

Trolling Marketers for Profit and Pleasure - jeffreyrogers
http://stilldrinking.org/trolling-marketers-for-profit-and-pleasure

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jwegan
As someone who regularly uses utm parameters, this has to be the most pathetic
attempt at trolling I've ever seen. When looking at data you usually just pay
attention to the top performers, not the stuff at the bottom of the list with
1 or 2 clicks. Even if you did notice the troll parameters you would just
shrug your shoulders and move on without spending more than a second of your
day thinking about it (which is much less effort than the person who pulled of
this "troll" put into it).

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Agreed this was pretty lame. I kept on reading waiting for the inevitable
'this is on HackerNews because I wrote a program to flood them with fake
analytics', instead it's literally just the one drop in the ocean. A marketeer
will (not) see some silly name at the bottom of page 30 of their google
analytics traffic and that's it.

This is the equivalent of writing 'poop' on a survey where your name or answer
is supposed to go. i.e. everyone will do it once in their lives, but we really
don't need to write blog posts about it and link to them on HN. The only
difference is that it's likely someone will actually read 'poop' on a survey
when entering the data, whereas on GA it'll be ignored on the bottom of the
list.

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thaumaturgy
Wow, the writing on this site is amazing.

He's a fan of HHGTTG ([http://stilldrinking.org/the-fizzbuzz-from-outer-space-
expla...](http://stilldrinking.org/the-fizzbuzz-from-outer-space-explained)),
of course, wrote a conversational piece with some hilarious lines
([http://stilldrinking.org/waiting-for-doctor-
who](http://stilldrinking.org/waiting-for-doctor-who)), and explained why
programming is all of the best parts of art and engineering and project
management combined ([http://stilldrinking.org/programming-
sucks](http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks)), and a very nice and even-
handed eulogy for Fred Phelps ([http://stilldrinking.org/a-letter-from-fred-
phelps](http://stilldrinking.org/a-letter-from-fred-phelps))...

This is really some of the best writing I've seen online in a long time.

~~~
nmjohn
I have found myself, now two hours after clicking this link, finally returning
to the comments because I spent so long reading his other posts.

Peter is an incredible writer and even in places where we have differing views
on the world, it still was a joy to read his perspective because of the way it
was articulated.

I recommend reading a post or two, highly worth the time. I actually went and
ordered his book because I liked his writing so much, something I've never
even remotely considered before.

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mhoad
This might be the single most useless thing I have ever seen on here. I've
seen more sophisticated fart jokes.

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anonnyj
"Also, I lied about the profit in the title, this is about being a dick."

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noelwelsh
Replace marketers with, say, blacks, Jews, or any other minority group and all
you have here is the standard template of the bigot wrapped up in fancy words
with a technical twist. "I like gays, some of my best friends are gays, but
..."

The first paragraph assures us the author respects marketers, and then
suddenly it's "marketing people and SEO people and whatever people doing their
branding and paradigm shoving and optimizing through pipelines or down funnels
or up pyramids of pigs with too much mascara". I can no more get behind
stereotyping of marketers than I can any other group in society.

At least the author has the insight to admit they are being a dick.

~~~
rosser
_Replace marketers with, say, blacks, Jews, or any other minority group..._

People aren't typically _born_ marketers, and tend to have a choice about
whether or not they stay one.

~~~
noelwelsh
How is that relevant? See my response to DanBC in this thread.

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88e282102ae2e5b
This is just phenomenal writing.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
That's why I posted it :) The whole site is great (I think some of his stuff
has shown up here before). The people posting about the lack of sophistication
or the childishness of the troll itself, aren't getting the real reason I
submitted it, which was to expose more people to Peter's writing.

