T-Shirt Hell pulls a fast one; closing message a troll for more business | Hacker News Reader

T-Shirt Hell pulls a fast one; closing message a troll for more business

tshirthell.com

27 pointsJimEngland31 comments

Shock of all shocks. NO ONE saw this coming. eye roll

Yeah no joke. Every comment on every submission of the original story to every social news site on the internet expressed suspicion that this was marketing.

And yet they kept discussing it and were interested in the (non)story. Proves human nature.

The surprising thing was that TechCrunch wrote about it.

Slow news day? :/

The surprising thing is that people read TechCrunch.

What is TechCrunch?

I see the McRib is back.

I believed it. A guy who changes his name to Sunshine Megatron might do anything.

I guess they learned something from furniture stores

Perhaps they should now create a new shirt that says, "I got suckered by tshirthell.com". That's sure to create more buzz for them.

100K shirts sold in 3 weeks. Brilliant. Props to the marketing concept.

yes props for making each and every one of those customers feel like suckers, brilliant marketing move that's sure to pay off handsomely over the long term . . . although something tells me t-shirt hell's customers don't have a problem with being made to feel like suckers.

A lot of Microsoft's customers feel like suckers but most keep paying for upgrades and buying more. It works.

I didn't say I respected them. The whole company is about treating everything as a joke. They aren't selling expensive software licenses here. They aren't fishing for respect. They want the "wow" factor. And they are good at getting it.

I understand their deal, I just don't think manipulating your customers into making a purchase is a good longterm strategy, even if some of the customers get the joke . . . time will tell I guess. Also, props usually means proper recognition/respect . . . http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=props just sayin . . .

Obnoxious isn't a marketing concept.

It can be - it's just rarely a good one. Rich Jerk is a great example of this - a heavily cross-promoted product that's done very well.

It is if you're T-Shirt Hell and you sell shirts based on the concept of causing offense. Their whole thing is to piss people off, and they did it again.

I understand, it was a cynical comment about marketing. :)

That's not marketing, that's fraud.

In a number of states, it's illegal to have a "going out of business sale" unless you are actually going out of business.

How awesome would it be if someone sued them for this? It's worth snooping around to see if what he did was illegal.

Would've appreciated an NSFW on this.

What exactly is NSFW? (Of course, reading HN is not exactly work-related anyway, right?)

More like NSFUB (Not Safe For Uptight Bosses).

That is, of course, subjective, but I'm pretty sure a site that uses the n-bomb and the c-bomb (and an arsenal of others) qualifies.

Already flagged and deleted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484639

The discussion and votes given seem to indicate people are interested in the story nonetheless. censorship--

Quality control != censorship

Censorship is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful or sensitive

Quality control would be removing spam, nonsensical content or, in some cases, content that's wildly off-topic.

Considering the original T-Shirt Hell story was run here without being "quality controlled" away, it seems reasonable to accept that a followup is, therefore, not off-topic for HN. That makes the removal of said story censorship and not quality control.

i bought 3 shirts... you got me.

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