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Comment by tom_rath | Hacker News Reader

How could these folks think making their customers look and feel like idiots would benefit their business?

I'm not sure why everybody's gotten their panties in a bunch over this. It seems to me that users got free traffic out of the deal, at least the way I see it: If I had gotten the e-mail, I certainly would have tweeted about it, and people who hadn't seen the prank yet would probably have thought it was cool enough to go check out my slideshow. After I realized it was a prank, I probably would have tweeted again, bringing in even more traffic.

Is the argument that it added lots of erroneous Twitter posts? Get over it. You tweet when your eggs are too runny, a single tweet about a slideshow isn't gonna hurt.

Are you saying it makes the people who fell for the prank look stupid and unprofessional? You really think being the butt of a joke on April Fools Day is the end of the world for your public image? It's Twitter, not your company's quarterly report.

I, too, get tired of the endless barrage of April 1 jokes that flood my favorite sites once a year - its a little excessive, and in this case, not even that funny. But those that are calling for SlideShare's head in this situation either have too much time on their hands or need to stop taking themselves so seriously.

I did get the email, and I did send the tweet. However, I assumed it was a bug in their traffic counting code.

However, there is a subset of the social web that measures worth with simple numbers (wheter it be # of Twitter followers, FeedBurner subscribers, or SlideShare views). For the people who fell for it and are always talking about their big numbers, I would imagine that this could make them appear foolish, mostly because putting too much stock in those numbers is foolish in the first place.

I think it was a brilliant campaign. We are all talking about SlideShare and #bestofslideshare was a trending topic on twitter. I have a sense that the online slide sharing space is getting more competitive with new services launching, so why not use April 1 to help assert your position as the market leader.

This is a good point... As an advertising campaign, it was deviously clever. I would love to see the traffic spike they got from Twitter, and the successive spike from the buzz around the story.

I got the email but didn't act on it. Mainly because if I was a 'slideshare rockstar' the additional bandwidth from downloading the mp3 for the slidecast would certainly have taken me over the bandwidth limit on that hosting account. I assumed that slideshare had simply messed up its hit counter. At the time I felt this was unprofessional.

Now that I know it was just a practical joke and not a technical blunder I still think it was unprofessional only now for different reasons.

There's no such thing as bad publicity.*

* I don't believe this maxim, but a ton of people do. They are rich, I am not.

There are lots of things you can do to get publicity that ultimately hurt your company. Maxim's like this have parts of truth but you can't throw all logic aside and just do things to generate publicity.

Facebook could delete everyone's profile and generate tons of publicity. They'd probably also go out of business.

I think it was a bad thing to do to their users.. but I would guess that the publicity it generated was well worth it. Heck it got me interested!

I'm both a friend of the founders and a customer (conference/business user). They're definitely not the kind of people who believe "any publicity is good publicity." That said, they have a wide variety of people using the site, posting everything from soft-porn to serious business decks. While a well-done gag does get you a lot of traffic and attention, it's hard to do it right when you're dealing with such a diverse set of users. They've learnt their lesson.

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