Comment by CryoLogic
6 years ago
Something very similar happened to me.
When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month).
I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects.
I took to it to build a JS library that converted links to affiliate links, for example amazon and some other small retailers I had used.
Basically you just parse any URL you embed in the page with this library and it would convert the existing (non-affiliate) links to affiliate links with your signature attached so you got a revenue share.
In addition to this, I had done research on Reddit's traffics and crawled reddit to see how many affiliate-capable links existed. I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.
--> I was rejected after the interview, but a couple months later Reddit announced it was experimenting with a new feature that would re-write links as affiliate. They ended up implementing this feature that I am 95% sure I came up with and someone else stole.
It was one of the shittiest experiences I have ever had interviewing, especially since I didn't get a job out of it but I believe they have made millions off of this idea so far.
I huge put off, but I've learned since then backstabbing and stealing ideas is a big part of politics in most corporations. What a bummer.
Prior art VigLink (2010): https://techcrunch.com/2010/01/12/viglink-affiliate-programs...
Reddit partners with VigLink (2016): https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/announcements/...
Hope this helps you move on.
On the specific idea: The idea is not unique, and really low hanging fruit for a mass site.
Agreed. Not sure how long ago your interview was, but I remember seeing plug & play services that would add affiliate codes to links of any site via a JS snippet even 10 years ago. A friend who ran a blog network used it.
At the time, I could not find a single social media site that was using link-rewriting to make affiliate money.
Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it.
The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and ran with it. I had done a lot of research into how much money Reddit would make off of this and how to implement it at scale without breaking existing affiliate links and such.
I had literally planned it as my pitch for what I wanted to work on and why they should hire me.
I believe you independently derived a very old, but lurcrative, idea. Kontera started off back in 2003 although I don't recall when they actually got to double-underline links. Viglink has been doing this more subtly as a commercial service since 2009, and AOL actually had a flavor of this built into Instant Messenger. There were also a number of affiliate networks that built this infrastructure to parse the Commission Junction offers database and update their networks with match/near-match products & services.
We did that at Bagcheck in 2010. It was super common. They may have taken your idea and ran with it but it wasn't a novel idea. Generally though, at scale, you run into problems with the affiliate programs and they cut you off.
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Not sure if it helps, but - sometimes the time is just right for some ideas and they crop all over the place. While it may seem to you it was your idea, they could have been working on it for days / months / years... I agree it sucks for you not to be able to know that though.
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Metafilter has had it for, oh, looks like almost 13 years:
https://metatalk.metafilter.com/11174/Im-proposing-a-small-c...
Think of it from another angle: You're interviewing this guy that has this idea that would be hugely rewarding for you with a payout of n% if you proposed it via the internal idea program. No one will notice. Or hire that guy and leave that to him.
I worked for a medium-sized community that did this in 2009, I think. At the time, I don't remember it being novel.
they did have examples of individual contributors doing it, and had been wishy washy on who should benefit from affiliate links for a long time prior
Here's my HN submission of a demo I wrote of something in the same space back in 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908283
It wasn't a new idea then either. The founder of VigLink reached out to me then to share what they were working on.
It's not just corporations, it's companies and individuals in general. It has happened to me a lot.
Ironically, making my stuff open source has cut down a lot on that. (Github leaves a clear provenance trail.)
This is not a new idea, and Reddit would have tried it eventually. Giving up your ideas during a job interview is also pretty stupid. If you had a "$2 million month" idea, would you have been happy no matter what they paid you?
> I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.
Obviously I don't know how the rest of the interview went, but the way you put it in the retelling makes it sound a lot like it was distracting from all the other reasons to hire you.
"How about that two million guy?" - "We hire developers, not libraries"
It might have been that they not only picked up the idea from the interview, but on top of that also did not hire you because of misplaced conditions. If that part came over more like "you can't if you don't", then it would be seen as a challenge: "sure we can". I think that just telling them that you have previously worked on link monetization and wrote a library about it would have been a much better interview strategy than dangling some made up number in front of their faces. As an interviewer I would fear that a candidate arguing like that would be prone to taking their regular salary as granted and renegotiate something on top for every quantifiable contribution.
Oh god forbid an potential employee feels he has some power in this transaction.
The power a candidate has and should be aware of is walking away, not withholding a trivial js library. Feeling powerful for demonstrably wrong reasons will put you in a terrible light.
Alternatively maybe they had been working on the idea for awhile and it was just a coincidence. Bringing an idea to the table that they were already working on might also hurt your chances of getting a job there.
Why would that hurt your chances? Wouldn't they see that as a good thing?
In addition to what others have said, Reddit abandoned the idea of skimming affiliates shortly after announcing the plan. They have certainly not made millions.
Really sorry to hear that. I understood patenting can be a pain and takes an inventor to get it done, but it seems like the thieves are more interested in getting patented than the inventors themselves.
I guess the best thing for you to do it in such a situation is to open source it so the whole community can benefit from it, not just one big evil company that steals ideas. At least you'd go down as a hero.