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jameshart 5y ago

You should give some thought to the moral argument you're making here. You believe it's okay to fake that the letters you send out are handwritten, because > our service 1) helps people and 2) can never cost them net-negative. That's not much of a justification, is it? What other means can you justify on the basis that you believe the service you offer is such an incredible force for good? If deceiving customers is okay, is outright lying to them? Selling their personal info on to other businesses? If someone's going to hire you to represent them in a tax dispute with their county government, one presumes that they will be expecting you to represent them truthfully, right? That you wouldn't misrepresent the true value of their home, or, for example, try to pass a protest filing off as having been individually prepared, but actually have automated the process. Doesn't your initial contact being deceptive rather undermine your credibility as someone who will act honestly and truthfully on a customer's behalf? The fact is pretty much all businesses believe that the service they offer helps people and offers their customers a net value. That alone is not a justification for bending your ethics. But when the entire way your business 'helps people' is that it helps them to shift their tax burden to their neighbors, kidding yourself that your unsolicited commercial mail is not really junk mail and devoting enormous ingenuity and effort to misleading your prospects are probably the least of your ethical concerns.

CosmicShadow 5y ago
who cares though? If he could hand write a note 10000 times easily he would, but instead he got a machine to do it for him so now it's bad? Isn't that what computers do? I'd be 1000x more offended if he emailed me something that looked handwritten, but was just a bot, and everyone seems to do that.
- haihaibye 5y ago
  We shouldn't celebrate all computer optimisations, if the optimisation breaks laws and hurts people. People were annoyed with unsolicited mail, so invented "no junk mail" signs, and laws. A handwritten address requires human time and thus is probably not worthwhile for low-margin spammers. It is a costly signal that a letter probably isn't junk mail. By reducing the cost of the costly signal, he breaks the value of it - now everyone lives in a lower signal, higher noise world: more likely to get unsolicited mail, more likely to throw out legit non-spam handwritten mail.
  - CosmicShadow 5y ago
    True, but any handwritten note from someone you don't know is already suspect or garbage, and in no likely future will every ad be handwritten. I wouldn't call a 2 second glance as I filter mail to throw in the recycle bin "costly" per-se, and I don't know how the mail sorters at the post do their job. I can't speak on laws as I am unaware of them. If you are using a direct mail campaign from a company they probably would know which addresses not to bother with anyway due to the no junk mail stickers (although that may be giving them too much credit) and would operate within the law. Anyway, I don't want to try and defend "spam", the more you get, the more it sucks for everyone, but at the same time, I don't feel bad about what this guy did and as an entrepreneur trying to make a living. Maybe other people get way more junk mail than I do, but at 0-3 items a day, more on the 0 side, it just seems trivial and a non-issue and it won't scale into as big a problem as digital spam due to the costs. It's more like a clever hack, because who actually uses mail, that's so analog and back2basics. I've got an axidraw and a laser cutter and can program and I'll be damned if I try to go through that much effort to make what he made, it just seems like a nightmare to me, but he was creative and looked like he had fun and did some really hacky stuff, so props to him.
aforwardslash 5y ago
"deceiving customers", in the same sense all food joints that say "best<whatever> in town", or carlsberg's "probably the best beer in the world". I'd argue there are plenty of examples on why this isn't the slippery slope you propose.
- jameshart 5y ago
  That’s not comparable. As I said, most businesses believe they offer a good product. Claiming ‘it’s the best in town’, when that’s clearly only your own biased opinion, is hardly deceitful. Making a letter look like it was personally handwritten by a human when it wasn’t is a lie. It is intended to convey an idea that is not true: that you have been personally chosen to receive this offer, that a person has devoted time to getting in touch with you, that this offer is probably not being sent to everybody and therefore you may have been specially selected to receive the offer, because a human being chose you. The equivalent is a restaurant using pictures of a kitchen making pizzas from fresh ingredients in their menu, but actually serving microwaved frozen slices. Sure, they never actually said they were selling fresh pizza, but… they knew what their customers would be thinking.