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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
And it covers people who sponsor conferences, meetups, and diversity programmes, bloggers and other content creators, and all the other ways that people gain awareness of their products. What do you think the OP, which ends with a call to buy the author's book, is?
And "marketers" these days isn't just "people who create adverts", marketing should be the whole point of your business, to quote Peter Drucker :
“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 50.0 ms ] threadThis 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.
He's a fan of HHGTTG (http://stilldrinking.org/the-fizzbuzz-from-outer-space-expla...), of course, wrote a conversational piece with some hilarious lines (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), and a very nice and even-handed eulogy for 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.
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.
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.
[1] "HELLO" auto-playing audio Flash ads.
“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
People aren't typically born marketers, and tend to have a choice about whether or not they stay one.