How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet
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Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet
#2This is the same as the 'Nigerian 419' fraud concept. They fill the email with spelling and grammar mistakes and in doing so, they filter out the marginally intelligent, resulting in a pre-filter to attract the most gullible.
The crappy, hand drawn ads, the dire videos, and the bad production have the same effect. The punter needs to be a gullible fool, since a fool and his money are soon parted.
Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet
#3I like how one of the stories in slate's sidebar is "The Secret Ingredient [...] will blow your mind"
Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet
#4The article doesn't seem to mention this, but there is another trick in these guys arsenals - fake news articles about their products.
They build entire webpages, along with side-stories and article comments that support their product. They look SO real that once I (and I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, having access to Internet for 15 years) fell for it briefly, and then had to explain it to my wife who stumbled upon them as well. I was truly impressed by amount of work these guys went through not only to write a pretty long science-looking article, but to build a whole (albeit pretty static) webpage and write realistic comment sections. Sadly, this whole effort is done to deceive other people.
Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet
#5This is the same as the 'Nigerian 419' fraud concept. They fill the email with spelling and grammar mistakes and in doing so, they filter out the marginally intelligent, resulting in a pre-filter to attract the most gullible. The crappy, hand drawn ads, the dire videos, and the bad production have the same effect. The punter needs to be a gullible fool, since a fool and his money are soon parted.
Makes sense, but Occams razor is more than enough to explain the bad grammar and production effects. Any evidence its a conscious decision?
Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet
#6Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet
#7This is the same as the 'Nigerian 419' fraud concept. They fill the email with spelling and grammar mistakes and in doing so, they filter out the marginally intelligent, resulting in a pre-filter to attract the most gullible. The crappy, hand drawn ads, the dire videos, and the bad production have the same effect. The punter needs to be a gullible fool, since a fool and his money are soon parted.
Makes sense, but Occams razor is more than enough to explain the bad grammar and production effects. Any evidence its a conscious decision?
PlentyOfFish did a small test:
http://blog.ads.pof.com/2012/04/03/throw-everything-you-know...
Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet
#8The article doesn't seem to mention this, but there is another trick in these guys arsenals - fake news articles about their products. They build entire webpages, along with side-stories and article comments that support their product. They look SO real that once I (and I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, having access to Internet for 15 years) fell for it briefly, and then had to explain it to my wife who stumbled…
Eventually they do one better, and actually produce content cheaply - aka Demand Media.
Flogs and farticle sites are so 2006 though. Now they use markov chain based generators to generate sites based on content scraped off other sites.
Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet
#9This is the same as the 'Nigerian 419' fraud concept. They fill the email with spelling and grammar mistakes and in doing so, they filter out the marginally intelligent, resulting in a pre-filter to attract the most gullible. The crappy, hand drawn ads, the dire videos, and the bad production have the same effect. The punter needs to be a gullible fool, since a fool and his money are soon parted.
Just like it says in the article. (You did read the article, right?)
Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet
#10I like how one of the stories in slate's sidebar is "The Secret Ingredient [...] will blow your mind"
Spoiler: It's Mint in your iced coffee. I'm eager to try it now.