SlideShare’s April Fool’s Prank: Cruel, Or Just Unusual?

http://mashable.com/2009/04/01/slideshare-april-fools/

by ericbieller • 17 years ago

48 26 17 years ago

mashable.com

tom_rath• 17 years ago

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

ZitchDog• 17 years ago

There's no such thing as bad publicity.*

* I don't believe this maxim, but a ton of people do. They are rich, I am not.

ericbieller2• 17 years ago

I think it was a bad thing to do to their users.. but I would guess that the publicity it generated was well worth it. Heck it got me interested!

ssharp• 17 years ago

There are lots of things you can do to get publicity that ultimately hurt your company. Maxim's like this have parts of truth but you can't throw all logic aside and just do things to generate publicity.

Facebook could delete everyone's profile and generate tons of publicity. They'd probably also go out of business.

dandelany2• 17 years ago

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.

jaxn• 17 years ago

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.

streety• 17 years ago

I got the email but didn't act on it. Mainly because if I was a 'slideshare rockstar' the additional bandwidth from downloading the mp3 for the slidecast would certainly have taken me over the bandwidth limit on that hosting account. I assumed that slideshare had simply messed up its hit counter. At the time I felt this was unprofessional.

Now that I know it was just a practical joke and not a technical blunder I still think it was unprofessional only now for different reasons.

kingsley_20• 17 years ago

I'm both a friend of the founders and a customer (conference/business user). They're definitely not the kind of people who believe "any publicity is good publicity." That said, they have a wide variety of people using the site, posting everything from soft-porn to serious business decks. While a well-done gag does get you a lot of traffic and attention, it's hard to do it right when you're dealing with such a diverse set of users. They've learnt their lesson.

andr• 17 years ago

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.

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

google buys Morton Salt, salt 2.0 on the way?

sachinag• 17 years ago

Another Chicago institution bites the dust. ;_;

jrockway2• 17 years ago

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

sah• 17 years ago

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!

greyman• 17 years ago

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

Hexstream• 17 years ago

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

tdavis• 17 years ago

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

jrockway2• 17 years ago

Well said, both of you :)

jbyers• 17 years ago

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.

ericbieller2• 17 years ago

Good call on this..

jasonbentley• 17 years ago

That's a really cogent analysis.

smokey_the_bear• 17 years ago

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.

zaidf• 17 years ago

Not cruel. Not unusual.

Just poor taste spam.

quizbiz• 17 years ago

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

ggchappell• 17 years ago

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.

catfish• 17 years ago

slide show hucksters

april fools

egos deflate ;)

SlideShare’s April Fool’s Prank: Cruel, Or Just Unusual?

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