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Welcome to promoting your product baby. No one cares if it's fake or not except the little voice in your head. If you can post fake messages today that promote

by gyomu 1y ago

Welcome to promoting your product baby. No one cares if it's fake or not except the little voice in your head. If you can post fake messages today that promote your product and will start getting you users, why wait for real users to provide real testimonials that align with what you want to communicate to do the same thing 3 months from now? Of course you want to seek out real testimonials from satisfied customers and share those as much as you can; you don't want to lock yourself in a bubble where you post how amazing your app is while emails of dissatisfied users pile up in your inbox; but it's not an OR situation, it's an AND situation. You might also be surprised to hear that the family laughing together while drinking Coca Cola in those video ads isn't a real family, they're not really having fun, and they're not really enjoying Coca Cola for the sake of it - they're on a filming set in front of a green screen paid by the hour.

nucleogenesis 1y ago
For me it’s just that I just don’t want to lie to make money. Commercials are on their face a work of fiction unless stated otherwise — for customer testimonials in commercials that are fake (in the US anyway) there has to be text saying as much. Because otherwise they’d be lying…
- gyomu 1y ago
  I don't see any lies in the screenshots from the original article being discussed here. They are a staged conversation with a contact named "Speedometer FAQ" - not pretending like it's with a real person, or real customer testimonials. If it makes you feel better, you could put "simulated text messages" at the bottom of such images.
  - an0malous 1y ago
    “Technically you could figure out I was lying” is a great haven for liars. The whole reason this strategy works is because there are many people who won’t notice that contact name and assume it’s a real conversation, otherwise they wouldn’t have used the chat format. It’s like saying “it’s ok to call the car ‘full self driving’ because one could figure out it’s not really full self driving.” But obviously, not everyone will realize that and you’re benefitting from the deception otherwise you wouldn’t have done it.
- an0malous 1y ago
  The sad reality is that many others have no such qualms and you will lose to them in a competition, many of the largest YC companies used deceptive practices to get to their level of success

by gyomu 1y ago

nucleogenesis 1y ago

For me it’s just that I just don’t want to lie to make money. Commercials are on their face a work of fiction unless stated otherwise — for customer testimonials in commercials that are fake (in the US anyway) there has to be text saying as much. Because otherwise they’d be lying…

gyomu 1y ago
I don't see any lies in the screenshots from the original article being discussed here. They are a staged conversation with a contact named "Speedometer FAQ" - not pretending like it's with a real person, or real customer testimonials. If it makes you feel better, you could put "simulated text messages" at the bottom of such images.
- an0malous 1y ago
  “Technically you could figure out I was lying” is a great haven for liars. The whole reason this strategy works is because there are many people who won’t notice that contact name and assume it’s a real conversation, otherwise they wouldn’t have used the chat format. It’s like saying “it’s ok to call the car ‘full self driving’ because one could figure out it’s not really full self driving.” But obviously, not everyone will realize that and you’re benefitting from the deception otherwise you wouldn’t have done it.
an0malous 1y ago
The sad reality is that many others have no such qualms and you will lose to them in a competition, many of the largest YC companies used deceptive practices to get to their level of success