Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 133 posts

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#71

Post by Natsu »

patmcguire wrote: post #25
CGamesPlay wrote: post #6

http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/

Oh my god, how deep are there fake links?

How deep? They go all the way down the rabbit hole, through Wonderland, have a tea party, and come back out again, my friend. Here's one of my favorites:

==========

Cat Basis Purrsuit - http://www.oneweirdkerneltrick.com/catbasis.pdf

Abstract Meow miao mew meow mew meow mew mew meow miao meow meow mew meow meow miau mew miao meeeow meow, miau meow miao mew meeeeow mew miao miao miao. Meow miao mew meow mew (MMM), meow miao mew meow mew meow, meow meow miao meow state-of-the-art meow meow.

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#73

Post by corin_ »

sc00ter wrote: post #9
junto wrote: post #2

This 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?)

Although the article only made that connection with the video (unless I was skim-reading too much), not with the crappy advert drawings (which they assigned other, perhaps equally relevant logic to) or moronic messaging.

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#74

Post by corin_ »

username223 wrote: post #56
callmeed wrote: post #51

Scams aside, it would be interesting to use some of these techniques on landing pages for legitimate, valuable SaaS apps. "One weird trick to improve your SEO/conversions/customer satisfaction/whatver KPI" which links to a page with a crude, long-form, un-pausable video. After that, you could probably at least get them to create a trial account. Has/would anyone try this?

"Scams aside", your scam would work as well as theirs.

It's not a scam because of the way they hook users, it's a scam because the end product doesn't work. If callmeed has a genuine, decent product at the end of it then his version wouldn't be a scam, even if he marketed it the same way as these guys.

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#75

Post by corin_ »

MBCook wrote: post #41
throwawayg99 wrote: post #35

I work with a dozen or so people who are involved in this sort of work. I think it is very interesting to see how they rationalize and deal with their moral compass internally. One of the guys is the most caring, liberal, loving person you'd ever meet; he justifies being involved in this sort of skeezy marketing work as "I can take a small amount from a lot of people and amplify the result to do good with a lot of mo…

I saw lots of cognitive dissonance when I worked for a company that was something of an advertising firm. Everyone hates pop-ups and spam... but it's probably OK if we do it. We can turn off the user's pop-up blocker right? What do you mean we can't get around it? How are we supposed to get them to see our side offers if we can't do pop-ups? And the constant discussions about how to keep our emails from landing in sp…

Just to show a little balance - there are those of us in advertising who try to do the best we can for our audience, and don't even need morals to make that decision, since doing the right thing gives us better results than trying to trick people.

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#76

Post by zombio »

turtlerose wrote: post #63
orangethirty wrote: post #59

I stumbled into some weird data as to how startups may be able to use this kind of technique without exploiting people. Yeah, it sounds hard to believe. But you have to understand that every technique out there can be used for good. Anyhow, turns out that there are some tricks that these type of advertisers use to increase their response. One just needs to carefully read the source of their pages (specially the Javas…

Oh, come on. There's such an obvious difference of situations here it's not even worth going into.

Agreed, it was obviously satire.

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#77

Post by prawn »

MartinCron wrote: post #10
Havoc wrote: post #3

I 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.

Reminds me of this Twitter feed spoiling bait-ish headline tweets: https://twitter.com/MamamiaSpoilers

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#78

Post by D9u »

Conquered the internet?

I don't think so. I've never clicked on any of those ads, and I'm sure that millions of other users of Ad Block, etc, have never even seen these ads.

Of interest to me was the author's reluctance to click on links due to malware threats.

Even when I used WinXP, years ago, I never have been infected with any malware, but then, I'm not the average PC user.

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#79

Post by caryhartline »

mindslight wrote: post #42
vacri wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use flashblock instead of adblock. Advertising pays for much of the internet, so I feel it's reasonable to let some of it through. Flashblock kills the worst offenders, and given I also run noscript (which isn't for everyone), the rest of the bad ones are taken care of as well. Simple images are allowed through, and these kinds of ads aren't particularly distracting. In the rare case there is a bad animated .gif, h…

Advertising wasn't always the norm, and I would personally love to return to the days where people published because they actually had something to say. How many search results these days are from those extremely valuable sites with one person geeking out on everything they know about a topic, versus the sheer number of content farms regurgitating the same simplistic crap just to get page views and ultimately waste y…

Advertising pays for a lot of very legitimate content-focused blogs/news organizations as well.

People can't afford to pay for every single blog or bit of news they read and authors can't do anything substantial or meaningful without making it a job(and needing money to do it).

Re: How 'One Weird Trick' Conquered The Internet

#80

Post by cLeEOGPw »

orangethirty wrote: post #59

I stumbled into some weird data as to how startups may be able to use this kind of technique without exploiting people. Yeah, it sounds hard to believe. But you have to understand that every technique out there can be used for good. Anyhow, turns out that there are some tricks that these type of advertisers use to increase their response. One just needs to carefully read the source of their pages (specially the Javas…

HN users have established a certain amount of trust in each other that lets us evaluate links in user's comments differently than links in other places, especially if the comment is upvoted. Your "technique" shows exactly that. If you would write anything like that on a thread NOT about advertising, you would just be downvoted and not get almost any clicks, so I don't agree that the same techniques work on everybody. Screening technique exists exactly for that - to screen people on who the techniques won't work.
Post reply on HN