago

I think you misread some of it. The bit about trolling / rolling on the floor was definitely in bad taste and indicates either a lack of empathy, or just poor judgement. In the end, though, I think he's done something decent-- providing a way for poor people in India to access a service that they are normally unable to afford. That's a good thing.

masto 9y ago

I think the word is sociopath. He's not necessarily malicious, he just doesn't seem to empathize with other people, they're just autonomous NPCs to him.

pentafon 9y ago

I've worked together with the author of this post. He's the kindest and most helpful person I know. He's a bit of a prankster but definitely not an asshole. See his next post about Cameroon (http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-cameroon/ http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-cameroon/) or donating portion of his revenue to open-source developers (http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-supports-open-source/ http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-supports-open-sourc...).

exadeci 9y ago

There are hundreds of companies letting you using their services for "free" because they resell your informations. He did a silly test to have some fun that didn't force the users. I'm happy for once to read an article that is not heavily edited by marketing to please the sensitive readers but instead gives us the raw reactions of the guy.