Sometimes you see an idea so zany that you have trouble even modeling the person who thought it might be a good idea, and went so far as to follow through. This is one of those times, for me.
Sadly with the amount of “it’s just a joke bro” I see on the Internet, it wasn’t as difficult for me to model the person lacking the necessary scruples to think of this and then immediately think “nah, I better not”
Doubly so for this. I can't understand how someone could come to the conclusion that 1) customers would think this was funny, and 2) it would improve their brand.
I mean, this is a like an AWS April fools joke where they pretend to loose all your data or something.
Typical tone deaf actions of the privileged. Myself, I would just chuckle and think "yeah right." Ten years ago I would have been in a panic, as someone mentioned previously, this would have been my food money for the month or my house payment and I would have been at thier mercy for a refund. Not appropriate, obviously now.
True and especially in France where there are lots of ghettos, I have friends there who were making around 1200€ a month (common minimum wage), and paying 600€ for rent. They probably had 400€ running monthly costs. Imagine these people receiving a 500€ bill...
I'm sure that's just a hypothetical example but just reading that last sentence gave my feelings of anxiety. Of course I have backups, and of course I'm testing them... but still.
From Twitter feeds, it seems many people cancelled their credit card in case of a fraud. This is quite annoying. Hopefully, some of them also have been told about that by their banks.
This statement is absolutely wrong. You make it sound like everyone is being rational all the time. Scams are at a similar level of credibility and they do work very well in practice. If I'm told I won't be able to pay rent next month despite working three jobs, which already stressed me out to no end, then it can definitely happen.
But that's not all. Even if we stay rational, we still have the responsibility to consider that the account had been hacked, or that an accounting error happened, etc. That will take some time to resolve. Maybe I'll incur financial cost in addition to wasted time, e.g. by canceling a credit card or involving a lawyer.
What will you do if your prank made me panic, or made me waste resources? Will you take responsibility?
Do you think Deliveroo would find it funny if I send them a bomb threat in response? It's just a joke after all! Yes they had to close their office and it cost them millions, but... it was just a prank, so chill, dude. Haha.
It's a funny as hitting someone's head with a shovel.
A very large bill might do the trick. They might even pay it, it's a pretty old school scam, sending invoices to random companies, usually some receptionist just rubber stamps it.
They fully deserve this and there should be a lawsuit, I have absolutely zero empathy for Deliveroo. What a monumentally stupid and irresponsible joke. I’m livid just thinking about this.
Can you imagine the stress this would bring to someone not as fortunate financially!?
> Can you imagine the stress this would bring to someone not as fortunate financially!?
Seriously, how does the person who approved this not realize that, for many people, a charge like this means they can no longer afford food for the month, and have to spend time they don't have trying to resolve the situation?
Time really is one of the biggest issues that separates the more fortunate from the less. Many are oblivious to it, or at least dismissive of its impacts.
This is hilarious on a meta level. Like, it's funny that a marketing team could be so detached and misanthropic as to think people would find this funny.
I made a comment here to similar effect. I agree, everyone seems to want to “be cute”.
But I am seeing it’s deeper than that. Look at SV obviously “nudging” political discourse, look at companies like Delta weighing in on election laws while requiring the same of their customers things they decry as a public evil, or Coke telling people to “be less white” whatever that is supposed to mean.
It’s like everyone has forgotten their own core missions. And yea yea “social responsibility” and etc, but I don’t want the cast of Avengers telling me how to vote, or care what my airline thinks about anything but planes and how to serve me better, or what joke my pizza places has to push out because it’s “international joke day”.
What became wrong with putting your head down and doing the best you possibly can at the thing you do?
People have realized you can't just put your head down and assume the rest of the world is going to do the right thing, because it won't. If that's all you do, you're going to get overrun by organized bad actors.
And not the bad actors who think it's ok to run a protected left-turn red light when there's no traffic. The bad actors making a push these days are the ones who believe "race traitors" should be executed and murder of government officials you disagree with is appropriate political discourse.
Know why these people are comfortable talking about and even acting on these beliefs? Because everything they hear is agreement. Too many people keep their heads down and pretend it will go away. They think clearly-disproven mantras like "sunlight is the best disinfectant".
But there are people starting to recognize that sunlight has in fact accelerated the growth of these things. What stops them is consistent widespread visible opposition. And that means lots of people and businesses stepping up and making direct statements. You hear about it when famous people do it because that's how fame works. But they're hardly the only ones.
Who is Coke presenting constant and widespread visible opposition to when they said “be less white”?
If you want to keep it straight tech... if you want Facebook being the ultimate moderators of what speech is allowed, what is true, and who can say it, that’s like your opinion man. I disagree and think they could focus on a sustainable long term plan that will best suit their investors while not causing harm - but how interested does FB seem on their core product vs legislation, “nudging”, their “outreach” on issues that they want to see changed? I’ve seen a lot more of Zuck and Dorsey in testimony than I have tech talks lately.
I'm not aware of how the French laws treat such matters. In my country, for each unduly charged cent, a company must reimburse two if the customer demands so. Such prank would've automatically costed them a good amount.
Interesting. Is that if they were charged or if they were sent an invoice? Like, if I sent you an invoice and mistyped the , and . you get to hit me with some double extraction even if I didn't actually get any money from you?
Customers, in general, don't abuse such right, and I've never come across cases of extremely evident mistakes like these.
However, in case a customer demanded such "premium", I believe you would have to take the matter to court showing that your mistake wasn't in bad faith.
Edit: but in general, yes, companies have to be really cautious. Such law applies to enterprise customers as well. I worked for a small telecom provider which hired services from a bigger one. They started a whole new department responsible for detecting unduly charges and, within some months, the department was not only recovering money, but also generating revenue.
I've just read a short juridical article regarding this law and I would like to append some information for the sake of completeness/correctness:
- regarding the hypothetical case presented, the customer would be entitled to get the double refund only if she'd paid the bill;
- still regarding the hypothetical case, if you've sent the wrong bill by mistake, and the customer still paid it, you could offer a "simple" refund and, in case the customer demands the double, you could refuse and the burden of proof would be hers -- although you could still loose in case the customer takes the issue to court and the judge gets convinced you attempted to commit fraud
- on the concrete scenario I mentioned (the company I worked for), the unduly amount probably happened out of negligence of the big telecom, not due to bad faith. However, it would be so hard for them to prove it (especially considering the error was never fixed), that they would simply accept to refund the excess in double
They have an app that lists restaurants and plenty of different foods and drinks. The potential to do something funny is huge just by creating fake menus and fake new restaurants. Funny, no harm done.
This makes it even more difficult to imagine how they could have thought that faking potential fraud and financial loss would be a good idea (can it ever be a good idea, anyway ?)
That went down about as well as slashdot's april fools joke a few decades ago that started 2 weeks before april 1st. Slashdot said they were being sued. Complete with slashdot fans passing around a hat to take a collection for legal bills. This was long before go fund me type services, too.
I think most agree it was a bad joke - there is no 'absurdity' to it. Even when you find out it is fake, it's not really funny, it's more like "oh, why did you do that".
That said, I'm amazed how angry commenters here seem to be getting over it. Yeah, they tried to do something funny, it wasn't, it backfired and annoyed people. But at the same time, lighten up. Not everything needs to be a rage-inspiring transgression.
Haha, I guess I'm a minority. Other commenters thought it was "morally reprehensible", "fraud", and are "livid". I'll try to do a better job of seeing how evil those around me really are.
At this point I try to laugh at everything, with the possible exception of low racist crap, just so I'm not associated in any way with the stick-up-the-ass no-one-can-laugh-if-not-everyone-is-laughing crowd.
It hurts me, because I used to have very sophisticated taste in humor.
There is another comment in the thread where someone suggests that maybe its time we do away with april fools. Personally, I think most of the jokes are dumb (and honestly mostly closer to the kind of inoffensive-to-all anodyne crap that can still be distributed as a "joke"). But I find it horrific that people think doing away with it is the answer (it's also possible that person is trolling I suppose)
Anyway, I've said before, this reminds me of "The name of the rose" where the inquisition era zealot couldn't accept that religious men should laugh, because if they can laugh, they could laugh at God and the whole power of the church would fall apart. There is an echo of this in the current lack of tolerance for any humor that derives from making fun of something, grounded in the misunderstanding that finding humor in something means disrespecting it.
I don't agree. I think some people are just too lazy to think of a good, funny joke that may or may not be offensive to some, but that in any case does not make anyone truly worried. These did and still do exist.
Come on, people may have 600€ in their bank account to survive a month and they receive some fake ass invoice, which is supposed to clear almost all of their savings. That’s the definition of “not cool” April fools joke.
I'd concede that it's not cool, if true, that banks and tech companies have so much power over people that a fake invoice someone knows they aren't responsible for makes them afraid for their survival.
Cmon dude. Everyone’s made different. Such an email would
Be very concerning. Especially during this economic period where people are losing their jobs.
If your monthly food budget is 500 EUR, which is realistic for a family of 4 in western Europe that shops with some care and only occasionally uses Deliveroo, this could be scary until you realize it was a bad joke - so scary that you immediately acted on it, causing yourself further aggravation and expense (banks in Germany often charge for replacement cards).
So yeah, it would have enraged me, as I would have immediately canceled that card, having had a credit card number stolen and abused before and having to wait for the bank to finish investigating the fraud to get my money back.
Am the only person who thinks we should not do April Fools anymore? It’s funny when you’re 8 and in school. It’s just become a day of annoying corporate bullshit as an adult.
You are not the only person. I would be super happy if we just stopped this thing once and for all. It was kind of funny 20 years ago. It's not anymore.
Just make it extremely clear it's April 1st and do something unusual instead of lying to everyone.
The worst part of April Fools' isn't the spirit, it's the deception and inauthenticity.
I remember one creator on YouTube this year who put it as: "yes, today is April 1st, but what I did is real, not a lie, and it took actual effort to achieve."
There are two ways you could do it. 1) the extreme way. Make it illegal under fraud laws (at least for corporations) or 2) create a non-binding agreement and get companies to commit to it via petition or similar.
It was funny in the late 90s. Slashdot would go all wonky, everything was a lie, and it was mostly absurd press releases and wacky scientific "findings". You could say "bah humbug" and stay off the internet and mostly avoid it. Or, you knew what you were getting into after maybe the second headline.
But the voltswagen thing was way too early. Jokes and serious news are mixed on sites like HN. This shit with deliveroo is unthinkable. And all this in a environment where fake news isn't just rampant, it's been weaponized.
Yeah, count me out. It's gone too far. Companies really need to quit it. At least, we could hope that HN could keep this crap off the front page
TL;DR: Since the government authorized facial recognition on security cameras and the mask prevents that, they voted a law to have a QRCode on your mask to enable "facial" recognition
I find those corporate April fools jokes unnecessary. It just hurts other businesses when communicating unpleasent news. Imagine getting an email that you got fired, and next day you appear at work thinking it was an April fools joke. Or that there was a security breach and you start mitigating it, only to find out that you wasted your time because of your manager being a joker.
Corporate takeover of April Fools' Day is such a stupid fucking aspect of modern society.
Pranks are at their best when they punch up, subversively point out the irrationality of existing power structures, or when they have no larger agenda or point. When they give you a moment to remember how absurd everything really is when you think about it.
Treating 4/1 as an excuse for PR departments to find a clever way to push their message just makes me sad.
The only joke I was surprised and chuckled at was the stackoverflow limiting the amount of copy paste. I was annoyed for few seconds and then laughed out loud.
The rest of the jokes are obnoxious, trite, wannabe bandwagons. Maybe it's time corporates ease down on this worn out tradition?
Czech Mapy.cz (part of a big corporation for cz scale) also has a good one (almost) every year. This year they restricted you from browsing more than 10 km from your location and the map went blank after 9 PM, according to current covid restrictions here. Obviously, there was a simple way to escape it.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadI mean, this is a like an AWS April fools joke where they pretend to loose all your data or something.
April fools is about pranking people.
Ya'll need to relax.
I get that for some people this is a lot of money, but these people aren't stupid because they're poor, they too can figure out it's a prank.
"That's funny, I didn't order 500 euro of pizza. No way I'm gonna pay that."
Please stop white knighting poor people by simultaneously implying they're retarded.
This statement is absolutely wrong. You make it sound like everyone is being rational all the time. Scams are at a similar level of credibility and they do work very well in practice. If I'm told I won't be able to pay rent next month despite working three jobs, which already stressed me out to no end, then it can definitely happen.
But that's not all. Even if we stay rational, we still have the responsibility to consider that the account had been hacked, or that an accounting error happened, etc. That will take some time to resolve. Maybe I'll incur financial cost in addition to wasted time, e.g. by canceling a credit card or involving a lawyer.
What will you do if your prank made me panic, or made me waste resources? Will you take responsibility?
Do you think Deliveroo would find it funny if I send them a bomb threat in response? It's just a joke after all! Yes they had to close their office and it cost them millions, but... it was just a prank, so chill, dude. Haha.
It's a funny as hitting someone's head with a shovel.
A very large bill might do the trick. They might even pay it, it's a pretty old school scam, sending invoices to random companies, usually some receptionist just rubber stamps it.
I struggle to think why everyone in the age of fake bullshit posted on social media all feel like they must “play the game”.
If you don’t have something clever or funny, not doing anything at all is a perfectly acceptable option.
I think they real story here is some implicit requirement to “be cute” or “be heard”.
Can you imagine the stress this would bring to someone not as fortunate financially!?
Seriously, how does the person who approved this not realize that, for many people, a charge like this means they can no longer afford food for the month, and have to spend time they don't have trying to resolve the situation?
But I am seeing it’s deeper than that. Look at SV obviously “nudging” political discourse, look at companies like Delta weighing in on election laws while requiring the same of their customers things they decry as a public evil, or Coke telling people to “be less white” whatever that is supposed to mean.
It’s like everyone has forgotten their own core missions. And yea yea “social responsibility” and etc, but I don’t want the cast of Avengers telling me how to vote, or care what my airline thinks about anything but planes and how to serve me better, or what joke my pizza places has to push out because it’s “international joke day”.
What became wrong with putting your head down and doing the best you possibly can at the thing you do?
And not the bad actors who think it's ok to run a protected left-turn red light when there's no traffic. The bad actors making a push these days are the ones who believe "race traitors" should be executed and murder of government officials you disagree with is appropriate political discourse.
Know why these people are comfortable talking about and even acting on these beliefs? Because everything they hear is agreement. Too many people keep their heads down and pretend it will go away. They think clearly-disproven mantras like "sunlight is the best disinfectant".
But there are people starting to recognize that sunlight has in fact accelerated the growth of these things. What stops them is consistent widespread visible opposition. And that means lots of people and businesses stepping up and making direct statements. You hear about it when famous people do it because that's how fame works. But they're hardly the only ones.
If you want to keep it straight tech... if you want Facebook being the ultimate moderators of what speech is allowed, what is true, and who can say it, that’s like your opinion man. I disagree and think they could focus on a sustainable long term plan that will best suit their investors while not causing harm - but how interested does FB seem on their core product vs legislation, “nudging”, their “outreach” on issues that they want to see changed? I’ve seen a lot more of Zuck and Dorsey in testimony than I have tech talks lately.
Unfunny. Not even smart.
EDIT:
Here's a guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkKs2LgF6qc
You've got to wonder how people come up with ideas as clearly braindead as this.
Apparently there was one such case.
Customers, in general, don't abuse such right, and I've never come across cases of extremely evident mistakes like these.
However, in case a customer demanded such "premium", I believe you would have to take the matter to court showing that your mistake wasn't in bad faith.
Edit: but in general, yes, companies have to be really cautious. Such law applies to enterprise customers as well. I worked for a small telecom provider which hired services from a bigger one. They started a whole new department responsible for detecting unduly charges and, within some months, the department was not only recovering money, but also generating revenue.
- regarding the hypothetical case presented, the customer would be entitled to get the double refund only if she'd paid the bill;
- still regarding the hypothetical case, if you've sent the wrong bill by mistake, and the customer still paid it, you could offer a "simple" refund and, in case the customer demands the double, you could refuse and the burden of proof would be hers -- although you could still loose in case the customer takes the issue to court and the judge gets convinced you attempted to commit fraud
- on the concrete scenario I mentioned (the company I worked for), the unduly amount probably happened out of negligence of the big telecom, not due to bad faith. However, it would be so hard for them to prove it (especially considering the error was never fixed), that they would simply accept to refund the excess in double
This makes it even more difficult to imagine how they could have thought that faking potential fraud and financial loss would be a good idea (can it ever be a good idea, anyway ?)
That said, I'm amazed how angry commenters here seem to be getting over it. Yeah, they tried to do something funny, it wasn't, it backfired and annoyed people. But at the same time, lighten up. Not everything needs to be a rage-inspiring transgression.
It hurts me, because I used to have very sophisticated taste in humor.
Anyway, I've said before, this reminds me of "The name of the rose" where the inquisition era zealot couldn't accept that religious men should laugh, because if they can laugh, they could laugh at God and the whole power of the church would fall apart. There is an echo of this in the current lack of tolerance for any humor that derives from making fun of something, grounded in the misunderstanding that finding humor in something means disrespecting it.
It’s not cool at all
So yeah, it would have enraged me, as I would have immediately canceled that card, having had a credit card number stolen and abused before and having to wait for the bank to finish investigating the fraud to get my money back.
IKEA sent an email about Hund Couture. They made a little video with dogs dressed in clothes made of IKEA bags. Amusing. Hurts no one.
Sending someone a fake bill that looks real isn’t really funny. I’m not even sure what that is.
The worst part of April Fools' isn't the spirit, it's the deception and inauthenticity.
I remember one creator on YouTube this year who put it as: "yes, today is April 1st, but what I did is real, not a lie, and it took actual effort to achieve."
But the voltswagen thing was way too early. Jokes and serious news are mixed on sites like HN. This shit with deliveroo is unthinkable. And all this in a environment where fake news isn't just rampant, it's been weaponized.
Yeah, count me out. It's gone too far. Companies really need to quit it. At least, we could hope that HN could keep this crap off the front page
Makes me thing about the april fools on LinuxFR[1]
[1] - https://linuxfr.org/news/mise-en-place-du-port-du-masque-ave...
TL;DR: Since the government authorized facial recognition on security cameras and the mask prevents that, they voted a law to have a QRCode on your mask to enable "facial" recognition
Obvious fake news, but funny read anyway.
Pranks are at their best when they punch up, subversively point out the irrationality of existing power structures, or when they have no larger agenda or point. When they give you a moment to remember how absurd everything really is when you think about it.
Treating 4/1 as an excuse for PR departments to find a clever way to push their message just makes me sad.
The rest of the jokes are obnoxious, trite, wannabe bandwagons. Maybe it's time corporates ease down on this worn out tradition?