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Comment by berniemadoff69 | Hacker News Reader

Pay careful attention to the response from Backblaze:

> "Hi Brett! The pixels we use are primarily for audience building when we advertise on other platforms like Facebook for example." [...]

The carefully calculated cutesy "Hi Brett!" with the exclamation point is the same reason big tech companies use infantile graphics [0]: by seeming playful, they create the illusion they are a Safe Friend you can Trust.

[0] http://jollo.org/LNT/public/nursery.html

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Using a salutation, and addressing someone by name is not a conspiracy to make people trust you. The things that you should care about are the banality of evil, and that no one believes that they've done anything wrong. I live in the Midwest and my job is to make low-impact CRUD applications for a small car insurance company. I would use the same salutation, because I have been taught that that is what I'm supposed to do. I wasn't coached in some session on how to trick people into thinking I'm their buddy - it just becomes part of the shared social vocabulary.

Modern business vocabulary has shifted from "Dear Mr. LastName," to "Hi FirstName!". This shift happened first in more "trendy" places, although most everyone has already moved on to using informal language in customer relations.

I do agree with your point about banality of evil.

I refuse, with every last fibre of my being, that fucking exclamation mark.

Cool! Just a quick recap: resistance is futile.

Is it ever!

Just look at your own HN page. Throwing stones while living in a glass house.

    Hi there!

Ha - you’re right. I suppose I object to "Hi $FirstName!" becoming the standard in professional communication. Often there’s nothing exciting that follows that exclamation mark, and the comma has been the standard so far.

Backblaze is role-playing 'trusted friend' on twitter the same way McDonalds and Wendys get into 'fights' on twitter. It's just corporate playbook stuff; I wouldn't say it's a conspiracy. Here's the latest posts on backblaze's twitter: https://i.imgur.com/mMkylym.png

A corporate playbook is an agreed-upon-in-advance set of rules to follow by a group of people.

That's pretty much the definition of a conspiracy.

A conspiracy needs to be secret.

Absolutely. Better to focus on what actually matters, and keep the action dense.

Dear Mr. Madoff69,

I believe that your analysis has flaws. It would be quite awkward on social media to use the a more formal way of addressing people. Twitter and other platforms have a "style" of conversation and trying to fit the square peg of formal writing into the round hole of internet conversation sounds stilted. I do not understand why you think corporations would decide to do that, no matter what their intentions are.

I humbly await your response.

Yours Truly, Mr. rPlayer

P.S. I hope your Grandmother is doing well. Please send my regards.

P.P.S. Please invest in my new cloud computing blockchain biotech startup where we sell NFTs.

Dear Mr. rPlayer,

Please update your signature to conform with the current standards, as outlined in the last month's circular.

Best Regards, TeMPOraL

TeMPOraL, Internet Compliance Officer (ICO)

ACME LLC - Synergizing Creative Accounting

ACME LLC, NaN NaN, Null Islands.

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Please do not print this message unless it is necessary. Every unprinted message helps the environment. Think of the trees!

It's even better with the small tree icon hosted by an external service, thus leaking some data when you open the email :)

They could have just left off the greeting.

I don't use twitter so I don't know what the etiquette over there but outside of emails I wouldn't normally expect any salutation in an internet message.

So for me it's not so much that the salutation not formal enough, it's more that it's odd that it exists at all.

But then again maybe usages differ in twitterworld.

The flat corporate graphical style has a Know Your Meme page and rich parody-art ecosystem:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/corporate-art-sty...

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