Headline is misleading. There's no problem posting reviews of your own products, as long as you identify yourself as being affiliated with the company. Posting ratings, on the other hand, is always unethical since they forcibly affect the average rating.
Shocking!<p>btw, you should really check out submissions and comments by raghus here on news.yc - he's really insightful.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=raghus" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=raghus</a>
Reviews for startups have always been extremely artificial. In an ideal world, users would be very vocal about what they like and don't like. Surprise, they're usually NOT!<p>Techcrunch in particular is a traditional publicity channel that gets most of its information through heavily biased sources such as press releases, friends, etc. instead of directly from the users. This is why I find it hilarious that techcrunch should be the ones to call them out on producing biased information.<p>Then again, Arrington has been working to discover sites as a user through hn for example, so he may be doing a small part to correct this wrong.
I see nothing wrong with this. You'd be surprised at some of the stuff startups have to do to get out there and get initial traction, not limited to spam and "faking it till you make it".<p>The only thing that surprises me is that they were putting up fake reviews so late into the game. The benefits weren't that great at that point, and the risks at least mediocre. It just looks like laziness, if anything. Maybe they wanted to artificially stimulate some growth prior to that new funding round and possibly trying to get acquired, and fake reviews are just one of many methods used at once.
here is another related link:<p>Web 2.0 And Why You Shouldn't Fake Reviews
<a href="http://www.anyarticle.net/Article/Web-2-0-And-Why-You-Shouldn-t-Fake-Reviews/97539" rel="nofollow">http://www.anyarticle.net/Article/Web-2-0-And-Why-You-Should...</a>
!Not a good sign at all, this undermines the product regardless of anyones actual opinion. I personally don't think slide is anything special, a simple flash widget. The likes of which I have seen better examples made by single independent coders in there bedrooms with no fanfare whatsoever, is this really the best idea Paypal X could come up with?<p>>>>>>It just goes to show that great ideas ARE worth a lot more than great execution!