

SlideShare’s April Fool’s Prank: Cruel, Or Just Unusual? - ericbieller
http://mashable.com/2009/04/01/slideshare-april-fools/

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jbyers
Aside from most people being bad judges of their own sense of humor, it
strikes me that many of these jokes land in the subtle-middle-mediocre swamp.
If you're going to do one of these pranks, you've got to go to extremes. Way
over the top, huge amounts of self-deprecation (witness aspects of Qualcomm's
WolfPidgeon bit), etc.

Slideshare's mistake was two zeros. They should have put on an absurd number
of zeros, and made the counter go up while the victim watched, by a lot. Maybe
break as it passed a bajillion and shatter as the numbers fall off the page.
Now it might be that this isn't that funny either, but at least it's pushing
hard on people's expectations and a bit absurd. It certainly would have been
self-evident as a prank, which is a pretty important component of any April 1
joke that affects you personally.

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smokey_the_bear
yeah, on kgs, www.gokgs.com an online place to play Go, they changed
everyone's rank to 9 Dan. It was funny because it was absurd and fun to see
such a high rank next to your name. If they'd just increased everyone's rank
by two, I'd have thought they changed their ranking algorithm or something,
and been sad later.

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tom_rath
How could these folks think making their customers look and feel like idiots
would benefit their business?

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dandelany
I'm not sure why everybody's gotten their panties in a bunch over this. It
seems to me that users got free traffic out of the deal, at least the way I
see it: If I had gotten the e-mail, I certainly would have tweeted about it,
and people who hadn't seen the prank yet would probably have thought it was
cool enough to go check out my slideshow. After I realized it was a prank, I
probably would have tweeted again, bringing in even more traffic.

Is the argument that it added lots of erroneous Twitter posts? Get over it.
You tweet when your eggs are too runny, a single tweet about a slideshow isn't
gonna hurt.

Are you saying it makes the people who fell for the prank look stupid and
unprofessional? You really think being the butt of a joke on April Fools Day
is the end of the world for your public image? It's Twitter, not your
company's quarterly report.

I, too, get tired of the endless barrage of April 1 jokes that flood my
favorite sites once a year - its a little excessive, and in this case, not
even that funny. But those that are calling for SlideShare's head in this
situation either have too much time on their hands or need to stop taking
themselves so seriously.

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jaxn
I did get the email, and I did send the tweet. However, I assumed it was a bug
in their traffic counting code.

However, there is a subset of the social web that measures worth with simple
numbers (wheter it be # of Twitter followers, FeedBurner subscribers, or
SlideShare views). For the people who fell for it and are always talking about
their big numbers, I would imagine that this could make them appear foolish,
mostly because putting too much stock in those numbers is foolish in the first
place.

I think it was a brilliant campaign. We are all talking about SlideShare and
#bestofslideshare was a trending topic on twitter. I have a sense that the
online slide sharing space is getting more competitive with new services
launching, so why not use April 1 to help assert your position as the market
leader.

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dandelany
This is a good point... As an advertising campaign, it was deviously clever. I
would love to see the traffic spike they got from Twitter, and the successive
spike from the buzz around the story.

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ggchappell
There is one problem with this article: the line at the end.

> What do you think of the prank? All in good fun, or did SlideShare cross the
> line? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

This suggests that majority vote rules in situations like this.

But really it should not.

So, for example, if I had slides on SlideShare (I don't), and I had fallen for
this, then I'd probably just laugh it off (along with some irritation; April
Fools Day pranks stopped being funny around 1980, okay?). However, other
people, who might use this for more "serious" things, have been significantly
wronged by the SS people. Does my laughing it off make this okay?

I guess it all boils down to two points.

1\. If you are in a situation where people entrust their reputations to you,
then you need to take this seriously.

2\. It does not matter in the slightest if 99% of those people think it's okay
to do damage to those reputations. Don't.

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jrockway
I think this prank was hilarious. People need to stop taking themselves so
seriously.

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sah
Not just hilarious, but truly in the spirit of AFD, unlike most of the lame
"pranks" that plague the internet every April 1st. Maybe it was unwise and bad
for business or maybe it didn't actually matter, I don't know. But either way,
this was a great prank!

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greyman
I agree about the spirit of AFD. In old good days, AFD was always about making
fool of somebody else.

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Hexstream
In summary, egos have been hurt and this has caused much whining.

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tdavis
Addendum: SlideShare learns the hard way that the Internet is Serious
Business™

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jrockway
Well said, both of you :)

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andr
Thanks to Mashable for bringing some sense in the April Fools stupidity. I
like the idea of the day, but if it's not really really funny don't do it.
Notably, "company X buys company Y" is dull. Doubly so if X == Google.

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nazgulnarsil
google buys Morton Salt, salt 2.0 on the way?

~~~
sachinag
Another Chicago institution bites the dust. ;_;

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quizbiz
I was sure Hacker News would get "hacked" for April Fools.

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catfish
slide show hucksters

april fools

egos deflate ;)

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zaidf
Not cruel. Not unusual.

Just poor taste spam.

