It is an amazing way and very growth-hackish (in the true way, not just marketing rebranded). As a long-term HN visitor, I really enjoyed the writeup and I'm not surprised at all it's in the front-page of HN.
What's more: he concludes with "P.S. I am out again looking for new opportunities". So besides being excellent at putting his work in front of his target audience, he may go 2 for 2 on the job front.
Chris got Steve's attention but never worked at reddit[1], Nina got Brian's attention[2] but never worked at Airbnb[3] and Feross got Chad's attention[4] but never worked at YouTube[5] even though TechCrunch jumped to report he accepted the job[6].
not sure what to make of it to be honest. they showed resourcefulness, which is good. but there's more to being a good employee at that. esp at a startup beyond a certain scale.
Just makes it more expensive! How much would you pay for your dream job or a new lead? A few hundred or thousand dollars would be chump change to a lot of people.
If you have an infinite budget, I could 'target' you by purchasing every ad on the internet with the copy "hi bawana, click this link!"
Nearly every impression would be seen by the wrong person, but a few of the impressions would be seen by you.
The rest of the exercise is figuring out how to segment the audience based on whether it's likely/unlikely that you're in the segment. If I know you're from the US and live in California, I can geo-target to that region.
modem ad technology can do it... your mastercard and visa purchase behavior, for example, is available for purchase. That data can be merged with other purchased data, and things like aggregated browsing behavior. This is all done to serve people who may be in my target audience with (semi) personalized ads. The ad may not appeal to you, so it gets classified as spam.
There was an article on HN of a writeup from someone that pulled this off recently. I think the post was probably someone in the neighborhood of 4-6 months ago.
I don't recall the company or the person that was targeted though.
Mobile apps and some mobile browsers don't support ad block.
While I have ublock on my laptop, i still get ads when I am on my phone which ironically is where these companies get most of their revenue these days.
If you have a Raspberry Pi, look into using Pi-hole[1]. It provides network-wide blocking when installed on your home network by proxying requests. I also use AdGuard Pro[2], which provides a similar function when I'm outside my home network. Both happen to be open source software[3][4], so that's a plus.
> Not for iOS though, atleast without a jailbreak.
If you have persistence, no jailbreak is needed. Would require you to binary patch the executable then resign the binary using your own Apple Dev account. Far from trivial, but still doable and without Jailbreaking.
if you have android you can get Netguard from github [0]. Its from the Xprivacy dev; functions as a firewall (VPN), w/o root. The github version supports ability to load Hosts file that can block domains (ads) - like the hosts files used by Ublock. This generally blocks ads across the OS. iOs should have something similar.
The goal of NetGuard is to function as a Firewall to limit apps ability to phone home without consent. The host file feature will block most in-app advertising and provide some protection for web browsing. Ads within facebook can be blocked using custom host filed within Ublock/Umatrix. I dont know about ad-blocking within the FB app itself.
Generally, you should be using Firefox, not Chrome, with Ublock and/or Umatrix installed to maintain control of your web experience. FB web interface can be used and ads generally blocked. Reddit's native ads are served directly via first party URLs so it is tuff to block. Reddit's made changes for the advertisers and their new UI is meant to popularize Native ads.
The necessary knowledge about the existence of content blockers as well as the technological literacy to set them up is probably a given.
He also probably has a high value attached to his attention, given that he is in quite a power position. This, I'd argue, would make a greater reflection of media habits more likely.
Additionally there might be the security/privacy aspect. Executives should really focus on security as their devices might be of greater value than your average grandmother's Scrabble tablet.
However I think that it is not very speculative to say that, if more people knew about content blocking, more people would block unwanted content. My intention behind assuming his knowledge/competence was only meant to exclude nescience from the list of potential reasons for him to not block content.
Personally I'm thinking that since he's the CEO of a company which monetizes on ads it could be that he wants to follow ad trends, see what's going on in the ad space, what other people are advertising etc.
I didn't end up working for Reddit. I wanted the head of search position that was open, but they thought I didn't have enough experience. We talked about an IC role, but I would have had to move to the SF area (I live in DC) as they didn't allow remote employees. I couldn't justify uprooting my family (wife and 3 little kids) to move to a more expensive part of the country for less money than I can make in DC, even with the promising stock options. It was a hard decision. Still don't know if it was right one.
(For the sake of full disclosure, I was never extended an offer, we decided to break talks prior to that stage based on the salary/location discussions)
How many years have you been at this? How do/did you learn the more architectural problem solving skills? I ask because I am pretty skilled technically, but only down in the weeds. Reading your blog post about the two techniques and how to combine them, I can understand, but I would not come up with this myself.
Nearly 20 years. I learned by attempting to do things that were kind of ridiculous. Like building a large scale general web search engine with hundreds of millions of pages (that was a lot in 2004) using 30+ servers in my townhouse. Go build something ambitious and you will learn how to put it all together!
Individual contributor can still be management, but in this case the position often means others matrix and not directly report ib to you. Influence, threat, or use magic wands to get things done.
Is it just me or do conversations he posted between him and his roommate seem a little off... They just don't read like any natural conversation I've ever had or have seen, and I'm not sure people naturally talk like that.
The subtlety of a normal conversation might have been lost due to the writer's poor writing skills. This is just a speculation though as I have faced similar problems in jotting down my views.
I did this with the CEO of Breather. Back then, you could target based off of employer, job description, school, and interests. You could also make these target options mutually exclusive—which, in the case of Breather CEO Julien Smith—meant an audience of 1.
My unlisted Medium post got 1 read. Felt like a damn king when it worked. Cost me (I shit you not) 20 cents to pull off.
Epilogue: I quoted him too high, and didn't get the job. Oh well. Still one of my best stunts ;)
I feel like Chris Soghoian (or maybe Ashkan Soltani) also did this in the same timeframe with Google executives when he wanted to lobby them individually about policy issues—but I didn't immediately find a reference to it. (But I think it was the same method, like targeting attorneys at Google who had a certain combination of almae matres.)
Somewhat related: Since a few weeks I'm regularly getting a Facebook ad with the title "I want to work at [company name]. Can you help?" from someone who seems to be interested in a job at the company at which I'm working.
There have been a good few of stories of people trying to get jobs, internships, client meetings with clever hack like this. I don't why this hit the front page.
Related to your story, it's either this person really wants to work for your company or you're part of a huge bigger list of employees whose company the person wants to work for. So the person might have just lumped your company with the others in the ad targeting set up.
The cost should also account for the work put in and the years of experience and know how to pull it off. It cost you $10, but it would cost me several hundreds or even thousands to pay experts to do it for me.
How is that relevant? When calculating my home's value should I add the cost of my college tuition? I wouldn't have my job without my degree, and I wouldn't have my house without my job.
> [Hacker News] is an amazing community, built off an early version of Reddit, and run by Y-Combinator (which incubated Reddit way back when)
I just scanned wikipedia, first version of reddit was from 2005, and first version of hacker news was 2007.
I always thought PG wrote the code for Hacker News, does that imply that PG helped write the first (Lisp) version of reddit before Aaron Swartz rewrote reddit in Python?
107 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] thread> What about getting my article to the top of Hacker News?
> The problem is, I didn’t think my article would be interesting enough to a large crowd to make it to the top of HN.
Ha! He not only played Reddit's CEO with a Facebook ad…
He also got his blog post into the HN top-ten (today).
Well done my friend, well done.
Yes, you can buy upvotes on Reddit. It's about 5 bucks for a couple hundred, often more than enough to get to the front page of mid sized subreddit.
None of them was actually ever offered one.
Make what you want of it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17110763
[2] https://twitter.com/bchesky/status/590561521576587265
[3] https://eatwritewalk.com/2015/07/14/the-good-the-bad-and-the...
[4] https://twitter.com/chad_hurley/status/24129459657
[5] https://www.quora.com/Why-would-Feross-Aboukhadijeh-turn-dow...
[6] https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/24/youtube-instant-instant/
I don’t think there was one.
I might be wrong tough and Feross is around here. If he’d want to clarify I’m sure he can. So can Chad, btw.
But it’s been almost 8 years, so...
plus, a blog on tumblr?
Might have to try myself someday
Nearly every impression would be seen by the wrong person, but a few of the impressions would be seen by you.
The rest of the exercise is figuring out how to segment the audience based on whether it's likely/unlikely that you're in the segment. If I know you're from the US and live in California, I can geo-target to that region.
I don't recall the company or the person that was targeted though.
Thanks,
j
I have a lot of mixed feelings about it but at the end of the day I don't think they earned a good reputation with the stunt.
I believe you can filter down to “works at X company” in the ad targeting. It’s possible they did some sort of other broader targeting, though.
While I have ublock on my laptop, i still get ads when I am on my phone which ironically is where these companies get most of their revenue these days.
[1]: https://pi-hole.net/
[2]: https://adguard.com/en/adguard-ios-pro/overview.html
[3]: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole
[4]: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardForiOS
Even if you install a root cert to MITM, some apps pin certs.
If you have persistence, no jailbreak is needed. Would require you to binary patch the executable then resign the binary using your own Apple Dev account. Far from trivial, but still doable and without Jailbreaking.
https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard/releases
Generally, you should be using Firefox, not Chrome, with Ublock and/or Umatrix installed to maintain control of your web experience. FB web interface can be used and ads generally blocked. Reddit's native ads are served directly via first party URLs so it is tuff to block. Reddit's made changes for the advertisers and their new UI is meant to popularize Native ads.
He is the CEO of a technology company.
The necessary knowledge about the existence of content blockers as well as the technological literacy to set them up is probably a given.
He also probably has a high value attached to his attention, given that he is in quite a power position. This, I'd argue, would make a greater reflection of media habits more likely.
Additionally there might be the security/privacy aspect. Executives should really focus on security as their devices might be of greater value than your average grandmother's Scrabble tablet.
However I think that it is not very speculative to say that, if more people knew about content blocking, more people would block unwanted content. My intention behind assuming his knowledge/competence was only meant to exclude nescience from the list of potential reasons for him to not block content.
Personally I'm thinking that since he's the CEO of a company which monetizes on ads it could be that he wants to follow ad trends, see what's going on in the ad space, what other people are advertising etc.
(For the sake of full disclosure, I was never extended an offer, we decided to break talks prior to that stage based on the salary/location discussions)
My unlisted Medium post got 1 read. Felt like a damn king when it worked. Cost me (I shit you not) 20 cents to pull off.
Epilogue: I quoted him too high, and didn't get the job. Oh well. Still one of my best stunts ;)
Anyone else who noticed similar ads?
Related to your story, it's either this person really wants to work for your company or you're part of a huge bigger list of employees whose company the person wants to work for. So the person might have just lumped your company with the others in the ad targeting set up.
http://www.justmediadesign.com.au/experiments/facebook-ad-pr...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-oliver-donald-trum...
[1] All the Kremlin's Men by Mikhail Zygar
https://gist.github.com/jwilk/3f0d80740f72c5ac0e2a4ae8790b9a...
https://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000
I just scanned wikipedia, first version of reddit was from 2005, and first version of hacker news was 2007.
I always thought PG wrote the code for Hacker News, does that imply that PG helped write the first (Lisp) version of reddit before Aaron Swartz rewrote reddit in Python?