There is a thin line between 'growth hacking' vs. user annoyance. Growth hacking is a way a product operates that leverages human behaviour to persuade users to do something that aligns with the goals of the product. For example, take the scenario below.

A family member took a ride in Namma Yatri (a ride-hailing app) and shared their ride tracker with another user. This is critical information that concerns the safety of the rider, so ideally there should be no gate preventing someone (with whom the tracker URL is shared) from tracking the user. But in this case, the ability to view the details and location of the rider is gated behind a login/signup screen, which is annoying to the user. Probably the PM or designer was optimizing for daily/weekly sign up numbers.

A good example of growth hacking that I saw recently is in Granola (an online meeting note-taking app). When any user(s) is using Granola to take notes, it shows a message in Zoom chat that there are some users using Granola; here is the URL to see who is using Granola. Clicking on that shows which users are using Granola, but that page also has a clear 'What is Granola' message and Download Granola CTA. An argument could be made that Granola is 'outing' users who are using Granola, thus bringing down Granola adoption, but I think it is a legal requirement in many places now.

Have some empathy for your users when designing these patterns.