"Authentic" is dead | Hacker News Reader

"Authentic" is dead

blog.asmartbear.com

120 pointsearlyresort48 comments

______ enables you to connect, interact, and engage in powerful new ways. Streamline how you work, collaborate more easily, and create high impact communications. Designed to meet the needs of today’s business, ______ helps you get more done — easier, faster, better.

Can you guess which popular product is this?

Just for the humor value, I'm hoping it is Microsoft Office.

searches

The true answer is even better.

Spoiler:

It's Adobe Acrobat.

Trojans?

Caffeine? :-)

Taking a stance against marketing speak is just another form of marketing speak.

But it is authentic.

If you believe that, it's impossible to have a discussion.

I don't mean to be harsh, but your article made me think that you were more interested in making strident, overly assertive statements than in having a conversation.

Are you talking about the headline or the article? Because the article appeared to me to be rather nuanced and not at all strident.

More the article than the headline, actually. To me it's written in a kind of "broadcast" mode -- choppy sentences and paragraphs, overly abundant typographic emphasis, etc. Reminds me of people who try to win arguments by being loud -- not amenable to conversation.

I really don't mean to attribute these characteristics to the author, who I'm sure is a fine fellow; just that the article brought them to mind.

The article is written very calmly. Short sentences and small paragraphs are a writing style that says nothing of the author except a will to be readable.

Moreover, he uses classic rhetorical techniques, including concessions and common places, in a very reasonable way to show that he understands the other side of the coin.

You just don't like the content. Stop trying to pin the blame on the style, and admit it.

It also came off as an example of what the author was advocating. Don't be wishy-washy, don't skirt around things, say what you mean and back it up.

Then you have another marketing problem.

What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

He meant it of certain kinds of philosophy, but there may be other applications. In particular, making note of this situation serves directly to expand the problem.

Come one come all and play the crazy Hacker News Language Game!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVZo1Jjfshw#t=1m13s

This reminds me of undergrad discussions of Heidegger, if you are reaching for authenticity, then you are always already inauthentic by definition.

I didn't say reaching for authenticity is inauthentic.

In fact, I explicitly said these ideas are worthy and should be pursued.

Rather, you can't just invoke well-worn phrases because they've been misused so much that people don't know what they mean anymore. You have to do the thing, just say it in a new way.

It's a shame, just like it's a shame that the word "gay" can no longer just mean "happy," but it's a fact that you have to deal with.

Some goals recede further into the distance the harder you try to reach them. You can't work at having an authentic relationship with your customers, you have to talk to them like a real person.

In it's practical application it's a bit of a jedi mind trick; you can't force yourself to be more authentic than you are at any given point in time; you just have to relax and be, authentically.

I'd agree with you on the overuse of certain tropes, pretty much any community has a few terms that are never precisely defined that are used as shorthand to frame a loose group of ideas "lean startups", "social media", "agile"; they'll be used and abused and everyone involved will have a slightly different piece of the elephant in mind when they use the term. But within the community they aren't used as precise technical terms, but rather as signals of allegiance to one sub-group or ideology.

"Seamless Integration" should be added to that list.

Can we add "foo is dead" to the list?

That's not scheduled until next year.

Bar is the new black!

A useful metric for me: when someone says X is to be disregarded, disregard them. The problem is not with the word. The problem is with how individuals and companies use the word and how well they understand and apply the underlying concept.

Buzzwords come in and out of fashion. Real substance sticks around.

So, you agree that the word has been tainted by shoddy businesses overusing it, yet you still think this article is to be disregarded?

Be suspicious of such articles in general. Heed the advice.

If you'd actually read the article you would see him advocating being specific about your own qualities instead of using buzzwords.

This is good advice.

A pity it has to be wrapped in the "X is dead" gambit for marketing purposes.

It's a headline, not a gambit. What would you have him do instead?

Also, to be completely pedantic: the word was placed in quotes, and the adjective form was used rather than the noun. Which, to me, means not that authenticity is dead, but that using the word "authentic" is (or ought to be) dead.

But if you disregard them, should we disregard you? It can be a big disregarding circle!

Disregard this statement.

The problem is not with the word. The problem is with how individuals and companies use the word

How people use the word is the word.

The reason these words are abused is because they work -- rather than admonishing that they "should no longer be used, ever, in any context except derisive mocking," it seems a bit more productive to recognize that there are times and places when customers are more receptive to (and even prefer) being told something is "powerful" than that it "processes 6,253,427 requests daily." (A lot of sites have front-page hype backed up with buried numbers and figures for those who really want to know, anyway.) Being a savvy consumer means knowing what words to dig deeper on, but let's face it, all consumers aren't savvy -- and most of them don't need to be.

"The reason these words are abused is because they work..."

Isn't this just an example of a bandwagon effect cognitive bias? How does the ubiquitous nature of bad copy make it any more effective? If anything, that's 180 degrees from true.

If every marketing statement could be taken at face value, this would work fine. Unfortunately, everyone has access to the same thesaurus I do. How am I distinguishable from my competitors if both our sites read like a checklist of abstractions?

Your point about the request processing number really drives this home. Whether someone prefers the word "powerful" as a stand-in for a demonstrative figure depends entirely on whether they're already inclined to believe whatever you say. If that is a good description of your average first-time visitor, then, um, I wouldn't waste much time on writing copy anyway. Just have a headline reading "This is exactly what you need." and a sign-up button.

I've only got one caveat about this article - in a competitive space where money is being raised, being 'the leading provider of' or 'the market leader' counts for a lot. There's therefore a lot of incentives for the less-than-ethical to exaggerate numbers that can't easily be independently verified.

If you go out the door with hard stats, be prepared for someone else to use those stats and claim they're doing better than you - and their claim will have a bit more verisimilitude because they won't have to guess about your performance. Frustrating, but it happens.

Is it? My marketing copy doesn't agree. And that has worked out pretty well.

A suggestion to overcome this: if your sentence's meaning relies on an adjective, it needs a better verb.

There are dragons down that path too unless you buy-in to the idea that by rationalizing adjectives you're somehow going to synergize the language.

haha very true and well demonstrated.

Clearly the author is not very familiar with the vocabulary of the hipster subculture. There are people who can argue for hours whether some band is still 'authentic' or not.

This is what the author is saying: authentic isn't binary

One of my favorites is QuickSSHD - dead simple, starts an ssh server on your phone so you can ssh in and browser around or even better, scp files to / from it (no need to plug in your phone to put files on it any more ...)

"Foo is a fast, easy way to bar." makes it clear what Foo does, and on what dimensions it's supposed to excel. That's clear and useful.

Please don't bog me down in details right out of the gate. Give me the 30,000 foot view, with an option to drop down lower if I like the lay of the land.

But neither "fast" nor "easy" carries any semantic weight in the sentence—no one will ever say "Foo is the slow, difficult way to bar." Just say that "Foo helps you bar" or even "Need to Bar? Try Foo."

This is why I wrote that it indicates "on what dimensions it's supposed to excel". Here's a non-abstract example:

----

Mercedes CLS550: the safe luxury car.

BMW M5: the sporty luxury sedan.

Toyota Camry: the reliable family car.

Hyundai Sonata: inexpensive, practical transportation.

Jeep Wrangler: fun off-road vehicle.

----

Nobody is going to refer to their car as unsafe, not sporty, unreliable, impractical, or not fun, but that doesn't make the brief descriptions unhelpful. It tells me why the creator thinks their car is different than the others.

And while nobody will say "the slow, difficult way", they might well say "the most powerful way", "the fully-customizable way" or "the environmentally responsible way" all of which indicate to me that they are differentiated by something other than speed or ease of use.

Your proposed alternatives tell me absolutely nothing except what market the product is in. You're making me work to discover why your product is different than others in the market, and that can't be a good thing for you.

You make a good point—I was assuming, though, that the product was in a market where speed and ease-of-use were the only possible dimensions by which to evaluate the product. This happens a lot—tax preparation companies, for instance, aren't going to say they're the "most powerful" or "most eco-friendly" way to do your taxes; they're going to say they get you out of the building as quickly as possible and back to your day. They're all going to say that. And so, in those cases, it's meaningless. Many segments of the web application market that those around here like to target have the same problem.

I absolutely agree that one should, at a minimum, test meaningful statements before resorting to pointless or tautological verbiage.

That said, if it turned out that 'Infiniti G37: car.' was split testing better than 'Infiniti G37: the high-performance luxury sedan', I'd double-check their work, then roll out the new slogan. After all, at some level it's more to do with what works than what is elegant and satisfying.

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