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Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

This is the same as the 'Nigerian 419' fraud concept. They fill the email with spelling and grammar mistakes and in doing so, they filter out the marginally intelligent, resulting in a pre-filter to attract the most gullible.

The crappy, hand drawn ads, the dire videos, and the bad production have the same effect. The punter needs to be a gullible fool, since a fool and his money are soon parted.

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Just like it says in the article. (You did read the article, right?)

Although the article only made that connection with the video (unless I was skim-reading too much), not with the crappy advert drawings (which they assigned other, perhaps equally relevant logic to) or moronic messaging.

It also mentioned the badly drawn ads.

Makes sense, but Occams razor is more than enough to explain the bad grammar and production effects. Any evidence its a conscious decision?

PlentyOfFish did a small test: http://blog.ads.pof.com/2012/04/03/throw-everything-you-know...

Great resource - thanks!

Hmm, I didn't even notice the first ad, because I subconsciously scanned over it as an ad. The second one looked liked content to me, so I saw that one, and even felt an impulse to click and see what kinda game someone built with such a campy art style

Microsoft Research wrote a paper about the intentional use of bad grammar/spelling in 419 scams. Keeping the ostensible source as the email Nigerian is another tactic along these lines, since anyone even slightly savvy will see that as an immediate red flag after all these years.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tzink/archive/2012/06/24/bad-spellin...

I skimmed the actual paper and wasn't very impressed. It uses theoretical models without any actual data to support its claim. The claim the paper actually proves is:

    If there is a technique that successfully weeds out false positives, then such a technique can be used profitably.

Which is a far cry from their supposed claims, that the spammers are using bad grammar and "Nigeria" to weed out false positives. They basically proved a molehill and claimed a mountain.

I heard it different: all that stuff is intended to make the mark feel superior and less likely to suspect that they're being scammed. Makes a lot more sense to me.

That's pretty much the same thing.

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