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Comment by Edman274 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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