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Comment by pille | Hacker News Reader

Someone had to design that automation. And it sounds like the message was at least made to look like it came from a person.

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Go read up on Github user: CoralineAda [1][2] Then consider that GitHub hired her. I would not be surprised if the this automated script and her employment were directly related.

[1] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/954 [2] https://github.com/CoralineAda?tab=activity

> Then consider that GitHub hired her.

I'm not terribly surprised. GitHub is, after all, a company which changed its logo to celebrate a highly political U.S. Supreme Court decision and which has had issues with left-wing racism (http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...).

I really don't want this to be a witch hunt (not seeing that here, just wary of pointing out individuals)—this is exactly the type of thing a business should take responsibility for as a whole. This was a process failure, IMHO.

Exactly. The point of my comment was just that automation is no excuse for this kind of thing.

For me it's still about the organization, and singling out individuals is about as productive as yelling at customer support on the phone.

I think you guys missed my point. In pointing out one individual, I was pointing to the organization as a whole. Github supports this kind over-sensitive social-activism. Example A: dragnet language-police script. Example B: hiring controversial, social-activists.

For better or worse, the appearance of coming from a real person seems to be the trend in marketing automation. I think many people, especially outside of tech, believe they are interacting with a real person most or all of the time, when in reality, they only are during exceptions to common requests. But people like interacting with real people more than they like seeing "automated message blah blah".

Related: The company is slipping my mind right now, but one startup changed their email name in automated messages from male to female and saw improved metrics as a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_automation

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