Clever "down for maintenance" page | Hacker News Reader

Clever "down for maintenance" page

down.grooveshark.com

81 pointsacangiano30 comments

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that not everyone would find a "that's what she said" joke all that clever, or even all that appropriate for a business to subtly present on its site.

And I think this speaks to one of the points I tried to make here (http://langer.tumblr.com/post/538680961), which is that ideas like this can come off as witty or clever in such a male-dominated industry because most of us are tone-deaf to the many ways in which another person might find something like this offensive.

My hypothesis is that in order to build a cult following, you sort of have to alienate others. Maybe it's crude, but it's part of the equation. The alternative is to take the "corporate" route and build a boring, conservative 404 that could not possibly offend anyone, but would not possibly entertain anyone either.

Instinctively, I disagree with you. But you might be right. I may even agree with you, intellectually.

What evidence do you have to support your hypothesis?

Alienation is a very powerful emotional force, used by all sorts of parties to all sorts of ends. Are there 'positive' forms of alienation?

Is there not a middle path that can be taken that doesn't alienate, but also doesn't bore?

If a comedian worried about offending people, s/he wouldn't be funny. If Apple worried about alienating large swaths of the marketplace, it wouldn't have a rabid following.

If there weren't a "positive" effect of alienation, people wouldn't consciously cause it. Maybe it's a side-effect of good marketing. Or maybe it props up the sort of us vs. them mentality associated with cult followings. Or maybe I'm getting too philosophical, and everything I'm saying is bullshit.

Hah - I didn't intend to end 3/4 of my post with question marks. Or did I? ..ahem.

My comment was really a rhetorical question about the moral (not necessarily commercial - I'm not arguing that) appropriateness of taking (as you described) an alienating path.

I've read quite a few descriptions of marketing as being successful by causing unknown wants and needs. None of those descriptions really talk about 'us and them' as a concept.

[edit-minor typo]

Full-disclosure: I am both a woman and a Grooveshark employee. Not just employee - Developer.

I read your blog post, and you make some very good points. I feel much the same about the industry as a whole, and became especially sensitive to it after attending FOWA Miami last year, and seeing the vast, vast difference in the number of women in attendance versus the number of men. At the after parties, I walked up to every woman I saw and asked them if they were programmers. I didn't find a a single one. They were all in marketing or design.

But here at Grooveshark? Yeah, so the "that's what she said" joke on our 404 page is inappropriate. But it's still pretty damn funny. Maybe I'm biased. I've heard "that's what he said" jokes thrown about the office as well. As a woman, I'm certainly in the minority of employees here at Grooveshark. But I am absolutely not dumped into any sort of Illustrator ghetto. In fact, I'm the lead ActionScript developer here. The actual Grooveshark application you use every day? Until the redesign, that was all me. It's gotten too large to be maintained by a single dev anymore, but I'm still the one who designs and writes all the application's architecture. I am not sexualized (at least no more than any of the men are) or vilified here. I am a valuable part of our team.

So yes, our industry has a serious problem. But don't think Grooveshark (or our 404 page) seriously contributes to it.

Yes, it could certainly do without the "what she said" part. That's not the main content on the page, though.

I don't even think it's going out on a limb. Except, of course, it seems to be.

I wonder how many people even realize that the running "that's what she said" gag from The Office is almost exclusively a meta-joke about Michael's constant inappropriateness...

They just don't care and love to have fun, and I love them for it.

My roommate, out of undying love for them, sent their team a case of Brooklyn lager just because. They responded with a full video of someone dressed as a shark as a thank you, and he just got an awesome Grooveshark t-shirt in the mail yesterday. This is how you build cult followers.

http://help.grooveshark.com/a-special-grooveshark-thanks-to-...

That's awesome. Just seeing that got me interested in what their product. Definitely impressed. I might just pay for it.

It's exactly why I tell everyone around me about GrooveShark if they mention Pandora or another music service. As soon as they get a BB Storm app I may not need my iPod again.

They rock and have built a great product.

This thread gives some more insight into just how awesome and open they are:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c2udg/iama_grooveshark...

Looks like they need another kind of bear for their database connections.

http://skitch.com/dolinsky/ddc1i/database-error

Too verbose for my taste.

Here's a good sample of effective maintenance pages: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/12/effective-mainten...

This page is in that list :) Under heading 4 as the shining example of page that "the same look and feel as your regular site."

Yup. Link was to highlight that there are many other examples of more effective maintenance pages than the one from OP.

iStockPhoto's maintenance page (heading 5) rocks

I like how the colour scheme is not the signature grooveshark yellow - an attempt to limit brand tarnish?

Too wordy; I like the idea of status updates (in this case powered by Twitter) on the page though. Neat.

Cute story, but I can't see which bit is clever? Perhaps it's an inside joke I just don't get :(

Highlight the header, you'll see "That's what she said" after "Going down for a bit". As in, she's going down (on you) for a bit.

thanks for the explanation of what thats what she said, meant.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but because there's many non-American/native English speakers, the pun might not be as obvious.

It might be because I have a pretty good screen but I had no need to highlight the header. Still it's clever in its informality, not its technical prowess.

No, my screen sucks, and I see it. It's a different color than the bar.

The first heading: "_bear_ with us".

Well, my guess is that if you get annoyed that the site is down, you'll blame the panda rather than the guys who run the site.

The perfect storm, I read the message while listening to 'waiting for your conference to start' elevator music.

I like the nearly-hidden "That's what she said." Perhaps not the most appropriate, but still funny.

It's not clever - it's puerile, and has no place in a professional organisation. It's equivalent to giggling inanely when someone says "homo sapiens."

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