For this same reason, ads that advertise miracle cures, tricks and dates tend to have spelling errors and terrible graphics. They do NOT want to attract any attention from people who see right through it.
That is more likely just a result of the people available to them for drawing/writing those ads, i.e. in non-English communities, rather than a willfully intended effect.
Haven't you seen all the legit Chinese/Japanese/Indian/etc. ads in their home countries with spelling errors and "terrible graphics?" It's even somewhat of a meme [1] especially some of the stuff written on their t-shirts.
Anecdata: once upon a time, I got into a conversation with the chap writing the sign outside a restaurant in Morocco, with the dishes of the day. With a smile on his face, he pointed out a spelling mistake on the sign: it was one he made deliberately, because he found (or believed) that more customers came in with the mistake than without. Less professional, more informal vibe?
My whole trip to Morocco was very enlightening. The locals were extremely sharp WRT tourists and word got around surprisingly quickly. It's foolish to leap from an economy's development level to the intelligence or education of individuals within it. Economies usually suffer for more structural reasons.
I used to work for a price comparison website in the UK. After a big redesign which took them from being a horrendous mess to "glitzy web-2.0 style" (this was 2006) their conversion rates went down.
They did some user research, and a lot of users said they trusted the site less after the redesign, because it now looked more like a typical advertising business.
I worked for a sketchy MMO site back in the day (MMOEdge), and my friend who ran the site paid $20k for a very professional and slick-looking pre-built site from a team in Australia. It looked really good, much better than the old amateur-looking site that was currently running. But when he switched to it, he found conversion rates went down, by quite a bit actually. We couldn't figure it out and eventually switched back to the old "cheap" looking site, and traffic was restored.
There's something about looking TOO professional that turns people away, I guess.
I find most "Web-2.0" websites childish and amateurish-looking. It's really a matter of taste. The Bloomberg site looks cheap to me -- just like a tabloid in the supermarket.
It looked much more trustworthy a couple of years ago.
I suspect that Craigslist would suffer the same way if they ever really changed. After all, that guy Craig whose list this is is not the same as some corporate slick entity and it makes it all look more genuine.
Maybe it's that the semi-unprofessional look implies a personal connection, like it's just "that guy Craig" like you said, vs. an impersonal and polished corporation.
This reminds me of a documentary about Costco that mentioned the company's significant efforts to "look cheap" without actually being cheap, in the negative sense of the word.
I know I am much more willing to run some software downloaded from a website that looks like it hasn't changed since the late 90s and is maintained by one person and their dog.
I never really used Digg myself, so I can't speak from personal experience, but I wonder how much is due to utility. A lot of the new user interfaces I see these days simply do not have the same utility as older ones did; there's been a clear trend in dumbing things down, called "minimalism". Just look at Gnome3; they removed all kinds of configuration options.
Reddit is a very "busy" site. But you can do a LOT on it; there's many different features packed into it. The same thing happened over on Slashdot: the old versions had more features, and their "Beta" version tried to "simplify" things which really meant removing features.
IIRC I have seen this discussed here on HN, someone had A/B tested their automated thanks-for-signing-up response mails "from the CEO" and found a significant improvemed response rate when they included one small speling mistake in the Subject.
pretty sure that mailing list email body copy with the slightly awkward formatting a CEO might use for general correspondence will tend to outperform a neat obviously-a-mailshot-created-by-marketing HTML template when it comes to generating many types of response as well.
> It's foolish to leap from an economy's development level to the intelligence or education of individuals within it.
A relative of mine is the CEO of the Fiji branch of a major multinational B2B services company.
Every few years, the regional headquarters in Australia would send over a guy from either Australia or New Zealand to manage some department. This would almost always end in disaster.
The problem was that they would always end up insulting clients. Clients were multi-million dollar corporations, but since they were usually family run businesses, their founders/CEO's often spoke poor english. I guess this is what made these (white) men assume that they were idiots and end up talking down to them. The one time it worked was when the guy they sent was Aussie, but had been raised in Papua New Guinea.
When this relative of mine became CEO, one of his first decisions was to ask HQ to send him a guy from their Sri Lanka office instead. It's been about five years now and they've had no more problems.
On the flip side of this, white expat professionals sent to work in management roles for multinational companies in Pakistan and India will frequently find that their equivalently-ranked colleagues have better spelling and grammar than they do, having studied the Queen's English in elite private schools since kindergarten. The only major difference being pronunciation.
I don't think the OP was commenting on the intelligence of the locals, but more their grasp of a foreign language. I've studied Chinese for six years and lived in Taiwan for four of them, I still make elementary mistakes because it's just not my native tongue. I bet if I was drawing up a menu I'd miss a couple characters or strokes on characters.
I've heard it is common for many Chinese people, when eating at a Chinese restaurant in another country, choosing the cheapest looking restaurant, the restaurant with the most basic signage, shops that haven't changed much since the 1970's, etc. Reason being they expected the unpretentious and basic looking restaurants to be much more authentic.
There is a Greek food place on south 1st ave in Seattle that advertises "BEST YEEROS IN TOWN!" on their sign. Yes they know what a Gyro is and how it's really spelled.
While I can't say for sure in this case, there are plenty of examples where ads are dumbed down because otherwise they don't appeal to the target market. Besides, if your target is dumb/gullible people, why take the risk of wasting a click on a smart person who you won't convert anyway?
I read an interview with a professional designer of ads on porn sites (maybe in wired?), she said they are crappy and amateurish on purpose. I'd provide a source but this is not something I will google at work.
Imagine 100 new scammers start posting whatever they want on the internet. The ones who post with perfect English get lots of people replying, but most of the victims realize it's a scam quickly. The ones who post with bad English get fewer people replying, but those who do are the most likely to fall for the scam.
You have a lovely Darwinian scenario here in which the highest return on investment comes from those with lower skill levels.
It's also the same rationale behind the rude "construction worker" catcall. Although you can tell quite a bit about a person by their gait and attire, the false positive rate is high, so it's doubtful a man will learn enough just by watching to make it worth his while to approach a stranger in the street for a sexual encounter. But whistling and making lewd remarks instantly winnows out any "difficult" (which is to say assertive, intelligent or self-respecting) women, leaving the most willing and easily pliable as the ones most likely to respond positively.
Basically the caveman version of the PUA approach. Be willing to make a boorish fool of yourself, have no shame in what you're doing and some percentage of responses will be positive.
For a long time, I wondered why all of the orgone / chemtrail / crystal worship web sites seemed like they followed a stylistic theme -- black background, spinning gifs, centered text in different colors and stlyes -- like the same schizophrenic guy made all of them. I went to dig up some citations just now, and it seems like the proliferation of cheap web page templates has fixed that, though.
That was the geocities style. Maybe the first generation of conspiracy web sites on the Internet created a cultural anchoring effect? Or maybe it just took a decade to update or replace the first generation of sites?
