Tutorial: How to piss off a friend by refusing illegal activity

The story of how I am not friends with a certain someone by refusing to do something illegal. Oh welp, how do I even start LoL, buckle up 'cuz it is both a fun and wild ride.

Characters

There are two characters only. One is me, and the other we shall call Svetlana.
Svetlana is an aspirational UI/UX designer and actually, she is interested in some other creative fields as well like making 3D models with Blender. That should be enough for an introduction.

Tutorial Starts Here

So, after meeting Svetlana on a Discord server about UI designing, I shoot her a DM asking if she is open to collab on projects. By collab, what I mean is that I am a dev & she is a designer so we both will pitch each other app ideas and work on them together (for free) to bring our apps to life, and split the profit if we make any.

She was happy to hear that as it was a good opportunity for the both of us and she was down to collab so, we started exchanging ideas. I pitched mine first and I believe it was brainiacs.in and she didn't dislike it but wanted us to work on her idea first. That wasn't a red flag but what she pitched next was.

The Illegal Robinhood App

She pitched an app idea where the users can watch ads and earn money.

Those who know how ads, licenses or ToS works can guess how terrible of an idea this is and for those who do not, do not worry. I will explain, with morals, maths and everything how bad this idea really is.

Coming back to Svetlana, she told me that she wanted to bring this app to life to help the needy or something. I asked Svetlana if she had read the ToS of Google ads. She said no which I had expected of course, and I started telling her how we cannot legally do that.

I send her the exact section of the ToS which prevented us from doing that and told her how we may get sued if we make the app she just pitched. BTW, in writing, it is just 2-3 lines but it took good 5-10 minutes to find and explain everything. After hearing that, she was sad & upset which is to be expected from any creator when their idea(s) die in front of them.

5 Stages of Grief (or maybe only 3?)

Guess how Svetlana reacted or what she did next? That dum b*itch asked an AI to justify that making her illegal app idea. (To those who are upset by my choice of words, I am not trying to character assassinate her. You will see why I chose the words I did).

LLMs are dum-dum but she was dumber

Look, being upset & angry in her position is totally understandable, and I tried giving her some space too but well, her denial, anger & bargaining all came at once. First, she asked an AI and you know how LLM answers in a way to feed into your confirmation bias. For example, if you ask any LLM whether it is justified to drink alcohol, then it will say yes and it will give you a few reasons to why it is okay, and if you ask how the same LLM whether it is not justified to drink alcohol, then this time it may say no and will give you a few reasons why drinking alcohol is never good.

BUT in Svetlana's case, even though the LLM fed into the confirmation bias and told her what she wanted to hear, the LLM still told her that she could get sued for making that app as it is is illegal.

Anger and Bargaining and that's it?

Well, she hadn't read that even the LLM says the idea is illegal part LoL. She just sent me the screenshot of the AI telling her whatever and I actually pointed out that the section where the LLM had said that it violated blah blah and what not. Anyways, how did she react to that? By saying f*uck the law and that she wants to be like Robinhood. She did really say both those things. I am not making anything up.

The Ethics & Mathematics of how the idea is both terrible & illegal

Well, since she only cared about the moral and ethics part of helping the needy or however she had put it like, I started to tell her why it is both morally and ethically wrong too.

Morally & Ethically

I haven't read Robinhood but according to everything I have heard (and after ignoring the criminal part like where his bandit group will kill people & stuff), Robinhood would rob the rich and donate to the poor. Is that okay to do? For the benefit of the doubt, let's say yes. However, for Svetlana's case, she isn't really robbing the rich. She is robbing the poor too!

Look, not only rich businesses put up ads for their services. Small local businesses and independent creators do too. They work their butts off and save a little to invest on ads dreaming to expand their horizon and what would an app that will basically eat ads do? Hurt their investments and their dreams! I know this 'cuz back then, I was helping out a cousin put ads for some service he was planning to start.

I guess it was easy for Svetlana to ignore all the hundreds of thousands of small business owners and independent creators who spend on that. I am not suggesting that robbing rich mega corporations is a good thing either. That is equally as bad too but putting that aside, what do you think? Is the app idea still justified? Not to forget that we can get sued anytime and other legal complications that still remain.

Maths behind the investment

Enough chit chat. Let's crunch down some numbers now. Time to use my beloved math skills :)

BTW, I am not an expert on ads or anything. But according to my understanding, the way Google ads work is that you first upload your ads to Google and spend however much you want to, and then Google will promote them at the places they feel relevant for example on websites which uses AdSense or on YouTube videos, and the respective owners of those websites or YouTube channels gets some money from what the ad publisher had invested.

I am not sure about the exact ratio of how much Google's Ads services keep and how much they pays to the ad promoters (websites, YouTube channels, etc.). The ratio could be 90-10 (where Google Ads keep 90% of the money and pays the promoters 10% only) or 60-40 or anything. Let's go with 60-40 for now.

In that case, if the app were to exist with say 5000 active users, then:

• For every $1000 invested by an ad publisher
• The host company like Google will take $600 (since it's 60-40 ratio)
• The remaining $400 that the app earns will be split among 5000 users so each will only receive $0.08 or 8 cents.

What an amazing Robinhood story this is! The hero robs both the rich and the poor, then pays more than half the money to the rich first, and lastly, gives 1 dime, single a single coin, to all the poor/needy people. What a heroic feat! /s

So what happened to the app, the collab and the friendship?

I took my time and explained her everything. It took maybe an hour. Well, she bargained after the denial & anger. I still refused to collab on that app and asked if she has any other ideas but well, it was too late. She didn't have any and she indirectly said that if we aren't collaborating on this one, then we aren't collaborating on any.

Well, need I say anything more? I knew that we aren't gonna collab and she isn't the rational type so trying anything was just gonna be wasteful but I don't like to end conversations or discussions with negativity lurking so before bidding her adieu, I said something along the lines of "It's okay even if we don't collab but the stuff you do is interesting so can we be in touch and share the amazing things we do every once in a while?" and she said sure.

Fast forward to a few weeks later, I texted her to catch up on her hoping that maybe she has realized her mistake but what did I get? A dry response suggesting that the air is still tensed around us. Well, that ensures that I'm never gonna get an apology from her xD

Couple of weeks later, she was doing something with Blender, maybe watching the mandatory donut course by Blender Guru. I texted her for that and I congratulated her for her final render because it was "holy smokes" amazing. It even took her multiple days to render which makes it more amazing and I praised her for her amazing work. She said thanks and then I asked her if she'll try to get into game dev next. And I haven't received a reply ever since :p

Conclusion

I don't know if the air is still tensed between us but I'm not gonna text anymore. Anyways, I don't know about you but it was a crazy experience for me as I felt that she was gonna hate me for real, and maybe does; we'll never know.

I hope that I was able to knock some sense into some of you tho' and now some of you understand why making such an app will be a terrible idea. Another takeaway should be that I tried to ease things between us, or more importantly, I did not end the conversation when something negative was going on. Recall that I asked Svetlana if it was okay to be in touch even if we don't end up collabing. It wasn't my intention to ask her to collab in the future but I did it to ease out the negativity lurking and the tense air. It doesn't matter if it that works or not but I always suggest that you try to do that. You are smart enough to know and understand why ;)