5 ms·

Not being an android user and not being familiar with the Play story I might have glanced over "Develop App" having internally misread it as "Developer App" and

Not being an android user and not being familiar with the Play story I might have glanced over "Develop App" having internally misread it as "Developer App" and thinking it was a category, not the developer's name.

NiekvdMaas 6y ago
Exactly this, it doesn't really stand out. Obviously I wouldn't have installed the app if I would have noticed.
- muststopmyths 6y ago
  I wasn't trying to excoriate you for your mistake, so I apologize if that's how it comes across. I did try to modulate the harshness of "Come on, dude" with the rest of my comment. Like I said, sometimes we let our guard down. So it's understandable if you got fooled. In hindsight there are more red flags in just that screenshot ("More by Develop App", obviously fake reviews to point out just two), but God knows I've clicked through installs for shit apps on iOS many times.
  - ShroudedNight 6y ago
    FWIW, Given the surrounding context, I interpreted "Come on, dude" as an exhortation for the author to cut themselves some slack. I agree that 100% correct 100% of the time is an exhausting bar to maintain, and one that we should be working very hard to ease this requirement. I think it's worth pointing out that the difficulty / impossibility of achieving that bar (at least in the general case) is one of, if not the central tenet of Christianity, ostensibly the dominant religion of the West for something like 1500 years. Regardless of one's metaphysical beliefs, it's worth remembering that arguments for the necessity of grace and slack in positive interactions have a long historical precedent, and I find we ignore them at our peril.
  - NiekvdMaas 6y ago
    No worries, no offense taken. I still can't believe myself I fell for this, as said I have 2FA on all accounts and I'm normally very cautious. I guess it's a combination of all the factors here at play: Facebook allowing a fake TikTok Ads advertiser, the ad looking very legit (referring to an existing ad credit program), Google allowing a fake TikTok Ads app with fake reviews, and not getting any notifications until the amount was charged from my PayPal account.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  I didn't notice it the first time I looked either :-( Bad spelling and grammar used to be a great indicator of something being amiss, but the volume of it in legit business these days has made me so desensitized that I didn't even blink at this one.
reaperducer 6y ago
I might have glanced over "Develop App" having internally misread it as "Developer App" I bet many thousands of people on HN would have done the same thing. I think it's an issue with reading comprehension. In general, comprehension seems to have plummeted in the last five to ten years. I send people e-mails asking two questions, and only get the first one answered. People read a headline and think it means something other than what it says. Flamewars erupt online over something that nobody actually wrote, but someone thinks they saw. It seems to be rooted in the fact that these days people skim text, rather than read what is written. I don't know if it's because of general information overload, or a lack of attention to detail, or if the mindless scrolling of phone apps has trained us that visual impressions of words are good enough. Or, if I can put on my old man hat, maybe it's just that people aren't as good at reading as they think, and that if people looked at a book half as often as they look at their telephones, they might get some good reading practice.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  It is also the case that people aren't as good at writing as they think. I've seen people write pages and pages of text to say a few simple things, don't separate the important from the unimportant, etc, and then wonder why others don't take 15 minutes out of their busy day to read the incessant, flavorless text until they find the actual point. A good way to write text where you're going to ask people for stuff is to write it in a top-down manner, where first of all you mention "I want X", then you quickly summarize what exactly you want and why, and then write a more detailed paragraph on the various nuances, always making sure to cut everything down to its absolute essentials.
  - akdas 6y ago
    I really like that style. It's related to the Inverted Pyramid style in journalism, meaning others have thought a lot about how to get important information up to the front of a piece of writing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
    - 6y ago
StavrosK 6y ago
Being an Android user, I looked for the developer's name, saw "Develop App" and thought it was a category and I was just mistaken about where on the page the developer's name was supposed to be. This was all instinctive, I didn't sit down to think about it, though. It doesn't help that the developer name and category have the exact same visual style, I guess.
kn0where 6y ago
The big red flag I saw was that “Tik Tok” is in the wrong font in every screenshot.

NiekvdMaas 6y ago

Exactly this, it doesn't really stand out. Obviously I wouldn't have installed the app if I would have noticed.

muststopmyths 6y ago
I wasn't trying to excoriate you for your mistake, so I apologize if that's how it comes across. I did try to modulate the harshness of "Come on, dude" with the rest of my comment. Like I said, sometimes we let our guard down. So it's understandable if you got fooled. In hindsight there are more red flags in just that screenshot ("More by Develop App", obviously fake reviews to point out just two), but God knows I've clicked through installs for shit apps on iOS many times.
- ShroudedNight 6y ago
  FWIW, Given the surrounding context, I interpreted "Come on, dude" as an exhortation for the author to cut themselves some slack. I agree that 100% correct 100% of the time is an exhausting bar to maintain, and one that we should be working very hard to ease this requirement. I think it's worth pointing out that the difficulty / impossibility of achieving that bar (at least in the general case) is one of, if not the central tenet of Christianity, ostensibly the dominant religion of the West for something like 1500 years. Regardless of one's metaphysical beliefs, it's worth remembering that arguments for the necessity of grace and slack in positive interactions have a long historical precedent, and I find we ignore them at our peril.
- NiekvdMaas 6y ago
  No worries, no offense taken. I still can't believe myself I fell for this, as said I have 2FA on all accounts and I'm normally very cautious. I guess it's a combination of all the factors here at play: Facebook allowing a fake TikTok Ads advertiser, the ad looking very legit (referring to an existing ad credit program), Google allowing a fake TikTok Ads app with fake reviews, and not getting any notifications until the amount was charged from my PayPal account.
donmcronald 6y ago
I didn't notice it the first time I looked either :-( Bad spelling and grammar used to be a great indicator of something being amiss, but the volume of it in legit business these days has made me so desensitized that I didn't even blink at this one.

reaperducer 6y ago

I might have glanced over "Develop App" having internally misread it as "Developer App" I bet many thousands of people on HN would have done the same thing. I think it's an issue with reading comprehension. In general, comprehension seems to have plummeted in the last five to ten years. I send people e-mails asking two questions, and only get the first one answered. People read a headline and think it means something other than what it says. Flamewars erupt online over something that nobody actually wrote, but someone thinks they saw. It seems to be rooted in the fact that these days people skim text, rather than read what is written. I don't know if it's because of general information overload, or a lack of attention to detail, or if the mindless scrolling of phone apps has trained us that visual impressions of words are good enough. Or, if I can put on my old man hat, maybe it's just that people aren't as good at reading as they think, and that if people looked at a book half as often as they look at their telephones, they might get some good reading practice.

StavrosK 6y ago
It is also the case that people aren't as good at writing as they think. I've seen people write pages and pages of text to say a few simple things, don't separate the important from the unimportant, etc, and then wonder why others don't take 15 minutes out of their busy day to read the incessant, flavorless text until they find the actual point. A good way to write text where you're going to ask people for stuff is to write it in a top-down manner, where first of all you mention "I want X", then you quickly summarize what exactly you want and why, and then write a more detailed paragraph on the various nuances, always making sure to cut everything down to its absolute essentials.
- akdas 6y ago
  I really like that style. It's related to the Inverted Pyramid style in journalism, meaning others have thought a lot about how to get important information up to the front of a piece of writing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
  - 6y ago

StavrosK 6y ago

Being an Android user, I looked for the developer's name, saw "Develop App" and thought it was a category and I was just mistaken about where on the page the developer's name was supposed to be. This was all instinctive, I didn't sit down to think about it, though. It doesn't help that the developer name and category have the exact same visual style, I guess.

kn0where 6y ago

The big red flag I saw was that “Tik Tok” is in the wrong font in every screenshot.