Hacker News Reader

Comment by fabricode | Hacker News Reader

"You have illegally been subjected to make..."

"Try the new app right now, its beautiful:"

As clever as it is, it would have been far more effective if you had checked your grammar before printing two hundred flyers.

View on HN

Yup, I came here to note the "its" problem. I won't try the app or look any further, because anybody who can't be bothered to use proper grammar on a publicity stunt sure as hell isn't going to release a quality product.

That is not a just correlation. Someone who is creative enough to come up with something like this, probably has a creative app as well. It is nearly impossible to put out a product without any minor mistakes.

Attention to detail matters, especially when it comes to being trusted to run a business with someone else's money.

Regardless - I'd be quietly reprinting and replacing.

I don't consider this creative, personally. People have been littering my car with leaflets for many years. Every single time, I get annoyed and throw them away.

There's a huge gap in the complexity of getting your product perfect and not making grade-school level grammar errors on a 20 line 'parking ticket.'

That's pretty harsh. I understand that it's silly to not proofread very carefully when doing a stunt like this, but language mistakes aren't a sign of incompetence.

Language mistakes are not, but not having your document proofread before you illegally litter it all over a parking lot is.

Grammar mistakes are a sign of laziness, not incompetence. Both should be warning signs.

Right, by incompetence I was referring to the parent's comment towards the guy not being able to build a quality product because he left an apostrophe out of a word.

Just to make sure: you are being sarcastic, right?

Not really. Someone launches a hot-new-startup-you-just-have-to-see every 20 minutes. The time I have spare to devote to looking at new things is super limited, so, much like with that old adage that "first impressions count", I start to filter things based on what are, in many cases, trivialities.

In this case, though, I don't feel that it's entirely trivial. Quality is something that happens top to bottom, I believe. Think about Apple -- while I dislike a lot of things they do as far as the walled garden goes -- I feel that they have a quality experience through and through. Every step along the way -- visiting the store, buying a product, even the packaging is well done.

When you have 30 seconds to make an impression on the people that might make or break your future, "that startup that littered a bunch of cars with dead trees and didn't even get someone to proofread" is not the kind of impression I'd want to be making.

Because as humans we don't make mistakes, right? You probably mean well, but this is the kind of attitude that people are complaining about in the HN community right now. People being cynical and instead of giving positive criticism people (like yourself) are picking on a lot of peoples grammar. I understand grammar is important, but working in an industry that heavily relies on print I see far worse mistakes than this on a daily basis by big large corporate printing companies all of the time. It happens, relax man.

Edit and wow, down-voted for telling someone to ease up on the submitter because there is a grammar mistake in the fake ticket? What the heck is wrong with this place? The community appears to be in a lot worse shape than I thought.

  "It happens, relax man."

Fabricode doesn't seem very upset about it? He's just pointing out an error, which could show negatively on the company. I know I would take them less seriously if I saw the mistake. It's healthy advice, double check your grammar before printing flyers, writing a blog post, etc.

It is positive criticism. It takes a matter of seconds to spot these errors. Lighten up.

While I can't speak for him, my take on the kind of lame grammar sniping that sw007 was referring to in the post that kicked off that shitstorm[0], is posters on HN using irrelevant, petty criticism to dismiss and shit on others' opinions and arguments, in informal discussions internal to the community.

The grammar mistakes that fabricode (the guy you're responding to) is criticizing are in user- and investor-facing advertising copy. If superficial presentation matters anywhere, it matters there. And I feel like since this was something so bold, and those flyers and this post are probably going to be the most attention this company is going to get unless it takes off, the stakes are even higher. While it was maybe (maybe) a little snarky, no other top-level comment has pointed these mistakes out, and I think such cosmetic topics are fair-game to discussing things like this. If it's not already there, that criticism is pretty close to constructive given the subject matter.

-----

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747

Reply on news.ycombinator.com