1 Mahalo dollar is equal to $0.75 USD, if you have 150 Mahalo Dollars or more. If you don't have that much, then you have to buy something with the 'Mahalo Store', which offers a very limited number of items for an even lower exchange rate.
I'm inclined to believe this. Check out this question titled "Do your family members or friends criticize you for the amount of time you spend on Mahalo?"
I love how snarky comments are downvoted on HN UNLESS they're about Mahalo. 30 more karma to go, then I'm going to come back and downvote you and everyone else making the same comment on this thread.
HN has a general disdain towards anything which is detrimental to the online landscape (spam, bad pieces of legislation, etc).
No one really gives a crap about Jason or Mahalo, the consensus just seems to be that it operates in the gray areas of SEO with little value added to the content they vacuum in.
Not arguing about the dubiousness of Mahalo. I agree with the assessment. But I don't see why we're lowering the bar for the quality of comments when it's re: a maligned entity. Sorry, it's still HN, when I read a thread about Mahalo I'm not looking for a me-too dogpile of jokes or zings. I want to read some real analysis.
I get that they're making good money by embedding ads in every inch of the site. Is this really a 'good' and respectable business model though? Something about it doesn't sit well with me, especially when the site doesn't offer quality content to the user.
Things aren't always so cut and dry. There's probably some people - a large number in fact - that does derive benefit from some of Mahalo's pages. You also have the fact that the revenue generated by Mahalo is going towards paying people which lets them live and feed themselves, etc.
In terms of the grand scheme of things, what Mahalo is doing isn't that "bad".
It's also not the ideal case either. As a savvy web user a Mahalo page is one of the last pages I'd want to visit, but I'm also savvy enough to know how to avoid it.
I don't doubt that there are diamonds in the rough. However, when I search and see a random Mahalo page in Google I have no way to know if this is one of the diamonds, or one of the thousands of "rough". Why take that chance when I can go to a more reliable site that I trust more?
