[rektide]

The whole website is playful as fuck.

This 100% felt like more playful teasing. At the expense of those who refuse to have a good time, who can't roll with it, who let themselves be tattered by tiny things.

It just going on and on and on just keeps highlighting how in depth & considerate & thoughtful they really are & keeps bringing out the joke more, about how hilarious & fun it is & how great it is to have such an amusing conversation piece.

This page is their moment of glory, a secret shrine to how awesome they are. The hurf-burf "this isn't 90's web design!" being way over precise & technical about the matter was a hilarious example of them just being here to have fun & be smart about shit.

[JohnFen]

I guess that's the problem with extreme snark. It's very culturally dependent and doesn't always translate well when taken out of the social setting that it grew in.

That page doesn't read to me as playful or fun, it reads to me as angry and bitter. Although I understand (now) that's not what they were going for, I can't make my brain read it any other way.

[rektide]

The whole experience drives a huge wedge into folks, as we see from the very strong breakdown of very negative vs very positive. The site's whole premise comes at the expense of severely agitating some people. Doubling down seems like the obvious move. I don't there's a real possibility of useful dialog or outreach with the discontent; making oveure's to a non-addressable market just doesn't make sense.

And it's not like they have particularly bad points either. They're over the top but basically counter-roasting far more over the top griping, for the most part. It's all pretty well constructed. I don't think they cause any additional or excess damage with this.

I don't always think shiboleths or in-comments are wise, but here in particular I think it adds greatly. It's almost entirely just people's disposition & response we see for how folks perceive this, and not at all cultural or information based. The context in question is mostly the reader themselves. This continues to parlay the grand-joke about emotions & people well, to me.

[JohnFen]

Well, as I said in another comment, I actually like that their website design pushes back against the huge beige conformity that constitutes most of the web. So I'm inclined to feel fondly for the company as a result.

I will admit, though, that that particular page put me off. It's just so hostile that it clearly says that I'm not welcome there even though I do agree with the substance of what they're saying. So I haven't looked at the rest of the site, and I don't even know what the site or the company is about.

I'm sure that they couldn't care less about me, though, and rightfully so.