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I agree with the general point of this, but disagree on the tone and the implications. The main thrust here seems to be "everyone lies, get over it", which see

I agree with the general point of this, but disagree on the tone and the implications. The main thrust here seems to be "everyone lies, get over it", which seems counterproductive. There also seems to be some equivocation over, say, using a true but empty metric to promote your business... and photoshopping yourself into a picture with a celeb, or falsely claiming to be an employee of a company. These things are both fibs, but one is IMO much, much greater in magnitude than the other. We're all used to people being overly optimistic and deliberately withholding damaging info, but we're not used to outright fraud at this level. Imagine if a startup claimed to have indexed billions of user contacts (as pointless of a number as it may be) but in fact has indexed only hundreds - all of which from the founders' own phones. This is the severity of fraud we're talking about.

larrys 14y ago
Using a "using a true but empty metric to promote your business" is more like being creative in that the reader, if careful, should be able to spot the bullshit. The same as when you read product labels or any advertising copy. I've seen web hosting companies refer to their hard disk space as "premium" storage or with other adjectives to make it appear as if you are getting something which is better than an ordinary seagate server grade hard drives (as if some server company is going to use consumer grade drives). Colo companies talk extensively about biometric security at their facilities (note if your stuff is that important that you care about that you should probably go onsite and verify it, right?). So what the startups are really doing is just what ad agencies have done for decades. They are using words to sell their product in a creative way.