I’ll go David’s complaint about Multiply one better. Multiply are spammers, and should be treated as such, as should every other service that uses their tactics.

Imagine that you were offered pills that promised to expand the length and diameter of your fingers, and you wanted some. (Maybe you’re a concert pianist or something — I actually don’t want to know the sordid details…) Now imagine that you could get the first month’s pills for free, if you just uploaded your entire address book and gave the pill manufacturer permission to make the same offer to everyone listed there, in email sent out under your name. Would you do it? Because that is what you are doing if you use Multiply.

Here is what is happening: anyone launching a new YASNS has to work much harder to get users than in the old days, because the concept is so well established now. Furthermore, the existence of a social profile elsewhere means nothing to Multiply. Therefore they have every incentive to spam non-users mercilessly, because if they can wear them down until they join, great, and if they never join, who cares?

But Multiply are not ordinary spammers, since they have the email addresses of your friends, and permission to use them. When Jenna NoLastname writes me saying “Want to meet you!”, my spam filter handles it, but when mail from my friend Schmendrick J. Subramanian shows up, my spam filter lets it through, because I’ve known Schmend since Back In The Day.

Problem is, it isn’t Schmendrick writing me, but instead some commercial outfit in Boca Raton using his name. The rationale, of course, is that they are contacting me on his behalf, except that he has not affirmatively asked them to contact me, he has just uploaded an address book and clicked the box that says “We can spam your friends.”

And, as an added flavor bonus, when my colleague Mohammed von Dusseldorf uploads his contact list, Multiply will spam me, and when my ex-girlfriend Wilhelmina-Esperenza Ng does, Multiply will spam me again, and so on, because as long as I am not a member, they have no reason not to spam me, and every reason to believe their messages are getting through, since they have explicit permission to bypass my spam filters. Unfortunately, the permission does not come from me, but from my friends. (Time to make those little quote marks in the air.)

Stowe Boyd said something chilling after he spammed a lot of us via ZeroDegrees: “It is interesting to see how many positive responses this has led to, however. At least 30 people have signed up to Zero Degrees as a result of the invitations, so far.” The problem with spam isn’t that it’s ineffective, it’s that it’s effective.

Consider how easy it would be to design a polite service. Multiply could simply watch outbound mail and say “We’ve hit that Shirky guy 5 times now — guess he’s not in. Let’s stop sending him mail.” They will never do this, though, because they don’t care how much people who don’t join hate them. The fact that they are making many people’s lives worse is what economists call a negative externality — the adverse effects are felt in the world, but do not show up on Multiply’s bottom line, because, per Stowe’s comments, all the owners care about is how many people said yes, not how many people said “I hate you.”

The canonical example of a negative externality is pollution — if spilling effluvient into the nearest river costs me nothing, so what if it kills all the fish. That’s certainly cheaper than installing filters, now isn’t it? Multiply is social pollution, and the environment it’s polluting — my willingness to assume mail from friends and business contacts is likely to be of value — is exactly the environment that social services require. In the long term, they are fouling their own nest.

But they don’t care about the long term, they only care about getting more members now now now. Fortunately, the subject header of the mail always has the non-common word Multiply, so those messages are easy to flag as the spam they are. Better, though a bit more work, is to write everyone who gives Multiply permission to spam you and ask to get them to take your name out of the Multiply db. It won’t keep Multiply from spamming in the short term, but it may hasten the day when your friends stop granting permission to spammers to use their name to reach you.