I respect the time, effort, and engineering the author put in. But this sort of thing largely just makes me feel gross.<p>We’re moving towards an Internet that’s just one never ending loop of regurgitated spam. Call me naive, but I wish people wielding these skills felt more responsibility to be good citizens of the Internet, rather than spamming cyclical stolen content and “growth hacking” their way to followers by manipulating social networks. The Internet is in no way, shape or form, pure. But I do wish we would stop treating fellow users (humans) as play things just to get a free dinner.<p>Is it just because I grew up on the Internet starting 20+ years ago that I’m hyper sensitive to spam?
I find this fairly repugnant.<p>In the same way that dumpster diving also gets you free food - but you are essentially a parasite, living on the waste of others. At least with the dumpster diving, the relationship is clear.<p>He generates literally nothing of value here - everything is stolen from others.<p>I truly hope we end up with the same social aversions to things like this that we do for other taboo social activities.
This is simultaneously both a cool project and a depressingly complete waste of human potential to create and consume via that demon scroll of mindless consumption that is Instagram…
As far as I can tell, based on him saying he doesn't ever log into the account he's just flat out lying to these restaurants when he says he will exchange a review on his IG for a free entre
Leveraging social currency to obtain free food? I hate to break it to this guy, but women have already found a way to automate this process far more efficiently.
> The beauty of this all is that I automated the whole thing. And I mean 100% of it. I wrote code that finds these pictures or videos, makes a caption, adds hashtags, credits where the picture or video comes from, weeds out bad or spammy posts, posts them, follows and unfollows users, likes pictures, monitors my inbox, and most importantly — both direct messages and emails restaurants about a potential promotion. Since its inception, I haven’t even really logged into the account. I spend zero time on it. It’s essentially a robot that operates like a human, but the average viewer can’t tell the difference. And as the programmer, I get to sit back and admire its (and my) work.<p>It'd be funny if the views and likes are also from bots. As well as there being a bot that algorithmically judge promotion solicitations from "influencers" and automatically dispenses the free meal from their advertising budget (is it really just a free meal?). Makes me want to write a short story (I wish I had movie making talents for a short movie) where social media bots keep reposting content and sending heart emojis to each other after the future where Putin's nukes killed us all (too soon?).
This guy lists himself as an entrepreneur, founder of a website that apparently sells influencer marketing. Given he has the skills to do something like this, why not just use those skills to get a job that pays you enough to buy food? If he insists on owning his own business, choose an industry sector where founders don't need to scam local restaurants to stay alive.<p>The scheme also seems doomed in that I'm hoping the restaurants aren't stupid enough to fall for it twice from the same account. At some point, he's going to run out of places close to him he can still get free food from and be forced to drive into Jersey, costing him more in wasted time, gas, and tolls than he would have spent just buying food.
I’m curious why this form of piracy is praised and encouraged by so many people, but when people sell DVDs on the street the police drag them away. At least the guy on the street adds value to the person buying the DVD. This guy is just inserting himself as a valueless middleman between the original poster and the viewer.
this is a significantly less criminal version of bruting gift card checking pages, which was both very doable and popular ~5-10 years ago.
the cards themselves had something like 16 characters, but only the last 4 would be variable at any time -- with a couple proxies, you could successfully catch codes after they were activated but before they were redeemed. I'm not sure there was any recourse for the party that was inevitably unable to redeem the gift card they had bought.
Person creates website with some content. Person verifiably has 25k people looking at it at least sometimes. Restaurants give him a meal in exchange for ad space(sponsored review).<p>Other than further polluting the new web with fake bullshit content, there doesn't seem to be anything immoral about it. It just "feels" a bit scummy. But hey, a man's gotta eat.