
The Economic Logic of (some) Amazingly Awful Websites - dredmorbius
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/7tojtidef_l4r_sdbringw
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jdietrich
If nothing else, Ling's Cars is _remarkable_. The car leasing market is
interminably bland, full of hundreds of players offering the same deals on the
same cars. There aren't many ways to stand out in that market, but Ling has
done it by being absolutely bonkers.

That remarkability may also act as a form of social proof. On some level, we
instinctively recognise that if Advantage Motor Leasing Ltd screw over a bunch
of their customers, they could just rebrand as Premier Motor Leasing Ltd and
carry on regardless. A faceless company with a Wordpress template website can
easily shake off a bad reputation. Ling's business is deeply personal and
highly distinctive, representing a significant investment in her reputation.

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Angostura
I was in the market for a car last year - nearly leased rather than buying -
and nearly went with Ling. Here's why

1\. I'd heard of them - marginally important, they had received coverage
because of the design.

2\. While the graphical design may make your eyes bleed, the site is supremely
good at making the business of leasing a car simple. There are nice bits of
text, written in colloquial breezy English, that explain exactly how leasing
works and what the pros and cons are of different kinds of deals

3\. It's wonderfully easy to compare the different cars and deals on the site
and get an idea of the total cost of leasing.

4\. The whole vibe of the site gives you the feeling that the conpany is
quirky, human, but very straightforward and honest - not something you
necessarily associate with leasing a car.

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gadders
Ling is pretty active on Facebook, and responds to questions and comments.

She has said that her target market is 30-ish year old men, mostly - the Top
Gear demographic if you like - and that is mostly who she targets. She does
lots of green-screen videos - she made her own Desposito video in Mandarin and
has started a series based on Wakaliwood films. She had a competition to win a
Lings Cars mug on her website. Mine arrived with a cock drawn on the bottom.

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onion2k
Ling's Cars is not bad design. It applies a eastern design aesthetic to a
western business. It's jarring because people in the west aren't used to it.
Just have a look at any typical Japanese or Chinese ecommerce site eg
[https://www.dmm.com/](https://www.dmm.com/) ... there's _a lot_ going on.
It's not bad; it's just different.

~~~
acdanger
I’ve never been able to square the Eastern vs Western dichotomy of design
aesthetic between the approaches to web vs product. Eastern product design
seems to embrace minimalism far more readily than Western design, but the
inverse is true for web design.

~~~
dredmorbius
Eastern typography and charactersets have exceedingly different affordances to
Western (esp. Latin alphabet) ones.

Whether or how this includes differences in degree, depth, or distinctions of,
say, reading literacy, I don't know.

At one level, though, Ling's Carss reminds me strongly of Amazon's recent
design trends (past five years or so).

~~~
astkaasa
A very common view about why amazon lost Chinese market share is that amazon
has much less information about the goods compared with its Chinese opponents.

~~~
dredmorbius
Amazon certainly has little enough information on products in its non-Asian
variants.

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namanyayg
I guess that this type of "optimization" happens naturally when someone
accidentally commits to a particular way of business deeply. I don't think it
is done with the goal of lead qualification in mind.

Why do I think so? It's because you're pretty much _never_ going to make a
site like this if you're optimizing for immediately qualifying leads. All of
this knowledge would be a result of trial & error.

~~~
dredmorbius
A key point I'm trying to make (post author here) is that it's quite
possibleto uconsciously stumble into a successful pattern. And to be blind to
that faact.

Tim Brady, ex-Yahoo exec, on why success is a losy teacher:

When things are going well and you’re in a growth industry, you don’t have to
deal with many difficult issues. It’s the old cliche, winning solves
everything. It’s really true. It solves everything… or maybe better said, it
masks all your mistakes. A lot of the mistakes you make get masked because you
receive almost no negative feedback.

But then the bottom fell out and the board let Tim Koogle go. The upper ranks
of management emptied out pretty quick, except for me and the CTO who stuck
around. We got a new CEO and set of peers in upper management. Let me just
say, I learned a whole lot more about business on the way down than I did on
the way up.

[http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/06/tim-brady-
interview...](http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/06/tim-brady-interview/)

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k_lander
" _Nigerian 419 scammers (and other fraudsters) employ similar tactics --
their methods are intensive on the scammer 's time, so the pitches they make
are so obviously bogus that anyone with half a brain (or more) realizes
they're bogus. Automatically selecting for those with less than half a
brain._"

Someone should create an scam responder bot tied to an email address that
people can forward their spam emails to. The AI would then attempt to engage
with the scammers in a human like manner, the intention being to increase
their engagement cost. Anything like this exist already?

EDIT: Yup. Google threw this up:
[https://www.rescam.org/](https://www.rescam.org/)

~~~
brightsize
Yes: [https://spa.mnesty.com/](https://spa.mnesty.com/)

Sadly the service is not working at this time due to this issue related to
Mailgun:
[https://gitlab.com/stavros/Spamnesty/issues/97](https://gitlab.com/stavros/Spamnesty/issues/97)
.

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adjwilli
The design of Hacker News operates on a similar principle. It looks vaguely
like an error page. Non-developers look at a think something is wrong, but
technical people stick around and self-select into the community.

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pasabagi
To be honest, I thought that website was great. It's very close to the
aesthetic of a lot of contemporary internet art.

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runnr_az
I think there's something to be said for this argument, but I'd like it to see
the argument fleshed out.

