Controversial T-shirt destroys business | Hacker News Reader

Controversial T-shirt destroys business

money.cnn.com

12 pointsmartey13 comments

As a customer of the original and deliberately offensive online T-Shirt store. Who certainly never had a problem with his wares causing this level of offense until one particular case. I cant help but think the problem here wasn't so much the offensive shirt or the content. It was that he failed to realize that putting a t-shirt that has little old ladies chuckling and moms happily wearing it, next to a tshirt that say something that only >1% would wear with pride and more than >25% may take offense at, is inviting disaster.

I doubt people even saw the shirt directly, I bet it came up as a related product while they were buying something else on his store, and the suggestion that they may want to buy this shirt based on them buying another of his shirts was likely one of the primary causes of offense "I see you like <cute cat joke shirt> I sold you. Can I recommend you snatch a copy of this handsome <culturaly satirical rape joke> as well?"

That sort of thing tends to offend people. But I dont see why he didnt apply a flamethrower of purity all over the place. New Corp-Registration, new domain, new amazon seller account, new EVERYTHING, but this time, some sanity checks in that script. A few careful letters/calls to various services to make sure they know hes legit & what hes doing is means they are keeping a valuable customer. and then a wash of shiny new design and brand all over it. Meet the New company same as the old company.

I find these self-righteous social justice types very irritating. If they have a problem with offensive randomly generated shirts, how about they just ignore them?

"Go and kill FreakyT"?

Haha touché. Though that might count as specific threat, which seems like it's in a different category.

Uh, if this gentleman has the freedom to print such t-shirts, then I see no reason why others cannot also exercise similarly protected freedoms by complaining.

As for the rest, to paraphrase an Australian fellow, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. "Just ignore it" at a minimum enables, if it's not tacit approval.

The images of offensive shirts were the result of a computer program that automatically generated random phrases and images. Fowler had used the program to expand his company catalog from 1,000 designs to more than 10 million, casual shirts with pithy one-liners like, "I mustache you a question."

Hard to believe there was no editorial oversight. On the other, hard to get to 10M designs with editorial oversight.

"The images of offensive shirts were the result of a computer program that automatically generated random phrases and images" - I simply don't buy this. Generating stuff randomly is one thing. Putting random stuff on display is another.

I'm not sure why you would include rape in your word list either...

If you use any normal dictionary of words you will end up with the word "rape".

You can find some generated books on Amazon that are created from Wikipedia content. They're print on demand so they get pretty obscure.

http://www.amazon.fr/s/ref=sr_pg_3?rh=n%3A52042011%2Cp_27%3A...

edit: actually let's link directly to page 400 (!) of the results which includes 15 euro books on "Articles on Pre-1945 Florida State Roads, Including: Florida State Road 3a (Pre-1945)" and "Articles on Education in Middlesex County, New Jersey, Including: Middlesex County College, Woodrow Wilson Middle..." etc.

Really? There was a t-shirt printing API posted on HN just a few days ago. Lots of online t-shirt shops simply need you to upload an image in order to create a storefront selling that shirt. Wouldn't be that hard to automate it.

Good.

Bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com