Mafia Wars CEO Brags About Scamming Users

jamie writes with a follow-up to our recent discussion of social gaming scams: "Mark Pincus, CEO of the company that brought us Mafia Wars, says: 'I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues right away. I mean, we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar, which was like, I don't know... I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it.'" TechCrunch also ran a interesting tell-all from the CEO of a company specializing in Facebook advertisements, who provided some details on similarly shady operations at the popular social networking site.

Comments

Re:And he likes that he did this...

[sopssa]

I don't place mafia wars and my facebook isn't hidden from any facebook user. Why? Because aside from my first name, no other info on there is real .. oh, except that I'm single. That should be a given seeing as I'm posting here.

So basically you're just trying to find a date from Facebook? I hope you have as much luck as this guy.

A British man has been tagged "The Sperminator" for getting 12 girls pregnant after wooing them on social networking site Facebook. Five women are now raising his kids, five were talked into abortions and two are expecting. For years, love rat Dominic Baronet secretly preyed on women with his smooth Internet patter.

When the girls started talking, they realised he’d impregnated them both on the same night. "Dominic should be banned from Facebook. He uses it to juggle scores of girls.

"We call him the Sperminator as he just goes around getting girls pregnant and doesn’t ever think about the consequences," she added.

Re:Blaming "greed" accomplishes what?

[Alex Belits]

First, maturity is realizing that not everyone who disagrees with you is a "fuckhead".

No, it's realization that some people are in fact fuckheads.

Greed isn't deviant. In fact, it's rather common, and to some degree, universal.

Most of deviant behavior is rather common and universal, just significantly less common than mainstream and recognized as such.

Most people do not exhibit a compulsion to rip off their fellow humans without having their life and health threatened, or being placed in other equally dire circumstances. People like the above mentioned businessmen, do, and their lackeys (a.k.a. fuckheads) spread propaganda trying to convince others (sane people) that such behavior is "natural".

What we call "greed" is just the manifestation of game theory.

Game theory does not describe a society.

When all is well, we all get along in a state of enlightened self-interest

Wow. Just wow.

where our self-interest and collective interest balance. But aggressive players can disrupt the game and at least temporarily benefit. Sometimes the gain really is short-term, and the society (system) settles back into a stable state. Other times, a new equilibrium is achieved. In human terms, that new equilibrium usually isn't desirable, and even the aggressors end up worse off. (To pick an example: who did the Trojan War benefit, exactly?)

More often than not such "balance" was achieved over many decades by society being nearly wiped out, and new generation adopting less idiotic ideas. Later it was achieved by being conquered and enslaved by less collectively stupid neighbors, having a bloody revolt, etc. At this point in history, I think, we are at the point when public humiliation of fuckheads is becoming sufficient to avert a disaster (or preventing it from spreading outside US).

Re:Blaming "greed" accomplishes what?

[cthulu_mt]

Most of deviant behavior is rather common and universal, just significantly less common than mainstream and recognized as such.

Your definition of deviant seems to contradict itself.

Oh wait, you mean "deviant" as things you don't like or disagree with.