I always find it a little fishy when startups put glowing quotes from news outlets without linking back to the original article. It takes minimal effort on their part and it's generally better to read the quote in context anyway. This only reinforces my suspicions.
I know many startups don't link back to the original article because they don't want to drive traffic away from their site. It's not for any particularly nefarious reason at all. When people see a link, they'll click on it, and they often won't find their way back.
The same way many landing pages don't link deeper into the site to encourage registrations?
News sites/blogs make a tremendous amount of effort to draw you to their other articles. I won't link them prominently because users are so easily distracted.
They took a nice page out of the FB playbook, ie import as much data from your competitors before they cut you off. I've never understood why LinkedIn gave them access to the API to begin with.
I don't understand how they got 25m users to begin with. I they they made me a profile one click after a friend invited me. So I guess I do understand how they got 25m users...
"Falsifies" seems like an odd choice of words here; I went to the article expecting that the Wall Street Journal made some statement that BranchOut managed to disprove, not that BranchOut faked a quote from the Wall Street Journal.
It doesn't mean "to disprove" as much as it means "to posit a condition under which the statement would be disproved". In other words, a falsifiable claim is one that can be empirically tested, not one that's necessarily already been proven false.
I agree. I had sort of a brain fart when I was coming up with a title, and couldn't think of anything that hit the mark short of "BranchOut puts quote from Wall Street Journal that Never Was."
Too late to change the URL now, but the title itself is changed.
The paywall has holes punched in it for Google to index the site. Often (not always, depending on cookies) going to an article from a Google search will get you the full text of even paywalled articles.
Nothing's hidden behind the paywall - Google can see everything. The general strategy for paywall sites is to let Google index everything and let a person's first visit to the site from Google bypass it as well. That way the paywall stays up, Google indexes their site, and they don't get in trouble for showing different things to the Googlebot than everyone else.
Did the same search. Wow. This is pretty scummy; I had thought they were bad but, not this bad. I already was not too fond of them due to the number of requests to join their service I receive on Facebook.
Its (sadly) quite common for news organizations to copy verbatim parts of a press release as part of an article. Not to say BranchOut aren't being dishonest here, but I wouldn't be surprised if this 'quote' was actually printed in the Wall Street Journal in some form or other - probably in some filler article like 'top 10 web startups' or somesuch...
So where did the quote come from? Was the text from a BranchOut press release that happened to be syndicated in Wall Street Journal? For example, the quote shows up in a press release on yahoo.com in a format that resembles a news article:
I considered the syndication possibility. If that's the case, BranchOut may excuse themselves with a bit of "Well technically, it was in the Wall Street Journal..." However, I think that sort of excuse doesn't do much for one's integrity in these circles. It might do as much for their image as saying "The five stars are just a divider for the text" might.
Apparently quite common among hackers. I remember reading a section about it in ESR's Jargon File ages back that had a great explanation:
Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this:
Then delete a line from the file by typing “dd”.
Standard usage would make this
Then delete a line from the file by typing “dd.”
but that would be very bad — because the reader would be prone to type the string
d-d-dot, and it happens that in vi(1), dot repeats the last command accepted. The
net result would be to delete two lines!
Ha! Oops, my mistake. For some reason when I hear "Oxford comma" I always think comma-inside-the-quote rather than comma-before-the-and.
I wonder if there's an equivalent hacker preference and explanation for the comma. Most of the people I know prefer it. Maybe we're all just doing list.join(", ") in our heads, or perhaps it's an instinctive mistrust for ambiguous grammar.
I've used the Oxford comma since high school when my favorite English teacher introduced me to them. At the time I didn't know they had a name. I found out they were called Oxford commas about five days ago when watching an episode of Boss on Starz. Since looking it up then I suddenly come across the term a lot now which is weird because I had never heard that term before.
"But it wasn’t until I noticed that Oxford comma that it all suddenly became very clear. That’s not right. That couldn’t be the Wall Street Journal." (From OP)
Does anybody know why an Oxford comma would be a signal that the quote isn't from the WSJ?
I've always found that using an oxford comma ("red, black, and blue" instead of "red, black and blue") is just common sense.
Separation by comma is a concrete indication that the items on the list are separated, which is useful in situations where the last two items could mean something different if not separated ("black and blue" has it's own special connotations, whereas "black, and blue" doesn't).
When you read a comma in writing, there is a pause in the flow of the sentence, like there would be in speech. Overusing commas can distract from the point you are trying to make.
I find the Oxford comma is completely unnecessary. If you find yourself in a situation where you feel a common turn of phrase (like black and blue) necessitates the addition of a comma, try switching around the items in the list (i.e. 'black, red and blue' vs. 'red, black and blue'). Less commas == more flow.
PS. I am only posting my 2 cents because you misused "it's" in your last parenthetical.
"Opinions vary among writers and editors on the usage or avoidance of the serial comma. In American English, the serial comma is standard usage in non-journalistic writing that follows the Chicago Manual of Style. Journalists, however, usually follow the AP Stylebook, which advises against it."
I've done it and I've seen it done by others. When I did it I banked on people ignoring the heading above it which reads "Never yet featured on" then some prominent logos below it. Here: https://writeapp.me at the bottom of the page. I was trying to be tongue-in-cheek but it can easily be misconstrued. It looks like BranchOut really does want to mislead in a more sinister way.
If I wasn't looking for it, I would have missed the "Never Yet Featured On". The list of feature articles is so recognizable now, I don't really pay attention to the details in the panel anymore.
Yep, that's the point. Now, I'm just a nobody and that's a bit of a joke but if that project were to take off (which is a very relative thing to judge but I'll know it when I see it) then I'll absolutely take that down and actually try to legitimately get featured in those places (except the app store because I will have an app there so it'll be true).
It's one thing for a nobody like me to do that but for a somewhat well known and popular service to blatantly lie without even giving a hint to the deceit is pretty low rent. I've got 13 people signed up to test a beta, 50 users from the original version which was a quick weekend project but if I saw those numbers grow at a rate that told me my project could attract a few hundred to a few thousand users I'd take those logos down so fast your head would spin.
ButI got the idea from others who have done the same thing with the heading saying something like "Soon to be featured on". Anyway, my whole point is that at a certain point it's not even okay to do that sort of thing jokingly and to fabricate a quote when you've got backing and so much visibility is dangerous because eventually someone will catch you like the OP did here.
Hmm... I've never run into this trouble before, but then again I've never really generated traffic, either.
I switched WordPress over to a more lightweight theme for the time being, but is there anything else I might do on the non-server-side of things to make this work?
Still- it was down for about 15 minutes (at least with my checks on downforeveryoneorjustme) Probably not the most productive of comments, on second thought.
There's no joke about how to tell when a startup CEO is lying, there is however a joke about politicians.
Seriously though, president is probably the least important job in america. I bet America would be just fine without a president for the next 100 years. Why you elect presidents based on things like 'likability' and 'electability' is because it's a very unimportant job, that just about anyone can do.
Probably why America doesn't elect very many highly trained people to do the job. Community organizers, peanut farmers, coke addicts, philanderers, actors, etc.
I'm curious... why would America be fine with no president for 100 years, but a bad CEO means a company goes under?
I'm seriously having a hard time finding a lot of logic in your response. And I'm not joking. I find it incredibly hypocritical that our society just accepts political trash.
And there's no executive board in most sovereignties... yet similar patterns arise. Despite some snarkiness, this is a legitimate question and a serious problem. I'm disappointed HN downvotes it.
Actually I agree with you, HN seems to have the tendancy to defend the status quo. That really is not what the issue here is though, you are just off topic.
Why does this get downvoted so hard? It's a proven fact that both parties lie through their teeth. I understand HN isn't a political platform, but this is a serious subject relating to business as well as politics. If you're going to downvote, provide a counter argument.
