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Comment by DandyDev | Hacker News Reader

Great initiative and very generous!

My pet peeve with READMEs: usage of excessive adjectives to oversell your project. Famous culprits: "blazingly fast" or software that is "beautiful" or creates "beautiful" things.

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> My pet peeve with README

DHH had a funny line around Dropbox's "mission" in his 2019 railsconf video (linked to the direct point in the video): https://youtu.be/VBwWbFpkltg?t=2818

Dropbox's official mission as of 2019 was: "We're here to unleash the world's creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working"

And DHH's remark was: "For fuck's sake Dropbox, you host files and make them appear on all of my computers"

Funny enough since then they changed their mission to be "Our mission is to design a more enlightened way of working" based on https://www.dropbox.com/about but it still doesn't come close to explaining what they do.

Customers don’t infer the purpose of a product from it’s company mission. The audience of a company mission are employees themselves. Dropbox has expanded to more than file syncing over the past decade. It makes sense to have a broad vision of their future, e.g purposeful mission.

Imagine Amazon telling employees to stick it to books because thats the business they started off with. Like why should AWS even exist, it’s not what they do! That narrow mindedness wouldn’t have gotten them to where they are today.

Zero people have looked at a mission statement like that and thought "Ah, now I understand the scope and limitations of my company, and will use that to direct my ideas".

> Customers don’t infer the purpose of a product from it’s company mission. The audience of a company mission are employees themselves.

ok sure then why is it in big red text on a customer-facing page, then?

It is a very good point. And the mission points to the future, where the management wants the company moving. It should not describe what it does, but where it is heading.

People are starting to adapt corporate PR and marketing jargon as sign of professionalism.

Another way to make yourself appear silly influencer is to use words like "I" and "My" in headlines ("I made a thing", "My thing hobby", "My thoughts on .."). Obviously it's you. But people don't know who you are and generally they don't care. Pushing persona makes everything look like social media marketing.

And not only such. In the end this is how marketing works, there is always the feeling to be left: the feeling to be part of the in-group.

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