Haven't you seen all the legit Chinese/Japanese/Indian/etc. ads in their home countries with spelling errors and "terrible graphics?" It's even somewhat of a meme [1] especially some of the stuff written on their t-shirts.
My whole trip to Morocco was very enlightening. The locals were extremely sharp WRT tourists and word got around surprisingly quickly. It's foolish to leap from an economy's development level to the intelligence or education of individuals within it. Economies usually suffer for more structural reasons.
I love this piece of (unintentional?) data-driven decision-making!
They did some user research, and a lot of users said they trusted the site less after the redesign, because it now looked more like a typical advertising business.
There's something about looking TOO professional that turns people away, I guess.
It looked much more trustworthy a couple of years ago.
Reddit is a very "busy" site. But you can do a LOT on it; there's many different features packed into it. The same thing happened over on Slashdot: the old versions had more features, and their "Beta" version tried to "simplify" things which really meant removing features.
I think if it wasn't like that then it wouldn't be Ling's.
It's also worth doing a view source....she's even got her face plastered all over the code :)
That said, not sure taking a side (either way) on the EU referendum is something I'd plaster on the home page of my business site.
Are you A/B testing us?
Another possibility is that someone makes an error and then claims it was intentional testing.
A relative of mine is the CEO of the Fiji branch of a major multinational B2B services company.
Every few years, the regional headquarters in Australia would send over a guy from either Australia or New Zealand to manage some department. This would almost always end in disaster.
The problem was that they would always end up insulting clients. Clients were multi-million dollar corporations, but since they were usually family run businesses, their founders/CEO's often spoke poor english. I guess this is what made these (white) men assume that they were idiots and end up talking down to them. The one time it worked was when the guy they sent was Aussie, but had been raised in Papua New Guinea.
When this relative of mine became CEO, one of his first decisions was to ask HQ to send him a guy from their Sri Lanka office instead. It's been about five years now and they've had no more problems.
Too professional = corporate, paid scientists telling you tobacco is good for you, politician, used car salesman, style over substance.
Less professional = honest craftsman, technician, artisan. It's more likely to be about the actual food than an empty brand experience.
Of course there's also the chance they're just not very good, but it's probably not a bad generalisation.
I'm sure there is research into this, but all I can find is blog opinions.
Imagine 100 new scammers start posting whatever they want on the internet. The ones who post with perfect English get lots of people replying, but most of the victims realize it's a scam quickly. The ones who post with bad English get fewer people replying, but those who do are the most likely to fall for the scam.
You have a lovely Darwinian scenario here in which the highest return on investment comes from those with lower skill levels.