Hacker News Reader

Yes it'll be helpful for you and your clients, until everyone does it, at which point hand-written becomes meaningless. At that point it's both no longer helpful for you to drive commercial results, but also it means anyone who wasn't using it in a commercial way, will now have lost the signalling power of handwriting because the reader can no longer differentiate between someone writing a handwritten letter, and someone sending a digital letter through a handwriting middleman service.

In other words, a bit of a race to the bottom.

As for your appraisal company, I'm not familiar with it. I am familiar with the Dutch appraisal companies, which spam the shit out of municipalities with automated legal objection letters, overwhelming the paralegal capacity, and they make money off of a combination of upfront legal fees (paid not by the homeowner, but by the municipality, as 'everyone deserves access to the law' here) and savings on the property taxes. It's really approaching spam and has blackmail elements, as if the municipality doesn't respond within a legal timelimit, there can be fines or moneys awarded on-top.

All of this is great for the individual owners who use the service, but terrible for the municipality and thereby for society. After all, the municipality is now doing a lot of unnecessary work responding to automated and entirely free (spamlike) appraisal objections. Of course the municipality's budget is paid for by the tax payers. So everyone is in the end paying for this nonsense, in the form of higher tax rates.

Not only that, but in the Netherlands it's lead to a system where the appraisal values are severely distorted downwards, and compensated with higher property taxes. Instead of taxing 1% of $1 million market value, they'll simply appraise it at $600k and set the property tax at 1.6666%. Nobody can reasonably argue the $1m home is worth less than $600k, so the municipality is freed from these appraisal spam companies, and is still raking in the same tax revenue. But these unnaturally low appraisals are distorting other things (e.g. the national wealth taxes which are based on these undervalued municipal appraisals) and it's all not pretty.

None of this is good for society and I'm pretty disappointed that we're now seeing tech move further into the field of spam, even in a physical sense.

> In other words, a bit of a race to the bottom.

Copied from another comment, but this is what I got from ~10 seconds googling.

• https://www.handwrytten.com/

• https://www.scribeless.co/

• https://roboquill.io/

• https://handwrittenmail.com/

• https://letterfriend.com/

Most political campaigns, non profits, etc use printed handwriting because it's so much cheaper.

As for our appraisal company, we send human beings into the appraisal district to speak with other human beings and negotiate a value. It is a very unsexy line of work, I'll give ya that.

Customers ( homeowners?) having a potentially risk free/ no downside transaction shouldn't have any relationship to whether they are interested in unsolicited mail or should receive one.

It is a ultimately zero sum game I would think, if this improves your open rate in the short term, everyone from political campaigns to the local deli, will start doing the same and everyone would stop opening hand written mails, and yours(and everyone's) open rate will be back to the same, and we will no longer be able to open by grandmother's Christmas cards .

> everyone from political campaigns to the local deli, will start doing the same

It is definitely a matter of time until this stops working. From a quick google of "handwritten letters" here's what I got:

• https://www.handwrytten.com/

• https://www.scribeless.co/

• https://roboquill.io/

• https://handwrittenmail.com/

• https://letterfriend.com/

>> I'm curious of OP had any moral qualms about deceiving people

> I look at the handwriting as way to optimize open rates, just like writing a good subject line.

So that's a 'yes', then.

> We don't think we're junk mail, obviously.

It's junk mail.

Many people may buy from spammers and be happy with the transaction. That's not why anti-spam laws exist.

They exist because they inflict an attention cost on people who receive unsolicited advertisements.

What you are doing is bypassing "no junk mail" signs, and fooling people into not throwing away unsolicited mail.

You should give some thought to the moral argument you're making here. You believe it's okay to fake that the letters you send out are handwritten, because

> our service 1) helps people and 2) can never cost them net-negative.

That's not much of a justification, is it? What other means can you justify on the basis that you believe the service you offer is such an incredible force for good? If deceiving customers is okay, is outright lying to them? Selling their personal info on to other businesses?

If someone's going to hire you to represent them in a tax dispute with their county government, one presumes that they will be expecting you to represent them truthfully, right? That you wouldn't misrepresent the true value of their home, or, for example, try to pass a protest filing off as having been individually prepared, but actually have automated the process. Doesn't your initial contact being deceptive rather undermine your credibility as someone who will act honestly and truthfully on a customer's behalf?

The fact is pretty much all businesses believe that the service they offer helps people and offers their customers a net value. That alone is not a justification for bending your ethics.

But when the entire way your business 'helps people' is that it helps them to shift their tax burden to their neighbors, kidding yourself that your unsolicited commercial mail is not really junk mail and devoting enormous ingenuity and effort to misleading your prospects are probably the least of your ethical concerns.

"deceiving customers", in the same sense all food joints that say "best<whatever> in town", or carlsberg's "probably the best beer in the world". I'd argue there are plenty of examples on why this isn't the slippery slope you propose.

That’s not comparable. As I said, most businesses believe they offer a good product. Claiming ‘it’s the best in town’, when that’s clearly only your own biased opinion, is hardly deceitful.

Making a letter look like it was personally handwritten by a human when it wasn’t is a lie. It is intended to convey an idea that is not true: that you have been personally chosen to receive this offer, that a person has devoted time to getting in touch with you, that this offer is probably not being sent to everybody and therefore you may have been specially selected to receive the offer, because a human being chose you.

The equivalent is a restaurant using pictures of a kitchen making pizzas from fresh ingredients in their menu, but actually serving microwaved frozen slices. Sure, they never actually said they were selling fresh pizza, but… they knew what their customers would be thinking.

who cares though? If he could hand write a note 10000 times easily he would, but instead he got a machine to do it for him so now it's bad?

Isn't that what computers do?

I'd be 1000x more offended if he emailed me something that looked handwritten, but was just a bot, and everyone seems to do that.

We shouldn't celebrate all computer optimisations, if the optimisation breaks laws and hurts people.

People were annoyed with unsolicited mail, so invented "no junk mail" signs, and laws.

A handwritten address requires human time and thus is probably not worthwhile for low-margin spammers. It is a costly signal that a letter probably isn't junk mail.

By reducing the cost of the costly signal, he breaks the value of it - now everyone lives in a lower signal, higher noise world: more likely to get unsolicited mail, more likely to throw out legit non-spam handwritten mail.

True, but any handwritten note from someone you don't know is already suspect or garbage, and in no likely future will every ad be handwritten. I wouldn't call a 2 second glance as I filter mail to throw in the recycle bin "costly" per-se, and I don't know how the mail sorters at the post do their job. I can't speak on laws as I am unaware of them.

If you are using a direct mail campaign from a company they probably would know which addresses not to bother with anyway due to the no junk mail stickers (although that may be giving them too much credit) and would operate within the law.

Anyway, I don't want to try and defend "spam", the more you get, the more it sucks for everyone, but at the same time, I don't feel bad about what this guy did and as an entrepreneur trying to make a living. Maybe other people get way more junk mail than I do, but at 0-3 items a day, more on the 0 side, it just seems trivial and a non-issue and it won't scale into as big a problem as digital spam due to the costs. It's more like a clever hack, because who actually uses mail, that's so analog and back2basics.

I've got an axidraw and a laser cutter and can program and I'll be damned if I try to go through that much effort to make what he made, it just seems like a nightmare to me, but he was creative and looked like he had fun and did some really hacky stuff, so props to him.

I enjoyed your page and the technical accomplishment, but the logic of your morality is pretty twisted. It's not ok to deceive people like that. And remember, these people are competing against other people, so there are people hurt just as much as helped. It's ok to compete, but this is cheating, in my opinion.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”