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Comment by browningstreet | Hacker News Reader

I had a site with some traffic and a popular, class-leading ad plugin for the platform.

At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription.

I got an email from the developer, which was kind enough, asking me why I was cancelling and if there was any feedback I wanted to share.

I mentioned how complicated ad inventory, ad placement, and online ordering for hands-off customer self-service was.

His question back was, "What's hard about it?"

I couldn't even muster a reply.

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Maybe there are some details missing here, but asking for more detailed or tailored feedback makes it seem like he cares and was willing to hear you out. Sometimes people are in their own industry for so long that they forget what their industry and tools look like to outside eyes. A simple menu to him could’ve been overwhelming for you as a quick example.

Unsurprisingly, there's a representative XKCD. https://xkcd.com/2501/

I ran into this a while back at a talk when the speaker used the phrase "perfectly ordinary sodium iodide gamma ray spectrometer". I pointed out to him afterwards that that's not something that most people would expect to follow "perfectly ordinary" in a sentence, and he explained that, yes, today you'd be using thallium-doped CsI or NaI scintillators instead.

If the response is an exact quote, the tone is "you must be stupid." It doesn't convey caring and wiling to hear things, and if they can't understand that before sending it, it makes perfect sense that the product sucks, and it will only get worse.

It’s not the tone. It’s how you perceive the tone to be. Be careful, especially in a culturally diverse and international environment. Plenty of cultures cringe when they receive overly friendly phrased words, as it will not sound honest and curious to them but condescending and fake (in this context it may be perceived as sarcasm); whereas others will experience and mean it as straightforward openness.

Communication is hard. Even harder in writing. A usually working approach is to assume friendliness.

Why didn't you tell him what you told us?

"At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription."

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